Computer technical support

Within the last week, my laptop started acting up. As in: application responsiveness is noticeably slower and one of the cooling fans runs constantly. It’s the motherboard, and it’s under warranty. My task is to get them to agree to fix it. (I secretly covet a tricked out one of these, I don’t have the spare cash lying around. ) I backed it up last night then attempted to navigate the vendor’s technical support site.

It’s tradition that the first few rounds of support involve an analyst giving you the litany of things to do to your system. These range from the bizarre and gross “shake out the bits collected under your keyboard” to the “get you off the phone until the support ticket can automatically close itself” delay tactics. An all-time-favorite is to recommend I “reinstall windows,” the analyst equivalent of a Hail Mary. The cure is worse than the symptom.

They have a hardware wonkavator that would theoretically save a lot of time by telling technical support about my system. Unfortunately running it requires using Internet Explorer. I would do this if their technical support didn’t completely ignore the data… or the highly-detailed information I give them.

Then there are “blurbs,” a canned, pre-approved statement for technical support to use in thei communications. Blurbs attempt to acknowledge the customer may not be the happiest person in the world, without making promises or admitting the company’s products might not be six sigma reliable. Used sparingly, they’re fine.

For example:

“Thank you for contacting Technical Support. I will be glad to assist you.“

Suuuuure you will.

I apologize for the inconvenience, however, in order to resolve this issue we need to run a test on the system.

This one irks me because they usually ask for the information I already provided them. No point in arguing, just re-attach the email.

This analyst must be new, because he only has three blurbs in the entire email. I often get the passive-aggressive, or pre-burnout analysts who rebel by wedging the maximum number of blurbs into a paragraph.

My goal/expectation is I’ll have to go back and forth via email for a few days, ultimately scoring a service appointment early next week.

Update: I have gone two rounds with him.  I made the rookie error of revealing Too Much Information, namely that I am running a non-Windows operating system on my machine in addition to Windows.  The support dude immediately pounced on this and responded with a “Linux is unsupported.”  While I could have countered with “But it’s Ubuntu 7.10, Michael Dell’s running it.”  Instead, I ignored this and sent him diagnostics.

[Slaps forehead]  Bad superhero!