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Worst Explanation From Tech Support?
Disgruntled-with-Tech-Support asks: "Let's face it: At some point or another, we've had to deal with some form of tech support. Quite often, it's a hit-or-miss experience depending on the level of support required. Occasionally, strange, bizarre, or nonsensical explanations result from the problems reported, such as this one: I had just had DSL installed, only to find it much slower than the 56K line I was looking to get rid of. On calling the provider, I was told (by someone who likely reading off cue cards) to visit one of their internal websites for measuring bandwidth. While there, I observed that they had both bytes per second and bits per second listed, and that the number of bytes/sec != bits/sec * 8, rather a factor around 13 or 14. I pointed this out as a possible problem, and the guy's reasoning: 'Uh, it looks like the bytes are getting through to you ok, but the bits are getting stuck someplace.' What was your worst explanation from tech support?"
The one they won't give you unless you cough up $25.95+tax.
--
E_NOSIG
Computer Stupidities Their stupid tech support section probably fits this article best.
What if this signature were clever?
I had a shipment of bad IDE hard drives. I was instructed by the Dell support dude that Dell recommends SCSI for "servers". Upon asking why, I was informed that it "had something to do with data harmonics".
"The problem must be on your end... everything here is working."
Yeah... sure.
That ranks right up there with their classic first question "do you have a firewall?" Answer "yes," and that IMMEDIATELY becomes the problem (despite the fact that it's been running for months with no change in configuration).
Just FYI: I find that confronting them with a few ethereal packet dumps usually gets you to the second tier at least.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I had the exact same situation as the grandparent post: I was calling about my cable modem being out, and after being directed through all of the idiotic OS configuration steps (despite the little "link" light being out on the cable modem coincidentally occurring in concert with being unable to see the outside world), which I played along with, I could see where the conversation was going (headed towards "there's nothing on our end...we'll schedule a tech for a week but hope it clears up before then") so I disconnected the cable from the cable modem, and then listened as the telephone support narrated as they supposedly connected to my cable modem, and then supposedly pulled diagnostic codes and evaluated its health, etc.
I listened for about two minutes, and then said "Well that's odd as I disconnected the cable modem two minutes ago" she became flustered and was clearly caught in a lie -- it was a pretty awkward situation. In other words it's just as probable that they were just bullshitting to make you feel like they've done what they can do, when really they just want you to suck it for a while, or to call back for some other sucker to deal with.
Actually, it depends on what you are measuring. If you are measuring bits/sec of traffic vs. bytes/sec of data, the factor is probably around what you stated for smaller packets. Since this is typically how bps/Bps is measured, the numbers on the page of the site are quite possibly correct. Of course, the tech guy is still a moron, but the explanation is almost correct. Those extra bits get "stuck" when the packets are decoded, since the ethernet and TCP/IP headers will all be stripped off.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
I understand, I know plenty of people who have had to work in tech support and gotten some pretty crazy calls (like the "Internet doesn't work" when the customer doesn't have their modem or NIC plugged in, or even better, no modem or NIC in their computer). I just management then would let you find out if the customer was competent, then switch to a different set of troubleshooting. Like when a hard drive went bad in a Dell I had, and the email I sent sounded like I knew what I was talking about, they quickly just asked me to run this diagnostic software they have and then report the results, not the usual run around. Or for my HP TC1000, when I called about some speaker noises and that I had tried everything, they just took my address and had it picked up. Those are the tech support calls I like, the kind where they adapt to how well you know the product you're calling about. But I can understand if management doesn't like it, they don't have to actually deal with the customers, so of course they should know what they are talking about.
>>>at the number of bytes/sec != bits/sec * 8, rather a factor around 13 or 14.
;)
>>Shouldn't it be bits/sec = bytes/sec * 8?
>no... it's eight bits to a byte.
Yes. Assuming he meant (bits/sec) = (bytes/(sec * 8)). I must assume he did. It's important to me.
