Had to replace a DVD-RW in a Dell one day. Installed & tested and left. Several minutes and three miles later I got a call on my cell from the customer. "It doesn't work!" "It was working when I left. I'll be right back." I walked in, ejected the disk, flipped it over and on my way out said "Green side up." You can't make this stuff up.
Many years ago we had one user with a new dialup account that was able to get online but couldn't get his email. He went through every phone tech probably several times troubleshooting it each time prefacing his call with "I've got an IQ of 175, am very smart and know how to use a computer." Also we often got "Your service sucks", "I need to get my mail because I'm waiting for info on my grants." and "If I don't get my grants I'm going to sue you for $25,000" and on & on.
In spite of going through the mail setup keystroke by keystroke (use the period key not "dot". No, not "at", press the shift and 2 keys, etc) many times over the phone with him and having it work perfectly for us on our end we still got extremely irate calls once or twice a day. "It still doesn't work." "Your service sucks." "I'm going to sue." "I'm smarter than God." Blah, blah, blah.
We finally sent two techs over to his house (for safety). What they found was a house packed with crap in massive disarray and a guy, who as one tech put it, obviously spent way too much time sniffing the empty Agent Orange barrels over in Nam. A classic tin foil hat type. In the place for his user name he had typed "luser @ isp . net" complete with spaces. I thought I learned that day that you can't assume anything. Users will go through great lengths to screw up the obvious.
One more from just yesterday. Had a user that couldn't log in. I had him retype his user/pass several times, still didn't work. Worked for me. Figuring Windows might have a death grip on something I had him reboot. "Open your browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, what ever browser you use." "How do I do that?" "Double click on the blue "E" on your desktop." "OK" "Do you have a browser window open?" "Yup, I've got 2 of them." "How did you do that? Nevermind. Close one." "OK" "What does it say in the username box?" "luser@isp.net" "OK, what is in the password box?" "A bunch of stars." "OK, erase them and retype (lusers password). "Oh, you wanted me to retype that too?" I guess I'll never learn...
Ahhh, good old Northworst Airlines. I live near their hub city and they've got quite a reputation around here. I don't fly much but when I do I avoid them if at all possible. The last time I flew a RT to Tucson I flew Southwest. Cheap ticket and they treated me like a king. Northworst would have been late, left me stranded in Phoenix or Vegas, cancelled a flight and lost my luggage just for good measure.
Alternatively just send lots of porn to people via their FlashMail, go on chat rooms spouting porn, sending mail to people over and over again, they will cancel your account on TOS. Of course only use as a last resort, but it'll likely get results once people start complaining about you.
A friends kid on AOL IM'ed a bunch of people trying to trick them into giving out their passwords. They cancelled his account almost immediately.
Amateurs. I once rode the downhill side of the Smokey Mountains for more than 25 miles on my bike with the engine off. I figure I got eleventy gajillion MPG on that stretch.
Sometimes it means that he really can't - his software won't let him. Many tech support call centers have software that restricts the techs from 'straying away' from the routine path.
Maybe in some cases but that wasn't my experience. If I got a tech with a clue and explained my troubleshooting steps and reasons I had no problem getting parts without any hassle.
The other way was to tell them I was no longer on site. We were suppose to wait on hold up to 20 minutes then we could call later. I'd give them 5 if I was busy or 10 if I wasn't. If I got the "Your hold time may exceed 10 minutes" recording I'd give them 1. Then I'd order parts when I got home where I could watch the news while they took up to 30 minutes to type up the order.
Those were only 2 stories out of many, I could write a book. And the death spirial continues.
They said the AOL rep was fired but we all know he really wasn't. The tv show would have to beat some pretty big odds to get him again if they called back into AOL to try to confirm it.
You're obviously under the misapprehension that the manufacturer considers you the customer. They don't. You're the commodity. Their customers are the other big corporations that pay them to install their crap on the machine.
You got that right. I'm a recovering Dell service tech (2 weeks out of that hell hole) and the last new Dell I set up had 53 processes running right out of the box. Then you have the cheap 256 meg machines that paged out before the OS was even loaded. Add MS Office which had its preload crap in the startup folder and you got 7 minute plus boot times. Not to mention all the system/program pop-ups and time limited shareware upgrade notices they had to deal with. Many of these people were newbies or average users and just wanted to do email and browse the web. The crap was driving them nuts before I even got out of the house.
You and I would format the drive and reinstall but that's well beyond the capabilities of many of these users. Even the "Dell Decrapifier" is beyond most of them. And they're not about to spend $50 or $100 or whatever to have someone fix their new $500 computer.
