The story ends… I now have a brand new Samsung Synchmaster 2243BWX and it’s fantastic. It’s a happy ending. Warm fuzzies and all. But the road that got there was simply a mess.

Back in 2006 on Black Friday I picked up from Circuit City (who would later subpeona my company and cause me all sorts of headaches, but that’s another story), a Samsung 22″ LCD Monitor (225BW). It was a great monitor. Going from square to widescreen was liberating. Add to that I got a smoking hot deal on it. All was good.

Earlier this year after owning the monitor for a year and a half it began to buzz. Horse fly doing laps around the room buzz, and all was not good. In late june I called Samsung customer service to do a warranty repair or replacement. After a whopping $500 hold on my credit card (and absurd amount for a monitor that sells for under $300) Samsung sent me a replacement.

A week or so later the replacement arrived. It was a refurbished monitor which looked like some three hundred pound tech geek had used it every single day for the past two years. The screen looked like crap. So I called Samsung back and after thirty or forty minutes on the phone they told me they couldn’t send another replacement until they received the first replacement. So I shipped that puppy back and waited, and waited and waited. Finally after several calls to Samsung I got yet another replacement sent to me. I made it really clear I wanted them to Q/A the unit before it went out. They said they would and so all was good.

Until it arrived. I plugged the less beaten ‘refurbished’ unit in and… nada. No picture, no image, nothing. Their Q/A’d second monitor was DOA. Again, after a long series of calls I was told they couldn’t send another till they got this one back. So I shipped it and waited. Another round of phone calls and I’m told that Samsung will replace it with another model and that I’ll be contacted to coordinate. Weeks go by and I am not contacted.

Finally after several calls I am told they are shipping a new monitor out! A week later it arrives. But I’m still faced with the need to return my old monitor which of course does not fit into the box of the new one. I call Samsung and they tell me that I need to figure out the boxing issue and I should just find a big box and stuff if full of paper towels (I’m completely serious, this is what they tell me). I finally DO pack the thing up, use tons of packing peanuts and ship it off.

Lets just hope the happy ending for this story stays a happy ending.