A pox on the computer industry…
September 30th, 2006
I complain about the computer industry all the time. Today is no exception. I just helped Philip fix his internet connection after random websites stopped working the other day. Apparently he spent at least an hour on the phone with Sympatico technical support, and the technician there gave up, basically just saying that windows was messed up.
Turns out Sympatico’s DNS servers are just junk, and switching to other servers fixed the problem right away. But why couldn’t the person working at Sympatico figure that out? Even worse, some web searches show that this problem has been occurring intermittently for years now. It’s appalling how tolerant we are of incompetence in this field…
It’s not that surprising, unfortunately, when you realise that in order to be intolerant of incompetence you have to first be able to recognize it as such.
Oh…I’ve had PLENTY worse. I’ve had to deal with Gateway support. Two examples:
1. There was a laptop that had a fan which was not spinning. We (the company I worked for at the time) just needed a new fan. The computer was out of warranty, so Gateway said it would cost at least $300 just to touch it. We fixed the fan problem (it was causing it to overheat after about 20 minutes) somehow. The customer was charged $60. Thats REAL service.
2. A desktop computer needed a new power supply. Unfortunately the power supply was proprietary due to the physical design of the power supply box. We were able to test the machine with another power supply to be 100% sure that was the problem. We contacted Gateway to get a new power supply and they sent one out. They sent it to the original Gateway customer, not to us, the people who provided the credit card number, who asked them to be sure to send it to us. The original Gateway customer is not the current owner, but somehow the power supply got back to us. It was the wrong power supply. We tried to return it to Gateway but they said that we couldn’t return it because we weren’t the original owner. So, we wanted to place a new order. They said they couldn’t even send us that power supply and recommended a 3rd party company to send it to us. I believe THAT power supply actually worked. I think we had to dispute charges on the credit card to get the money back. I don’t know what became of the power supply.
That’s a fun story with the fan!
And a good example of incompetence that ANYONE should be able to recognize – it’s not necessarily technical competence that’s lacking, but general knowledge of the products that you’re selling or supporting.