Oh, and since this thread is about crappy service... In Information Week (6/12/06, pg 11) Paul English of Kayak.com says (in part) "Dell is in a customer service death spiral." That's being kind. I couldn't agree more. Virtually every customer (90%+) complained of long hold times, 4 to 6 hour or more troubleshooting sessions from brain dead techs or the guy named Sam or Fred that couldn't speak understandable english. Then when Dell did customer service surveys they'd complain LOUDLY and Dell would blame us because their shit didn't stink.
I had to deal with them even as an on-site tech. "The hard drive sounds like a coffee can full of rocks. I unplug it and the sound quits." "Well, lets run some diagnostics." "Huh? It's about to self destruct. Send me a GD drive!" "I can't until we run diagnostics." "But it isn't even seen in the BIOS." "You can run diagnostics off the Resource CD." And on and on and on. Or the poor woman who bought her 8400 to do work from home with a random reboot problem every few minutes. She spent 30+ hours on the phone over 6 months before they even sent a tech out. Then her warranty ran out between visits and they refused to help her any more. And the company I worked for that stressed customer service above all else refused to run it up the chain of command. Spineless assholes. I just couldn't do it any more.
Sorry, it wasn't you that set me off. It just looked like a good place to vent. Can you tell I'm glad I'm out?
These days you could probably get a patent for a "process of expelling excess gas generated by metabolic processing of protein and accumulated in the large intestine and colon."
done ~~ Sorry! Maximum number of users has been reached. Please try again later.
It's 4 am CDT and you've slashdotted the USPTO. Well done!
"I may get a cheap NVidea card with TV out instead."
I've built several boxes recently (not all for MythTV) and am addicted to the NVidia FX 5200. They install and work flawlessly, have plenty of power for all but the most demanding games, have VGA, DVI & SVideo out, are fanless and only fifty bucks. I've used the Chaintec and MSI cards with no problems at all. Highly recommended.
One day a friend and I were doing a quick rebuild of another friends 'puter and we needed some heatsink paste so after lunch we stopped by the local RS. "We need some heatsink paste." said I. "What?" "Heatsink paste." "What's that?" I explained. "Don't have any of that." "Yes you do." "No we don't." "Yes you do. I'll look around... Here it is." "Oh, I didn't know what that was."
To be fair, they're not all ignorant but have you noticed that you never see the same employee twice? I never have. Either they rotate sales droids to a different store each day or they have have an endless supply in the back room and at the end of the day the current crop is laid off, fired or quits.
And lest you worry about replacing one invasive species with another, once the French have eaten all the toads all you have to do is attack a few of them and the rest will surrender.
I don't need no stinkin' clean room. Back in the old days I had an Amiga with one of those Seagate drives with the "stiction" problem that would refuse to spin up.
A rap on the side with a screwdriver got it going for a few months then even that wouldn't work. Then I popped the cover off and would get it started with a flick of a finger along the edge of the platter. I set the cover back on and set something heavy on it to hold it in place. Worked fine until I shut it off then I had to spin it up again. It worked like that for several more months until I got bored and tried to lube the spindle with drop of WD-40. It didn't like that at all and started getting read errors all over the place. Oh well.
Disclaimer: I did close my office window and put out my cigarette when the drive was open.
"I've eated bear more than once, and it was pretty good."
My dad use to say the best way to cook bear meat was to throw it in a frying pan with an old shoe. When it was done you throw away the bear and eat the shoe. I've never tried either.
"If your boss is a big enough Dick to fire you when you didn't deserve to be fired, he'll get his eventually." "Just sit back and be patient." "It does eventually come around."
My boss kicked about a month after he canned me. Super Big Dick type A personality keeled over when his ticker blue screened. Over a year later I've got another job but he's still dead.
"And the amusing part is, if you were really important and a critical task depended upon you, they just sabotaged themselves...."
Happened to me. I had recently taken over as the admin for 23 mail servers. I had just completed a security audit and found only 2 servers were fully secure. The other 21 had between one and many vulnerabilities. The next morning I walked in armed with a plan of action to secure everything when I was handed my walking papers. I kept my mouth shut and took all my notes with me. F 'em.
It's them damned Martians again. It was bad enough when they were taking out our spacecraft entering their airspace but now their expanding their empire.
Slashdot Mirror
I nuked myspace.com and several others right in my Linksys router. My 9 year old is sharp but she ain't that sharp, at least for a few years.
