(no subject)

[heartturnsblue]

I don't work in IT or tech support of any kind. Before you start throwing stones at me, let me say that I'm pretty sure I've got a good story of reverse of tech support stupidity.

One morning, just days before I was set to return to college with my spiffy Dell laptop and it's brand new hard drive (that's another story entirely), I discovered that the display had gone. Had gone what, you ask? Simply, it was gone. Oh sure, I could read black text on white if I sat two inches from the screen... but for all intents and purposes, my LCD had obviously crapped out.

So, like the good extended-warranty owner that I am, I called Dell's tech support line. Some fellow who sounded like his birth name was probably closer to Mohammad than Chris (as he introduced himself) answered and the following conversation ensued...

ME: Something is wrong with my laptop's LCD. The screen has gone really dark and I can't see anything on it. I tried to adjust the brightness and contrast but it didn't help.
HIM: Okay. Is the computer currently on?
ME: No.
HIM: Okay, turn it on and press F12.
ME: Alright...
HIM: Okay, now you should see the diagnostic test --
ME: No, I don't see ANYTHING. The. Screen. Is. Black.
HIM: (dramatic pause)... Your new LCD will be there in two business and days we'll send a technician out to install it.

I don't think even the language barrier can account for that stupidity.

Comments

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the intersection of minimum wage outsourced phone help and end user's who can't figure out that the computer being dead might, just MIGHT, be related to the power outage...

[heartturnsblue]

I'll admit to the occasional blonde moment, but I think even I might notice a power outage. Although, I was thoroughly amazed the first time my laptop stayed on during a power outage. Perhaps I have little room to talk...

[tophee.livejournal.com]

FL Inverter! Only second to hard drives as the most-replaced part inside the notebooks I've worked on.

/toph

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Hear dat, I've had several go south on me in just the one year I've been working in IT. The inverter on my pitiful old iBook at home is going too. Sigh.

[azurelunatic]

That sounds to me like a classic case of testing to see if the end-user really knows what they're talking about. You'd be surprised the number of people who actually don't.

Sailor Jim told a story the other day of someone who was trying, and failing, to send text messages ... because the guy didn't know he had to hit "Send".

[heartturnsblue]

I hope that was the case, but it seems fairly common for Dell. Tis why I've developed the habit of explaining my problem in extreme detail before they even have a chance to question me about it. Even that seems to fail most of the time.

[azurelunatic]

I've had my share of bad encounters with them. I think the worst case was the one where the guy did not accept that I had my DSL modem in the USB port until I ejected the NIC from the computer and read him the contents of my spam box in my webmail.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he might've been testing you; if you'd been able to read him anything off that diagnostic page, he'd have known you didn't know your ass from a ham sammich... Nice to have someone on the other end with a clue, let me tell ya...

[ephant.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Even the smartest sounding person can be mistaken, lying or just fucking crazy. Believing what people say can get you in to all sorts of trouble. I, for example, have had someone call me to say 'my screen doesn't work' when what they meant was 'internet explorer doesn't load pages'.

[azurelunatic]

But there's a world of difference in the attitude of "You sound like you know what you're talking about; let's go through a few formalities that my supervisors require to make sure that it really is what you're convinced it is" and the attitude of "You're a moron and what you're reporting couldn't possibly be true".

[brothersterno.livejournal.com]

sometimes, the two sound the same. Often, when I put a cursetomer through that particular song and dance It's because I really think I can fix their "problem" with some thorough and guided troubleshooting. However, I've lost my shit with indian vendor techs who don't know that a loop test passing at 200 feet is not going to change whether or not we short it at the EU premise 6000 feet away, and that it just might be that there is something broken/disconected in the central office, and that maybe they should, I don't know, open a ticket to the telco who owns that CO.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

They plowed under our phone/data lines last week (8 hours down). I'm on my cell talking trying to make people understand just WHY they can't call me on the land line to make it all better.

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

Verizon went through a phase several years ago of cutting through their own cables (or otherwise screwing things up) every so often, resulting in our loss of long distance, Internet access, etc. But our two local phone lines, one being the fax, would be unaffected since they were routed elsewhere. Ah, if only I had a nice, stiff drink for every time we got a fax from a customer saying, 'Your phones aren't working - call me!!'