1 byte / 1 sec => (8 * 1 bit) / 1 sec = (8 * 1 bit) / 1 sec => 1 byte / sec = 8 bits / sec
And I'd expect more like 9-11 bits to transmit a byte, on average, due to packet overhead and error correction. 8 is optimal, which doesn't happen much. 11-14 wouldn't be shocking if there's a lot of packet loss, as it sounds like there may be.
everything in moderation
"We don't support linux." I've heard that so many times from Road Runner. When I moved to AZ though the DSL guy saw my desktop (Afterstep) looked around a bit for the start menu, then I realized I should probably reset (the modem he gave me to start off with only worked in windows so I had to reset to install it) so I killed X and he saw the prompt "Wow linux, what distro is it?" I told him (debian) and he said "Wow, debian? We're converting all our servers over from Win 2000 to Debian real soon."
I've also had good experiences with tech support, especially on other peoples computers cause I'd be calling for warrenty work. I'd call up say "Hey this computer has a problem starting up, so I swapped out a few things like the PSU, RAM, CPU, and motherboard, the motherboard is probably fried since when I tried a different one it worked, so where could I get a new motherboard since the PC is still under warrenty?" The guy went from ultra depressed (thinking "Oh no, not another problem that will probably require 2 hours to finally get to the conclusion that someone has to look at the computer") to really happy and excited like "Wow thanks for testing out all that stuff, so it's deffinitely the motherboard? Just bring it to such and such store and they'll install a new one for you."
PC tech support seems so much easier to deal with since they seem to know more about how the computer works. I guess it's easier for them since the problem is always on the users end and they have to deal with a lot of different situations. With internet tech support all they know how to deal with is configuring e-mail and setting auto detect IP address in Windows 98 and above. They rarely have to deal with a customer calling up telling them there is a problem on their end and even if the customer described exactly what was wrong, they wouldn't be able to do anything.
A buddy and I had an assignment back in college to write "a windows app". That was pretty much the long and short of the constraints and this being circa 93 or so, we were working with VS 1.0 (installed from 27 3.5" floppies, no less). This was the collegiant version with no optimizing compiler.
We decided it would be terribly cool to create a electronic version of Star Fleet Battles. So, off we went creating our SDI application.
After some blood, sweat and tears we had something which should have worked. It was correct in every way we could figure out but the damned thing kept crashing on us. (imagine that) I finally decided to take one for the team and open a support incident.
After spending hours on the phone on hold while talking to different clueless support weasels I was finally connected with a person with actuall programming experience. I don't know if he was a developer or not but he did try to help. Finally, he asked me if I could send him our source code so he could attempt to debug it because there didn't appear to be anything wrong with it. I emailed him the source package and waited.
And waited.
Waited...
Finally, I called the guy back 3 days later.
Me: "So, have you had a chance to look at our code yet?"
TS: "Yeah, neat little game you've got here - is it SFB?"
Me: "Yes, it's supposed to be - I've never seen it work."
TS: "What? It works fine. We've been playing it here in the office for the last couple of days."
Me: "But, my version doesn't work - what did you change?"
TS: "Where's it breaking again?"
Me: Tells him line number and error message.
TS: "Oh that - you're dealing with a known bug in the debug compiler. Just compile your code in release mode and you're good to go."
I 'politely' explained at this time that I was running the collegiant edition. "oh" he said. "You're screwed."
Eventually, he assisted me with determining a work around. I never did receive the free upgrade I was promised to VS 1.5 which was available at the time (though, I'll admit he started backtracking just as soon as he offered it - somebody probably slapped him).
IIRC, we got a B on the assignment. All the time we spent debugging and on the phone with MS tech support ate seriously into our plan to develop features. We were supposed to have a certain number of menu items and other metrics of functionality which we completely fell short of. Fortunately, I had email evidence of some of my communication with the TS guy so our prof was merciful.
That said, it was an excellent course in how software actually gets developed - spend huge quantities of time on the latest MS bug and fail to meet your feature requirements in the course of debugging and trying to make the stupid thing work.
When I moved into my house, the DSL wouldn't work, using the modem that I'd brought with me from my apartment. So, I took the modem out to the point where the phone line comes into the house and tested it there. Still didn't work. Neither did the other modem I had from a previous apartment. So, it seemed pretty obvious that the problem was outside my house.
Armed with this information, I called Verizon.