Had to replace a DVD-RW in a Dell one day. Installed & tested and left. Several minutes and three miles later I got a call on my cell from the customer. "It doesn't work!" "It was working when I left. I'll be right back." I walked in, ejected the disk, flipped it over and on my way out said "Green side up."
You can't make this stuff up.
Talking about too smart to be stupid...
Many years ago we had one user with a new dialup account that was able to get online but couldn't get his email. He went through every phone tech probably several times troubleshooting it each time prefacing his call with "I've got an IQ of 175, am very smart and know how to use a computer." Also we often got "Your service sucks", "I need to get my mail because I'm waiting for info on my grants." and "If I don't get my grants I'm going to sue you for $25,000" and on & on.
In spite of going through the mail setup keystroke by keystroke (use the period key not "dot". No, not "at", press the shift and 2 keys, etc) many times over the phone with him and having it work perfectly for us on our end we still got extremely irate calls once or twice a day. "It still doesn't work." "Your service sucks." "I'm going to sue." "I'm smarter than God." Blah, blah, blah.
We finally sent two techs over to his house (for safety). What they found was a house packed with crap in massive disarray and a guy, who as one tech put it, obviously spent way too much time sniffing the empty Agent Orange barrels over in Nam. A classic tin foil hat type. In the place for his user name he had typed "luser @ isp . net" complete with spaces. I thought I learned that day that you can't assume anything. Users will go through great lengths to screw up the obvious.
One more from just yesterday. Had a user that couldn't log in. I had him retype his user/pass several times, still didn't work. Worked for me. Figuring Windows might have a death grip on something I had him reboot. "Open your browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, what ever browser you use." "How do I do that?" "Double click on the blue "E" on your desktop." "OK" "Do you have a browser window open?" "Yup, I've got 2 of them." "How did you do that? Nevermind. Close one." "OK" "What does it say in the username box?" "luser@isp.net" "OK, what is in the password box?" "A bunch of stars." "OK, erase them and retype (lusers password). "Oh, you wanted me to retype that too?" I guess I'll never learn...
Even bags of crap aren't free. Checked the price for it lately at your local garden store? This shit must really stink.
The Geek Squad should be called the Greek Squad cuz ya know they're gonna poke you in the pooper...
"Did you perhaps mistype MCSE (Must Consult Someone Else)"
There, I fixed it for you.
Ahhh, good old Northworst Airlines. I live near their hub city and they've got quite a reputation around here. I don't fly much but when I do I avoid them if at all possible. The last time I flew a RT to Tucson I flew Southwest. Cheap ticket and they treated me like a king. Northworst would have been late, left me stranded in Phoenix or Vegas, cancelled a flight and lost my luggage just for good measure.
A friends kid on AOL IM'ed a bunch of people trying to trick them into giving out their passwords. They cancelled his account almost immediately.
Amateurs. I once rode the downhill side of the Smokey Mountains for more than 25 miles on my bike with the engine off. I figure I got eleventy gajillion MPG on that stretch.
Maybe in some cases but that wasn't my experience. If I got a tech with a clue and explained my troubleshooting steps and reasons I had no problem getting parts without any hassle.
The other way was to tell them I was no longer on site. We were suppose to wait on hold up to 20 minutes then we could call later. I'd give them 5 if I was busy or 10 if I wasn't. If I got the "Your hold time may exceed 10 minutes" recording I'd give them 1. Then I'd order parts when I got home where I could watch the news while they took up to 30 minutes to type up the order.
Those were only 2 stories out of many, I could write a book. And the death spirial continues.
You got that right. I'm a recovering Dell service tech (2 weeks out of that hell hole) and the last new Dell I set up had 53 processes running right out of the box. Then you have the cheap 256 meg machines that paged out before the OS was even loaded. Add MS Office which had its preload crap in the startup folder and you got 7 minute plus boot times. Not to mention all the system/program pop-ups and time limited shareware upgrade notices they had to deal with. Many of these people were newbies or average users and just wanted to do email and browse the web. The crap was driving them nuts before I even got out of the house.
You and I would format the drive and reinstall but that's well beyond the capabilities of many of these users. Even the "Dell Decrapifier" is beyond most of them. And they're not about to spend $50 or $100 or whatever to have someone fix their new $500 computer.
Oh, and since this thread is about crappy service... In Information Week (6/12/06, pg 11) Paul English of Kayak.com says (in part) "Dell is in a customer service death spiral." That's being kind. I couldn't agree more. Virtually every customer (90%+) complained of long hold times, 4 to 6 hour or more troubleshooting sessions from brain dead techs or the guy named Sam or Fred that couldn't speak understandable english. Then when Dell did customer service surveys they'd complain LOUDLY and Dell would blame us because their shit didn't stink.
