Today, the UPS man brought two packages, as HP made good on their promise of replacements within 24-48 hours. As promised, my replacement battery was in one of the packages. In the other was another incorrect power supply of the same type as the last. I have now spent over two hours (over several days, even) getting a replacement power supply for my warranted, business-class HPQ laptop.
The quick summary of past events is that my power supply died, harming my battery in the process, and I opened an internet support case to get replacements. I got a new power supply, but no battery; the new power supply turned out to be the wrong one. Then I placed another call and this time got the promise of a new battery and yet another power supply. The rest of the story can be found in the introductory paragraph.
I spent 28 minutes on the phone with HP support this time. Rather than reopening the old case, they opened a new case, thus ensuring that their metrics would continue to be excellent. But in reality, my chat incident spawned another incident which spawned another incident. This is getting ridiculous.
Anyway, I now have a new case number and am expecting yet another power supply in the next day or two... The whole thing brings to mind a certain saying: If you have the time to do it wrong and then fix it, you have the time to do it right in the first place.
I finally got the right power supply on the seventh.
Hallelujah.