Frontpage Story #24

Never have I made a call to tech support and *not* teach them something. These folks only know how to follow online prompting. If you disagree with them, they can get rather ugly, and usually you can tell they are one-second of hanging up on you, simply because you know more than they do.

I am currently on hold again, after a snot-nosed know-nothing techie named Dwayne hung up on me after I asked to talk to a supervisor. This is after waiting 1) on hold for His Dumbness to answer the phone, and 2) an additional 10 minutes while he asked someone how to look up a case number and history.

Let me back up a little...
Six weeks after purchasing the computer, my video card went out. (About 4 weeks ago) After determining there was nothing I could do about it, and that it was indeed hardware, I called tech support to have the computer fixed. After an hour holding, I finally got someone to help me. They wanted me to do a full-restore. I told them no way. After going round and round with the guy, he ultimately decided that the hardware was indeed malfunctioning. He gave me a case number, set up the road tech, and told me that the road tech would call me in a couple of days so the road tech could change the system board. (Ironic, isn't it? That little design feature just cost them about 10 times what it would if the video card was seperate! God, I love irony...) That was three weeks ago, an I haven't heard a word from Compaq or the road tech.

It goes on...
The Rockwell 56K modem has been giving me problems off and on since I purchased my system, a 5192 with Win98. The problems got worse, and the only way I could stay connected online after a while was to do a cold reboot. Technical support did everything under the sun to correct the problem. Nothing worked. (I refused to let them manipulate the modem strings to lower the max speed. That would have limited the functionality of the computer) I received a case number, and I told them I'd call back if it started up again.

Ironically, after the call, I decided to pop open the case and reseat the modem yet again, concurrent with uninstalling the driver. When I restarted, it found it and reloaded the drivers. Strangely enough, Windows had to install the drivers itself to fix the problem. Well, a week or so ago, it started it's new tricks. I decided to give tech support a call and find out where the heck the guy with the system card was; after all, three weeks is plenty of time to get around to calling me. The snot-nosed kid that hung up on me at least told me that the backordered part just came in, and that I should receive the road tech's call (all together now...) within a couple of days. I'll believe it when I see it.

Compaq's tech support seems to have a real hard time dealing with the fact that many of the people calling in know more than they do, and that many callers know what they are talking about.

P.S. I finally got through to a supervisor, whom gave the standard apology and maybe I can do something about the guy, etc. Unfortunately, he wasn't a whole lot of help, either.