Tech Support
Man, I hate level one tech support. Seriously, replace them all with answering machines instead, and save a few dollars a year. I just sent a message to an unspecified computer company yesterday which paraphrased read like this:
Hi, my three week old laptop’s hard disk has died. When turned on, the BIOS does not detect any disks on the bus, and it emits a horrible screeching sound when the disk tries to spin up. Where should I ship it to for a warranty replacement?
And a day later, got back a message asking me to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows, to see if that is at fault. Yes, I realize they’re just monkeys with a giant keyboard full of macros with labels like “Reinstall Windows“, “I’ll need to elevate your request” and “Sorry, your 12 hours warranty expired yesterday” – but still, why haven’t they been replaced by a knowledge-base and a smaller set of competent engineers? It turns a simple warranty replacement problem into a multi-week saga.
You know what? Screw it. It’s Acer. The same monkeys who held my *brand new* netbook for a month of its 12 month warranty, for a simple noisy fan replacement. Nuts to them.
Yesterday I went to a Connected Community Hackerspace meeting, where I got to meet “the REAL geek squad” and showed off my LUFA powered Webserver. As is the case with all public demonstrations, the first 20 minutes was comprised of me swearing while trying to get my JTAG to connect to my USBKEY, until it spontaneously fixed itself and all was well. I’ve handed off my donated ARM7 board to the much capable Angus (hoster of this website, in fact) so that he can set up an environment for me so that I can actually use it.
On and a special mention to Michael McKenzie and Dave Fletcher, who donated AU$1 and AU$0.1 respectively. With PayPal fees, I’m now $0.67 richer!
Unfortunately, far too many times tech support is a piece of sh*t. Open hardware would be particularly nice in such cases.
Regarding web hosting, BlueHost is light years ahead of its competitors. You can type any question on their front page and it gets answered by a knowledgable human being usually within one or two minutes. Unfortunately, it’s the exception, not the norm.
Once I’ve seen a very well build knowledge base that you mentioned. It refreshed the list of the possible soultions each time I pressed a key in the question field.
I just find it a bit depressing; it seems these people exist solely to delay due process for actually fixing the issue. Level 1 just isn’t competent enough to solve anything other than the simplest of issues, which would be better served by a troubleshooting wizard on the web anyway.
Of course, a knowedge-base is only as good as the people who write it, but you’re still better off firing the whole Level 1 team and hiring one good writer instead. Far less user frustration.
– Dean