• Feburary 6: bought a Samsung 2043BWX monitor from Tekserve
• Last week of February: monitor dies -- no image whatsoever
• March 10: trying to meet deadlines, finally have time to submit an exchange request to Samsung, giving a credit card so they can mail a replacement
• Next 4 weeks: status on Samsung site does change. I call weekly, am told that it will ship out after 15 business days, and I should be patient.
• April 3: Told no monitor is available for an exchange, and I will be called back with options such as other monitors they could send.
• April 6: I call back after getting no call from Samsung service, am told the person who could authorize shipping me a different model has been out and they will call me the next day.
• April 8: I call again, and I'm told that shipping a replacement is impossible. I will need to ship them my monitor and wait 5+ business days for it to be repaired.

So, basically 4+ weeks of phone calls, and empty promises to call me back, to learn they’re not going to replace a monitor that I could have shipped in had I been told to do so on March 10. Since I bill hourly for my consulting work, I would have been better off just throwing away the monitor based on the time this has taken.

Update: I sent an email to customer service at Tekserve with a link to this blog post asking for help, and one of the owners(!) wrote back to say they’ll replace it right away.