Tech Support Sucks

It's been my experience that calling tech support is an exercise in futility. There seem to be only a handful of people at any given "support" center who actually know what they're doing, and good luck getting one of them on the phone.

I cannot recall how many times I've been given troubleshooting suggestions that were either totally irrelevant or just plain wrong.

Nothing makes my day like having a computer problem, calling tech support long distance on my phone bill, waiting half an hour - or longer - to talk with someone and then realizing I know more than he does.

What people need to remember is that these support centers are often run by a contracted company and not Dell, HP or whoever and get paid less for a return call on the same 'incident' than a new call for a new problem.

They therefore have the explicit objective to take as many new calls as possible and then dispose of them as soon as possible; the old "churn and burn." The last thing they want to do is to take the time and effort to seriously and methodically troubleshoot your technical problem.

This is why so much tech support "advice" comes down to R & R (Reformat drives & Reinstall software). They know this will take a long time and force you to get off the phone so they can take (and bill) the next call. Also, neutron bomb measures like R & R probably will solve most problems, so you won't be calling back (even though, if you think about it, you never did learn what was wrong or how to avoid it in the future).

Now, increasingly, we have the problem of tech support being farmed out to non-English speaking countries. On a recent call, I spoke to Vishnapranyahursadanapol (I think) who seemed like very nice guy - SEEMED like, I say, because I literally couldn't understand one thing he said.

I have an ear for languages and I'm VERY comfortable with accents, folks. If I can't understand someone, then he just cannot speak clear English. Period.