Re: Seeking more hardware advice

[jared r r spiegel <jrrs_(_at_)_ice-nine_(_dot_)_org>]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 09:03:08PM -0400, Jonathan Hirschman wrote:

> although somewhat off-topic, still relevant.

  i'm going to shoot off-topic and push the envelope of relevancy for
  a bit.  delete.me at will.

> Next day, I spent almost a full day exhausing the patience of the 
> overseas folks, 
> ... got an American supervisor. She knew exactly what 
> the issue was, but wouldn't cop to anything; two days later, I got a 
> similar SBLive (but, like the first one, with a proprietary Dell 
> connector) and a new BIOS on a hand-burned CD.

  dell... proprietary connector... ?  proprietary *anything* ??..
  no...... <G>

  i'd rather be shot dead than be accused of defending dell, none
  of that hardware is allowed in my house anymore, but as far as
  tech support goes; indeed, many readers of this list are going to 
  dread the 'call to tech support' that is needed solely to communicate
  to the company that some of their hardware/software is in a broken
  condition and you're reporting that...  

  from the other side of the phone, i can say that the quickest and
  most amiable resolutions in the context of "your guys' stuff is broke"
  is where the customer on the other end of the phone responds to my
  "how can i help you" with an itemizaion of everything they have done
  which brings them to the reason they're calling.  i'm one of the
  guys you're *glad* to get when calling tech support; but even for some
  of the people i've seen in the "industry", employees who, for example, 
  would rather tell a customer that their own linksys home DSL router
  is "unsupported" and argue with the customer rather than just tell
  the customer to set it up with "DHCP / automatically / no host/domain
  name needed / no MAC address needed"; even those people have little
  room to refute you or give you a runaround if you can just lay down
  the X, Y, and Z that prove why the hardware needs OEM attention, but more
  on that below ::

  some of the people answering the phones are really just regurgitating 
  information they received in "training" that they perceive as factual truth -
  without ever having so much as tried to prove/disprove said regurgitated 
  information to themselves. ( modem not handshaking?  "my training manual
  says one step is to clear the temporary internet files!".... :/ )

  to one of those type of people, "Linux is Unsupported", which equates to
  meaning that it _does not work_.  they won't even know what "a BSD is?".

  hold queues suck.  at 3:30 EST every day our queue dies because that's when
  we have the most people on the phones.. outside of that, we're hideously
  understaffed, with no end in sight, and end up with 14-40 min queues the
  other 22 hrs of the day...
 
  not like i'm fishing for sympathy for tech support; nono...  nearly all
  bad tech support reputations are well-earned.  of the 3 places i've worked,
  there has been ~1 sharp, knowledgeable tech who would not chirp "Unsupported"
  the instant you say "*nix" for every 12 that do... +/-.  the trick is in
  getting those 12 to not have any possible questions or "troubleshooting"
  steps to exhaust after you give them your spiel - which usually roughly
  equates to knocking down each one they'd otherwise run you through before
  they suggest them, rather than superseding them.

  don't take this the wrong way, just trying to give idea/pointer to make
  anyone's "inevitable" call to tech support possibly less painful.

  jared.

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