The state of Indian outsourced technology and support

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?