Call #1 I made the mistake of telling the guy that I had a Mac. So, I get transferred to their Macintosh help department, and get some guy in India who can barely speak English and assumes I have a bad modem. Of course, he can't solve the problem and has to give me a different number to call the next day (not that I'm going to, because I know it's not the modem -- I've tried it at my office and it worked fine).
Call #2 The first call didn't work, so I call back again. This time, though, I'm smart enough to forget to mention that I have a Mac. After a suitable period spent listening to soothing jazz (and the occasional assurance that my call is important), I get a nice enough women on the phone. I patiently explain to her what the problem is and what steps I've gone through to track the cause. After listening to me, she responds by asking which modem I have. I describe it, and she immediately tells me that I have the wrong modem. I need the other model of modem. Unlikely, but I'm no expert in DSL technologies, so I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt ... which means waiting half a week for a new modem to show up.
Call #3 The new modem shows up, and I try it. Much to my lack of surprise, it also fails to work. Back to the phones, I call Verizon for a third time. Finally, I get someone sounds like he has a clue. Still wary, though, I decide not to mention that I have a Mac. Only problem is that he wants me to run through some diagnostic steps, which means I have to pretend to follow what he's telling me, and then do the equivalent under OS X. Simple enough, until he asks me to read him some number with a weird title. I think he's talking about the MAC address, but I'm not positive. Busted? Thinking quickly, I acted like I'd been interrupted, and asked him to hold on for a second. Then, I sat there for a few seconds, and when I came back said something to the effect of, "ok, so you wanted the MAC address, right?" Bingo, got it right. I gave that to him, and within' a minute or two, he'd run his diagnostics and determined that the problem must in fact be outside my house (just as I'd suspected at first). He told me he'd send someone out to fix it, and bid me good day.
Epilogue Within a few days, someone apparently fixed the problem, and I got a call saying everything was good to go. I plugged the modem in, and SUCCESS it worked! Only took 2 1/2 weeks, and three phone calls to reach the solution that I'd already determined when I made the first call.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
We have Speakeasy DSL, which is the best service I've ever had. Unfortunately for some people in our building, they opted for the cheaper solution: Cable. Our friends moved in next door, so we decided to share our DSL with them -- totally within Speakeasy's TOS. My neighbor came over to tell my roommate, who had hardwired the two apartments' networks together in the phone room, that their network was down. He checks everything in our apartment and everything looks good. Then he remembers the cable guy was in the building... he goes and finds the guy had disconnected the two apartments and told my roommate "Sharing your connection is illegal." He kept saying this, even after my roommate explained that we had DSL, not cable, so even if it WERE true we weren't allowed to share, it wasn't their problem. Ten minutes later, the internet isn't working again. Turns out the cable guy took the power cord to the hub, since he felt that my roommate "didn't understand stealing was wrong." Words... escape me.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I used to have a 433Mhz Celeron computer up untill a about 5 months ago when I got an EMachine T2341. It started up so fast, and I got all of my stuff installed and put in a extra Gig of ram. So, I was playing Warcraft III, and then the thing just shut off. I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I unplugged it and started it back up. Well, the memory had never shown the full gig. *runs free* It only shows 641840. I installed MBM and relized that my computer has an automatic temperature shutoff switch somewhere over 150 degrees that I was hitting. I got some clock cycle limiting stuff and managed to keep it from crashing or powering down. I opened up a tech support request, and they said that my ram was being used for the integrated graphics that I wasn't using. I E-Mailed back, and then they said how to turn it off. That didn't work.
Hold shift at the EMachines logo to see the ram.
This is an AthlonXP 2400+, it goes to fast to read.
Your ram is defective.
I don't think it is. What about my heat problem? Is that red light supposed to be on?
Your ram is defective.
What about my heat issue?!
Your ram is defective.
I took it back to Best Buy:
This computer has heat problems.
You opened the case. The warrenty is void.
It says right here in this E-Mail(waves paper) that I can do that.
The warrenty is void. All we can do is exchange it for a new one.
Well, the ram still doesn't work, but the inside of this one looks different. It hasn't overheated yet. Same model, different motherboard and cpu-fan...
Actually, the DVD format has a weird rule that there is supposed to be at least 1 gig of data on it, minimum, even if it's just padding. Almost all readers will still be able to anyhow.
