Darts and Laurels

[mindy.livejournal.com]

A laurel to Alex at SBC-Yahoo DSL, who talked me around the problems I was having with the crappy install software and didn't talk down to me at all. An extra-special laurel for calling me "Mindy" and not "ma'am". On the off chance you're listening, you rock hardcore.

A dart to Seagate, who managed to ship me the wrong type of drive as a warranty replacement not once, but TWICE, for the same RMA.

Does anyone have particularly amusing/horrible/good stories about dealing with techs from other companies?

Comments

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

Oh god yes. :: kills Michael Dell with a spork ::

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Vonage - overall excellent service, the quality is wonderful, and for what you get, the price is quite reasonable. Just be careful if you need technical support.

Especially if you have a network configured just the way you like it.

First off, it took two calls, once after waiting on hold for about 15 minutes to have their phone system dump me, and a second 15 to get a technician. Maybe it's the mindset I have when we deal with a grade of service committment of most calls answered under two minutes, preferably no wait at all for my client.

You see, their tech support seems to believe that any service failure, even one that proved to be on their end (due to a number change for a little while I had NO number) is in the fault of the customer's configuration. The same configuration that had been working ever since I got the thing (being all Linksys equipment and being quite familiar with the stuff, it was 10 minutes to being ready to go behind an existing router).

Resetting and reflashing the phone adaptor was quite understandable. Resetting (but not reflashing, because I wouldn't have it) my existing router was a bit much. Not to mention the recabling - he seemed to think I had a bad network cable in there despite all the lights being normal as far as Ethernet was concerned. An hour of this later and he finally comes to the ingenious conclusion that "I guess it's not in your network". Yeah, dumbshit.

Epson was a decent experience, even if they were in the end useless. Got through quickly and got an honest technician - one that readily admitted some people in his office had no issue telling a customer they had spyware they really didn't have so they could charge their $50 spyware removal fee to fix the printer. Unfortunately, they seem to think the problem in my printer is hardware related, as it seems to think it should try a "send to email" command every minute or so. Not a jammed button - there is no such button to jam (many of their printers do). But uninstalling their various control panel crap and letting TWAIN do its thing seems to work out just fine. Laurel this guy for having the balls to admit some people can really screw up.

Darts to Vonage for being utterly clueless and for a supervisor trying to smooth over his incompetant tech that couldn't take five minutes to check their end until after an hour of troubleshooting.

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

Verizon DSL tech support has always been good to me, except that one time during the initial setup when nothing was working (later determined to be a result of having ICS enabled). Whenever I call tech support over there, I end up swapping 'stupid customer' stories with the techs. One guy told me I had an ID10T error, which I really didn't, I think he just wanted to finally be able to use that joke and not get in trouble.

AOL tech support is worse than their users.

Sandisk tech support was awful, asking me the same questions over and over by email just to get an RMA.

Covad tech support, level one: well, let's not even get into that.

MCI DSL NOC: I like those guys, no complaints, except that they almost always want to send a dispatch out.

[jecook]

hmmm...

Dell- I've given up on calling them. I use their "live chat" feature, which seems to work pretty good when requesting parts because I a;lready _know_ it's broken, and I can prove it.

Ditto with HP, only via email, and that takes a few times around to get it in gear. Their phone support is a total fucking nightmare. See Dell above. Oh, how I miss my "reseller support" capabilities! Direct line to level two (or the engineer who designed the fucker!)

Qwest- Hit or miss. some techs were pretty intellegent, at least one advised me to do a "nvram erase all" on a cisco modem that had a totally b0rken serial port, just to get the CPA circuit back up. screw the darts (unless they are lawn darts!), I'm going for the cruise missles.

Linksys- Scary. Managed to get a hold of a level two network engineer who told me that "yeah, none of our products support routing across a VPN connection". Thanks folks. (hint, buying residential grade VPN routers for small business might seem like a cheap idea, but it's not. Trust the fuzzy tiger on this one. the VPN connection passed some 100K on a GOOD day, and the device likes to shit itself if you tinker with the web interface.)