I had to deal with them even as an on-site tech. "The hard drive sounds like a coffee can full of rocks. I unplug it and the sound quits." "Well, lets run some diagnostics." "Huh? It's about to self destruct. Send me a GD drive!" "I can't until we run diagnostics." "But it isn't even seen in the BIOS." "You can run diagnostics off the Resource CD." And on and on and on. Or the poor woman who bought her 8400 to do work from home with a random reboot problem every few minutes. She spent 30+ hours on the phone over 6 months before they even sent a tech out. Then her warranty ran out between visits and they refused to help her any more. And the company I worked for that stressed customer service above all else refused to run it up the chain of command. Spineless assholes. I just couldn't do it any more.
Sorry, it wasn't you that set me off. It just looked like a good place to vent. Can you tell I'm glad I'm out?
These days you could probably get a patent for a "process of expelling excess gas generated by metabolic processing of protein and accumulated in the large intestine and colon."
done
~~
Sorry!
Maximum number of users has been reached.
Please try again later.
It's 4 am CDT and you've slashdotted the USPTO. Well done!
"I may get a cheap NVidea card with TV out instead."
I've built several boxes recently (not all for MythTV) and am addicted to the NVidia FX 5200. They install and work flawlessly, have plenty of power for all but the most demanding games, have VGA, DVI & SVideo out, are fanless and only fifty bucks. I've used the Chaintec and MSI cards with no problems at all. Highly recommended.
One day a friend and I were doing a quick rebuild of another friends 'puter and we needed some heatsink paste so after lunch we stopped by the local RS. "We need some heatsink paste." said I. "What?" "Heatsink paste." "What's that?" I explained. "Don't have any of that." "Yes you do." "No we don't." "Yes you do. I'll look around... Here it is." "Oh, I didn't know what that was."
To be fair, they're not all ignorant but have you noticed that you never see the same employee twice? I never have. Either they rotate sales droids to a different store each day or they have have an endless supply in the back room and at the end of the day the current crop is laid off, fired or quits.
"Just call in the french."
And lest you worry about replacing one invasive species with another, once the French have eaten all the toads all you have to do is attack a few of them and the rest will surrender.
And an 8th grade English teacher. (Mine) Biggest stick-up-his-ass person I ever knew. Actually had the balls to call In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida trash.
I don't need no stinkin' clean room. Back in the old days I had an Amiga with one of those Seagate drives with the "stiction" problem that would refuse to spin up.
A rap on the side with a screwdriver got it going for a few months then even that wouldn't work. Then I popped the cover off and would get it started with a flick of a finger along the edge of the platter. I set the cover back on and set something heavy on it to hold it in place. Worked fine until I shut it off then I had to spin it up again. It worked like that for several more months until I got bored and tried to lube the spindle with drop of WD-40. It didn't like that at all and started getting read errors all over the place. Oh well.
Disclaimer: I did close my office window and put out my cigarette when the drive was open.
"I've eated bear more than once, and it was pretty good."
My dad use to say the best way to cook bear meat was to throw it in a frying pan with an old shoe. When it was done you throw away the bear and eat the shoe. I've never tried either.
"If your boss is a big enough Dick to fire you when you didn't deserve to be fired, he'll get his eventually."
"Just sit back and be patient."
"It does eventually come around."
My boss kicked about a month after he canned me. Super Big Dick type A personality keeled over when his ticker blue screened. Over a year later I've got another job but he's still dead.
"And the amusing part is, if you were really important and a critical task depended upon you, they just sabotaged themselves...."
Happened to me. I had recently taken over as the admin for 23 mail servers. I had just completed a security audit and found only 2 servers were fully secure. The other 21 had between one and many vulnerabilities. The next morning I walked in armed with a plan of action to secure everything when I was handed my walking papers. I kept my mouth shut and took all my notes with me. F 'em.
It's them damned Martians again. It was bad enough when they were taking out our spacecraft entering their airspace but now their expanding their empire.
I for one welcome our new Martian overlords.
"...when I was on the road making locale-specific engineering modifications to a pay telephone system..."
Aw, I thought you were going to tell us about running over phone booths with your car.
Yea, I really get pissed when the theater doesn't have an outlet that I can plug my camcorder into.
"You got a check for six dollars, and what did you do for it? Oh that's right you filled out a webpage, then sat on your ass for a check to come."
I got a check for $13 and change. Guess I sat on my ass twice as hard.