As far as I know, though, CDs don't have this restriction.
This conversation took place three years ago when I accompanied a friend on a trip to Best Buy to help her purchase a new computer. I kept my mouth shut to see what the guy had to say.
Salesman: This HP model is really popular. It even comes with a cd burner.
Friend: That's one of the things I really wanted for my new computer.
Salesman: Great...but if you decide to purchase a model with a cd burner, you should also pick up this surge protector.
Salesman hands her a $99 APC surge protector.
Salesman: This surge protector is even on sale, so you lucked out.
Friend: That's ok, I already have a regular surge protector from my old computer.
Salesman: Ohhhh...that's not going to work if you get a model with a cd burner. You know they don't call them "burners" for nothing. These things reach over 500 degrees. If you don't have a high quality surge protector, there's a high chance that your computer will catch on fire and burn your house down.
Friend: Are you serious? I don't want that to happen.
Salesman: Hey...I'm just trying to look out for you and your family's safety.
Me: I think it's time to go.
Later that day.
Friend: That guy wasn't that bad.
Me: Too bad Best Buy doesn't sell fire extinguishers, he could have sold you one of those while he was at it.
Nothing against Best Buy or computer salesmen in general...I just thought it was a funny story.
well ill tell you what, i used to work for a company here in oregon called stream. basically its like this, the person who your talking to sits there hitting shortcuts with his keyboard, and beleive it or not, but there arent enough shortcuts so they sometimes have to use 2 shortcut combo's. and these guys will trouble shoot 6 people at one time, and all of them will get fustrated and call us eventually.
Earlier this year at work, I needed to run Visio 2003 to make some simple diagrams. (This is at work, not home, so I didn't have a choice of software.) Visio, installed on Win2k SP4, would not run. When I started it up, it would crash immediately, usually without even giving me a message.
Called Microsoft.
After a 45 minute call to setup an account, then a wait to get a callback, then another 45 minute conversation with a very nice Indian gentleman, we fixed the problem.
Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Windows are incompatible. This is a known issue. The fix is to drill down to some obscure registry key and add a 1 to it. Then everything works fine.
And somehow Linux is the OS with the reputation for obscure configuration and software conflicts. Go figure.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
In early 2001, after building my mom a computer from scratch, I received her old Gateway 233Mhz system to do with as I pleased. The first thing I did was flash the BIOS. When the system failed to POST after that, the next thing I did was contact Gateway support.
Thus began an odyssey that I hope never to repeat with any company, and certainly will never repeat with Gateway. They're never getting another dime out of me or my family for as long as I'm alive.
Below is why. The first two logs detail a chat session between Gateway and myself, conducted using a particularly nasty piece of customer service software called eGain. You can see how it made the live person on the other end of the chat session sound like a robot.
After that follows a series of e-mail correspondence. This log has been edited both to cover my tracks a bit, and to get around the slashdot filters, as the characters per line ratio of the post is otherwise too low.
Chat Session 1
Question: I updated my BIOS and the system boots, displays gateway logo, but does not POST.
A Chat Agent will be with you shortly.
Wendell: Hello Fahr, welcome to the Gateway Chat Support Service. I am Wendell here to help you with your issue.
Fahr Vergnugen: Hi. Have a system here that's not terribly happy.
Wendell: Can you please tell me the exact problem you are facing with your Computer?
Fahr Vergnugen: Need S/N?
Wendell: Fahr, please provide me your Serial number.
Fahr Vergnugen: Okay, older PII-233Mhz / LX chipset board. tried to slap in a newer celeron, it didn't take, decided to update the bios.
Wendell: Okay , Fahr.
Fahr Vergnugen: sure 0009589521
Wendell: Thanks , Fahr.
Wendell: Can you please tell me the problem you are facing with your System?
Fahr Vergnugen: grabbed BIOS 4A4LL0X0.15A.0023.P18 from the gateway support site (was running P11) and flashed the board.
Wendell: When this issue happens is there an error message? If so, could you please tell me the exact error message?
Fahr Vergnugen: now, the system fires up, displays a gateway logo, and a small progress bar in the top left fills from grey to white, and the system acts like it's going to POST normally, but it never happens.
