A rant against Gateway service

I'm off to the North Carolina beach so expect reduced blogging from me. Ordinarily, I would holiday-blog when my wife wasn't looking but my portable refused to boot more than two weeks ago. It was obviously a hardware problem so I knew the otherwise capable techs at GMU couldn't fix it but before taking it to Gateway I needed their authorization. That took a few days. After a week of sitting on the bench, the Gateway store in Fairfax ran a diagnostic and realized that they couldn't fix it either. They promised to expedite it to the main service center. A week later I found out they were still waiting for, get this, a box to be sent to them so they could send the portable to the service center. A box#$*! (Worse yet, I gave it to them in the original box it came in - foam included.) So finally the computer makes it to the main service center and now I am told it is waiting for a part!##!@! Now, wouldn't you put your service center and parts warehouse close together like say in the same phrelling place?