[kuang.livejournal.com]

I had a worse one with a Tosh laptop that was known to have a particular issue with fuzzy screens. This one had gone one better and had started to fill the screen with random blocks of colour, so I called their tech support to tell them to replace it. After a few minutes of going through the usual nonsense I explain the symptoms (weird fill patterns immediately after powerup) and the guy recommended I reinstall the drivers for the monitor. When I explained that given the timing of the fault this probably wasn't the cause (yeah, among other reasons I know, but I didn't want to confuse him further..) he suggested that maybe reinstalling windows would be the next thing to try. I restated my reasoning, he tried to tell me that they wouldn't look at it unless I'd been through their diagnostic path, so I suggested HE tried to reinstall windows on a machine with a dead panel and see how far he got. That semed to do the trick ;)

As an interesting consequence of this I discovered that the user had initially taken it back to the PC World branch she'd bought it from, who'd suggested she pay them just over £600 for a new screen as it was just over one year old. Bad enough, but that particular Tosh came with a 3 year manufacturers warranty...

[fearrett.livejournal.com]

When I worked at Dell, and we got problems like this one, I'd say about 90-odd percent of the time it was because people didn't take the time to adjust their brightness settings properly.

Not saying that this invalidates your point and also, the techs name was more likely mohinder, being in India.

[xrockravenx.livejournal.com]

Some fellow who sounded like his birth name was probably closer to Mohammad than Chris (as he introduced himself) answered and the following conversation ensued...


Nice job with the stereotyping. Because every Indian guy or anyone with a "heavy" accent is named Mohammad, by default of course.

Maybe Chris had a serious speech impairment. =P

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

That's right. Mohammed is an Arabic name. Everyone knows all Indian guys are named Ravi. :P

[heartturnsblue]

Alright, it was a bit of stereotyping. The name Mohammad came to mind mainly because I DID get a tech from Dell once with that name. I'm as frustrated as anyone when it comes to outsourcing but perhaps my joke was in bad taste (or at the least, bad choice of name).

[vortex.livejournal.com]

Sounds to me like you got a good Tech...he got to the problem in three lines, instead of forcing you through a series of twenty or more steps.

One of the companies I worked for switched from Toshiba Lapops to Dell because we were losing money from having to repair all of the toshiba's who's laptop displays went out...

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

yeah, I really don't see the problem here. He went a little way into his script then gave it up. I don't see the high level of stupidity at all.

I do see a certain level of bigotry though, which is always nice on a Monday morning.

[kepplah.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'd love to have that conversation with Dell. He's obviously working from some enumerated list. Just be glad he didn't go through all 20 steps. Plug into the wall, sacrifice a first born, defile a virgin, etc. Any tech call that is fast is a good call.

[eightofspades.livejournal.com]

Frankly, agreed. There's a reason my intern gets outgoing tech-support calls 9:

That guy thought 'I'm not going to get bitten on this, it's broken. Pass.'

[jecook]

If I had a nickel for every time I've had to bullshit the script reading monkey on the other end of the line/chat session, I'd have..... >$5.00.

The place I'm at has a Warranty Parts Direct account with Dell, and the vendors that we deal with have more clue then I do, and don't quibble when we do the diagnostics for them. :)

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

Actually that was decent troubleshooting technique. You can say that your screen has gone blank, and there's still a multitude of issues to take into consideration, which were cleaned up by the non-diagnostics boot:

- Could have been a driver issue, which was resolved by going into the diagnostics boot which runs at first in ANSI mode and then with a standard VGA adapter that runs on virtually anything. If you had seen something when you booted into diagnostics, but not when you normally booted, it'd pointed him to a driver

- Could have been a resolution issue (you said you could see white on black text if you stood back a couple feet) this diagnostics mode boots into a basic 640x480 resolution for ansi and then I believe 720x afterwards.

- Could have been a "end user" issue, which by having you do something different (hit f12 and the power key) makes you rethink and look for the f12 and the power key, rather than just hitting the key you thought you hit.

Sounds like you actually got a decent tech. Don't ever be offended by what we do or ask (I'm on site, so I often redo what people say they've already done, just to make sure) we always have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which is generally a person who says "When I poke at that typewriter thingy the TV does not display anything? I hit the power button on the CPU but I think my memory might be too low because I threw a bunch of pictures on there the other day"

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Agreed. So when you add the no-level of stupidity to the pointlessly stereotypical line, I think we have a bigot! There is a reason we try to keep this community limited to techs, isn't there?

[kelly-bean.livejournal.com]

"When I poke at that typewriter thingy the TV does not display anything? I hit the power button on the CPU but I think my memory might be too low because I threw a bunch of pictures on there the other day"

hahahaha.

yes.