Fahr Vergnugen: the bar takes between 3 and 4 minutes to reach 100%.
Wendell: When this issue happens is there an error message? If so, could you please tell me the exact error message?
Fahr Vergnugen: and from there it just sits. If I hit TAB to view system messages, it acts normally, but again, no POST. Nothing happens.
Fahr Vergnugen: no error message. Just doesn't beep and post.
Fahr Vergnugen: I think it's probably pretty shafted, but I thought I'd check with you guys.
Wendell: Fahr, please hold on while I search for your resolution.
Fahr Vergnugen: np, holdin' on.
Wendell: Thank you for waiting. Please review the following information, which I think will help you.
Wendell: [Item sent - Astro and Profile 2 - Computer stops responding after power-on self-test (POST)] http://www.gateway.com/support/techdocs/astro/trsh oot/1106.shtml
Wendell: Did you get the page , Fahr?
Fahr Vergnugen: yep, but no help I can tell already, since it assumes I can get to Windows, which is not the case.
Wendell: I realize your time is valuable, please wait one minute while I research this further.
Fahr Vergnugen: np
Wendell: Fahr, I apologize for the delay
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
I'd sue him, and his employer in small claims. I'd make a mini-vacation of it if it went to court. Get my ducks in a row in my free time while watching the tube. File a police report on the theft. Write a letter detailing the situation to the Better Bussiness Bureau. Maybe write a letter to newspaper or TV stations, see if I could get anything about it covered. Reckless Cable Companies Steals From Honest DSL Customers.
:)
Now this all seems like a pain in the ass. And it is. But in the end, you'll have a badass story about how you battled a multi billion dollar telecommunications giant, and made them kiss your ass. That's right, I'd file for a new hub and to have them write formal letters of apology. Now *that's* being a dick. I would bet at least a memo would go out to not touch other people's things.
If you are a C or C++ programmer however, you will/should be using the definition in the ISO standard (1996 for C++, 1999 for C) in which a byte is the unit returned by sizeof and used by memcpy, memset etc.
On the hardware I am programming today, which sells millions of units, a byte is 16 bits. A char is 16 bits. A short is 16 bits. An int is 16 bits. A pointer is 16 bits but that ain't enough so we have to using segment registers from inline assembler (argh). If they could get away with it they would have probably have made a float 16 bits.
Believe it or not, there are processors that are not Intel 8086 compatible!
People who are not pedantic generate buggy code when arriving on wierdo systems, since computers tend to be pedantic themselves. But I admit that the association of byte with octet is very common, and in my opinion it was a mistake for the C and C++ committees to use the word byte for that unit of storage.
I had an opposite issue in a sense...
We had a lot of Digital DECstation workstations. One of them stopped working, so I called Field Service, and our usual guy comes out. Although it is a straight-up motherboard swap, he needs to do some diagnosis to put on the tag to engineering.
As is, the system wouldn't POST. He took the cover off, tested it again, and it POSTed fine. Figuring something was loose, he tightened all the connections. Put the cover on, system wouldn't POST. Took the cover off, system would POST. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We decide NOT to put hte cover completely on, but just lay it down on top, upside down so the internals were covered, but nothing scresed in or possibly shorting. Won't work. Take it off, works fine.
New theory - took a piece of cardboard laying nearby, and covered the case. Wouldn't work. Took it off, and it worked. Took a piece of paper, covered parts of the motherboard at a time, and slowly narrowed down the location.
The DECstation 5000s had a pair of large EPROMS with labels on them. The labels covered small round windows which I assume was for "flashing" the EPROM to wipe it out and reprogram. Apparently, they had somehow developed a sensitivity to light. A single sheet of paper was enough to block the light to prevent them from working.
I'm no electrical engineer, but this was bizarre.
The field service engineer put "afraid of the dark" on the tag, and left it at that.
Try and debug that one on a help desk phone...
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
Develop a strong ancillary relationship with the people you work with, bond with them out of the office (that's the multiplayer arena with the blue and white part on top, green part on the bottom, and has vehicles) and after you have known them for a while you would be surprised at how well they react to all of those statements.
... particularly when dealing with oilfield field hands, I am all ears.
