Just tell me the truth

I'm becoming convinced the computer repair shop is lying to me.

First - the background. On the 30th of October my oldest son spilt a glass of water next to my laptop, which pretty promptly stopped working. The next morning I rang HP to tell them my laptop wouldn't turn on and the tech support guy walked me through a few things to get the laptop going again. It did start up so I was all "yay!" and then I asked him if he could help with something else I'd been having trouble with, the fingerprint security thing that had stopped working a couple of weeks before. Whatever he asked me to do didn't work, and each step didn't work through several restarts of the computer until finally the computer just stopped working again. At this point he declared the job required more help then he could provide and told me it would need to go to a repairer. Since the repair shop is pretty near my house I decided to drop it off, so I have a receipt for the laptop dated 31 October at 12:04pm. I was told at this point that it would likely take a week because they were pretty backed up but they would order the parts that day so when it came up on their job list it would be pretty quick to fix.

Friday last week (so exactly one week later) at around 2pm I got a phone call from the repair shop asking me for my log-in password. The lady who rang me told me that they'd had to order a second part but they'd finished installing it so after a few tests they should be calling me back later that afternoon. Except they didn't. Yesterday (Tuesday) I was going to be in the area anyway so I popped in around 1pm to ask what the status of the job was, I was told that it was on the guy's desk and they would be probably returning it to me later in the afternoon. Except they didn't.

Today I just rang up to find out what was going on after starting to experience moderate panic about the whole looming-end-of-semester-with-all-relevant-information-saved-on-that-laptop business. Today the story is that the tech who was working on it yesterday was called away for an emergency, he wasn't there right now but one of the other techs believes that it should be ready by either this afternoon or tomorrow.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but this is starting to look a lot like I'm being fobbed off. Either they've lost it, they are incompetent, or I keep getting bumped down the priority queue. No matter what it is, I would far rather they told me the truth than keep getting my hopes up. Not to mention that this is a warranty repair and their stated service standard is 2-4 working days for warranty repairs. I almost hope HP send me out a customer satisfaction survey if I ever get the laptop back.