The state of Indian outsourced technology and support

[misfoks]

On the footsteps of yesterday's amusing little aside, I got a call from my mother yesterday, who often calls when something's gone wrong with her machine. "Just to let you know what's happening, my computer's stopped booting," she started. I groaned quietly, but true to form she kept talking without giving a chance for response. "I've been on the phone with HP tech support in India and they had me do a, a, what do you call it, restore thing, and that didn't fix it, it kept saying it couldn't find an NT loader and I'm just now on the way back from the post office, HP finally sent my XP CDs overnight to me, and--"

Here she paused to take a breath, so I quickly slipped in, "Remove the disk from the floppy drive."

Apparantly, HP/Compaq's outsourced help never thought to check the floppy drive (OK, obviously neither had she). She was in the midst of reformatting the drive as they'd suggested, and naturally HP has followed the current trend of not supplying the software on CD unless there's a dire emergency.

Oh, and the people in yesterday's saga did in fact reply. "We'd love to help you, but we can't reproduce the problem," they said. "Please send us exactly what you were submitting." So I did. Full name, requested login ID, selected radio buttons, everything. They replied again, quoting my full email with all that information, and said "We'll need your full name and requested login ID to help us find the account." The account which I'd been saying I couldn't create.

WHY MUST I BE SURROUNDED BY FRIKKIN IDIOTS?

Comments

[feren.livejournal.com]

Because IT was invented as a way to further enhance our experience in purgatory.

[roquen.livejournal.com]

Idiots can be useful. Especially when they have lots of available spending money.

Even the great one's can fail

[saintingie.livejournal.com]

Although I feel your pain, sometimes, I are one.

When I got back from Arizona, I logged into the helpdesk email account and started answering questions that had been untouched while I was away (yes someone WAS supposed to answer them but they didn't). I totally fucked up on a response to someone who couldn't send an attachment via webmail. He sent me a rather amusing response, not quite as harsh as I would be to tech support, obviously pointing out to me how idiotic my response was. Whoops. I still have to reply to him and see if I can duplicate the problem. At this point, I think it might have resolved itself but the next questions is, what the hell was happening to the mail server? And my only response is, "Well, its Imail. Maybe someone didn't give it a hot enough cup of tea?" Someday, we're getting off Windows for email but not quite yet.