Why do I have to hold my mouse button down and move it to highlight a block of text, and why do I have to hold down the CTRL key before I hit the C key to copy the text to the buffer, and why do I have to click the Start button when I want to shut down?
If you know a more effective answer than 'Because you fucking have to.'
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
You don't read a lot about that, nowadays.
I had the misfortune to buy an HP Vectra from them for my brother , and the Windows install was in one huge monolithic blob on a CD: you had to install all the crap at once, even if you only wanted Windows or a certain driver. That would have been fine if they had shipped a stable build that actually worked. But the config for the Zip drive was both wrong and out-of-date, and downloading latest Zip drivers from Iomega didn't seem to help the persistent crashes and freezes.
So I rang up their "Tech support", to ask about their recommended fix. She walked me through the script, starting with "is the computer switched on Mr. (my surname)?", and suffixing every single question in the script with "Mr. (my surname)". This was clearly their attempt at personalizing "Customer Care", and make me feel like a Valued Individual(tm), but all it did was make me want to smack the "Customer Care" out of her with a blunt axe.
Eventually we came to the end of the script, and no closer to a solution. She now advised me to re-install from the massive blob CD, which would fdisk all my data to oblivion. I explained that I'd done that already, and it hadn't worked.
"It looks like the installation CD as shipped has a problem."
"No that's not possible Mr. (my surname). They're thoroughly tested."
"Well sure it is. Maybe it worked before, but doesn't work on the latest hardware."
"No that's not possible Mr. (my surname)"
"Why not?
"What do you think could be wrong with it Mr. (my surname)?"
"How about the out-of-date drivers?"
"How would that crash the machine Mr. (my surname)?"
"If there's a bug that didn't show up before, but shows up under a new revision of BIOS, or a new ethernet card, or new firmware in the Zip drive, and so on."
"I don't see how that's possible Mr. (my surname)."
"Well it says on the Iomega site that there's a known memory leak issue with the version of drivers that you've shipped, for a start."
"I'm sorry, what was that you said Mr. (my surname)? A memory LEAK?"
"Memory leak, yes. I can give you the address of the bug report on the Iomega site."
(muffled laughter) "There's no thing as a 'memory LEAK', Mr. (my surname)." (more muffled laughter, now joined by her colleagues, phone covered up and uncovered as she talks)
At this point I was starting to get irritated. Paying for incompetence and ignorance is one thing, but getting laughed at for politely explaining to someone what I paid them to already know is quite another.
So I told her to put her supervisor on the phone, right now. She sighed, and said "OK, Mr. (my surname), I'll put him on right away!" (more muffled laughter).
The supervisor was no better informed than his idiot underlings, but at least he was willing to listen and learn when I explained to him how poor allocation and deallocation management can cause a failure to reclaim discarded memory, and he accepted that there really was something called a memory leak, and that the computing world outside of CompUSA had known about it for years, and that Iomega had reported the bug exactly as I'd described it.
But CompUSA never did fix my problem. So I backed up my brother's data, and rebuilt his PC from scratch with a borrowed Windows CD, figuring it was worth losing out on the "free" Norton AV etc. that came on HP's monolithic blob-CD, if that's what it took to get a PC that didn't freeze randomly a dozen times a day.
Now, whenever one of us runs into a "professional" who wouldn't know his own job if it jumped up and bit his dick off, we usually look at each other and say in unison "there's no such thing as a 'memory LEAK', Mr. (my surname)".
The cable guy came to hook up my future mother-in-law's computer. I had recommended an eMac, since I know I'll be the one maintaining it and I know Macs better.
He rings the doorbell. At 8:30 in the morning. My mother-in-law opened the door (in her bedclothes) and asked him to wait a minute while she woke me up. He sighed and tapped his foot. I dragged myself out of bed and threw a shirt on.
Immediately upon entering the house, he says he's having a bad morning. Oh great. Then he asks what operating system the computer's running. "Mac OS X 10.2," I say.
"It won't work," he says. At this point, I'm feeling two things. First, I feel like I screwed over my future mother-in-law for recommending a computer that wouldn't work, and second, I want to know why this guy thinks an eMac won't work. So I ask.
"Well, uh, our software, uh, hasn't been upgraded, so, uh, I can, uh, get your name and number and we can, uh, call you when it gets upgraded. It works in OS 9, though."
"This computer has OS 9, too. Will it work if I boot into OS 9?"
"Uh, no," he says, "it's something about being upgrade to OS 10. It doesn't work anymore. It also doesn't work in Windows 95, or on computers that were upgraded from Windows 95 to 98, and people have problems using the service on HPs that have Windows XP installed"
At this point I knew he was lying out of his ass, because there's no difference in booting into OS 9 from an eMac and running OS 9 on a computer where it's the default OS. At least to the applications. And my parents have an HP with Windows XP installed, and haven't had a problem. This got me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. So I tell him to install the line, and I will set it up myself.
He walks out in a huff because (I think) he was hoping to get out of this job and get a doughnut or something. At this point, he's woken everyone in the house up by talking too loudly, and he returns with a HUGE drill bit. (Like an inch in diameter. Way bigger than you'll ever need to run a cable wire. I know, I helped my dad run cable in my house and we did it with a 3/8" bit and a coat hanger.) My future mother-in-law asks him what he's going to do with it.
"I have to drill a hole in the floor."
"Wait a minute, I'm paying $89 to have in installed in an outlet on the wall."
"Well, that's a different team, you'll have to get someone else to come out, and that computer's not internet ready, so it might not work anyway."
At this point, she's starting to cry because she just bought this house and he wants to put a 1" hole in the floor, and she thinks she just wasted $800 on a computer that won't work.
"Why isn't it Internet ready?" I ask.
"It doesn't have ethernet" the idiot says.
"Yes it does"
"But it's not the same on a Macintosh." (Yes, he's that dumb.)
"My friend's got four Macs running OS X hooked up to Comcast hi-speed in the same township."
"Well, maybe he figured it out how to do it," he says. "I don't know how."
Not knowing how is a lot different than "it won't work."
Under my breath I say "Maybe I should call Comcast and get a friggin' job."
"FINE!" says he. "YOU DO MY F*%ING JOB." Then he grabs his stuff and slams the door as my future mother-in-law is holding me back from rushing the asshole.
So now we have my future mother-in-law and fiancée in hysterics, kids scared in the other room, and my future brother-in-law and myself ready to hunt this guy down. All in the space of fifteen minutes of this guy ringing the doorbell.
We all calm down, and my mother-in-law calls Comcast and asks what computers aren't supported. As it turns out, there shouldn't be any problems using Comcast broadband, and they "don't know why any of their repairmen would say that." Then she got transferred to this guy's supervisor.
"Well, I'm getting a different story from him," he says. No shite sherlock, he wants to keep his job.
So th
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
i think e-machines is not the culprit here. its most probably best buy.
we'd tell people to return dead on arrival products to best buy, and 4 weeks later that same product is sold to somebody else, as new, not working. since we track serial numbers and retailers - we KNOW best buy sometimes puts returned merchandise back on the shelf without testing it first.
i never buy anything there.
Unbeknownst to me, my printer port had broken from the mother board. I got my printer about 6 months after I got the computer, so I imagine, the printer port was just always broken.
I spent an entire day on the phone calling back and forth between the computer company and printer company. Finally, the printer company swore that their printer was fine, and told me to force the computer company to accept the blame.
I stuck to my guns and told the computer company the printer was absolutely fine, and that something had to be wrong with the computer itself. I was then told to go through a whole bunch of steps, a few of which included DOS prompts. Since my very first computer was run completely through DOS, I had no problem with these steps. This mystified the tech support guy.
The mysticism then turned into cynicism. He asks me:
"Are you a competitor?"
*laugh* "No."
"I don't believe you. I think you are a competitor testing our tech support."
"What? No, I'm not a competitor!"
"By law you are required to tell me if you are a competitor if I ask you. So I'm asking you, are you a competitor?"
"No! I am not a competitor!"
"Then how do you know DOS?"
"My first computer ran off of DOS!"
"Right.."
"Look, I just want my friggen printer to work, ok?"
After many more tests, his superior came to the conclusion that my printer port just must be broken. A few days later, a repairman showed up and swapped in a new motherboard, and voila! It worked.