The Homer Simpson approach to computer Technical Support

Recently, I have had a series of encounters with "technical support" from several computer companies. In a nutshell, their support has been useless, inane, and even insulting. Homer Simpson could have done a better job.

My career over the last 42 years has been the technical side of computers. I can safely say that I've been around the block more than once. (1) 

What I resent is this:

1. They do not try and open a dialogue. They just assume. 
2. They assume that I am a "newbie" and assume that I know nothing about computers. 
3. They assume that I am idiot who does not know how to read or write. If they're so smart, why don't they have a real computer job instead of reading rote answers someone else gives them? 
4. They have no experience with the product they support. I had a online chat with one such techie and he had to go offline for 5 minutes at a time to get help.
5. They do not ask me about the environment I'm using. They ALWAYS assume that its windoze and internet "explorer" (2)

Here are some of the encounters with "technical" support that I have had recently:

1 - A Canadian ISP. My daughter used a small ISP in Victoria, BC. Several of the family in various parts of the US, who use Yahoo, have had our email rejected by their daemon for one of two reasons. "Too many addressee for this hour" or "Too much time in the queue".  So I contacted their tech support:

• I got the usual baffle them with BS. "The error message indicates that the Yahoo.com  server has been behaving in a manner which our server considers threatening. This has caused our server to respond automatically by blocking that outgoing mail server in order to protect our customers from the apparent threat. Often, this is the result of a dramatic increase in the volume or type of mail that we have received from that server. This is either caused by spammers (3) in the yahoo system or that their servers have been compromised.
  Some of our customers have reported that the Yahoo mail administrators have been made aware and are investigating the causes of the issue on their end. Please note that this is not something that [… we …] can resolve directly since the problems are occurring at the Yahoo mail servers. There's a reason why Yahoo is being blocked and this is the something that the Yahoo administrators must work on in order that their servers are no longer triggering [… our …] spam filters to block them
  If the problem persists, it will be necessary for the sender's mail admins to fill out a form online as a request to be removed from the block"
• Yahoo's problem? I send email to at least a dozen different ISP's from Yahoo (such as Gmail, hotmail, earthlink, etc., including two different ones in England). The only time I've had them rejected is with "Addressee Unknown" when I've given a bad email address. Otherwise, I have NEVER gotten email rejected from any of these ISP's for any other reason. Hm. I can send email all over half the world and it does not get rejected except by some little company in Canada. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
• "If the problem persists, it will be necessary for the sender's mail admins to fill out a form online as a request to be removed from the block" What what?Why does this little Podunk company require me to fill out an exception request. No other ISP in the Western world requires it and I can communicate with them without any problem.
• I then tried sending email at various times of the day including before 5 a.m. Surprise, Surprise. The 5 a.m. email got through, the latter ones were rejected. Hm. "Too many addressees this hour", "too much time in the queue", it works off peak but not during peak hours. It sounds like a capacity problem, it acts like a capacity problem. Maybe they ought to look at their capacity issues.
• Bottom line: My daughter switched to GMail and the problem went away.
• It sounds like somebody in Canada has their toque's on too tight and are wearing snow blinders.

2. A recognized "leader" in financial software.  I wanted to start my budgeting fresh for 2011 without any reference to 2010 because last year was disastrous for me and I need  a strong budget approach. Their financial software regularly queries my various accounts, and gives a monthly accounting for my budget. All well and good, except it kept confusing things with 2010 data. I asked their tech support as to how I could start afresh. Their replies were:

• "It doesn't work like the others". What others? My toaster? The phases of the moon? Please give a hint!
• "Read the manual and search the forum". Duh, why didn't I think of that. Rule one in life: RTFM. I read the manual - it has no technical information, it is only a long sales document. Rule two: Ask other people. The forum dialogues are about as useful as Facebook, a lot of "I have the same problem" and "have you tried?".
• I asked if I could delete the 2010 transactions and their reply is that I have to wait 3 months for it to rollover. Based on their other uninformed answers, I deleted 2010 transactions and it almost worked correctly. 
• Bottom line, I was so disgusted with their support, I got my money back.
• (I should have known the trouble I was getting into when they introduced themselves as Rajit, Pathi, and the like)

I was having trouble logging in a new service. 

• Dear Member, If you are not able to log in into your account, please ensure that you are using the correct username and password.  If you have forgotten your username/password, please go to ... Duh, am I stupid or what. Why didn't I think of that!!!  
• We have provided your log in information.  Please verify that you are typing in your username exactly how it appears. Uh, yep, I tried that - several times. Why did I call your help desk first?
• Please make sure you try the following before you log in:

Obviously, these exact instructions are for Internet Explorer. Though similar, FireFox and Safari have the same stuff hidden in other places.

1. Open a New (Internet Explorer) Browser

2. Choose "Tools" (in other browsers, the information they wanted me to change is under "preferences")

3. Click on "Internet Options" 

4. Click on "Delete Cookies" (SAY WHAT?)

5. Click on "Delete Temp Internet Files" (AGAIN, SAY WHAT? How ham handed can you get?)

6. Then click "Settings" and choose "Every Visit to the Page" (AHA, inadvertently, a real clue)

7. LASTLY, RESTART YOUR COMPUTER !! Are we still in the dark ages !! - to change a few cookies in a browser!

Well, while awaiting their reply, I switched from FireFox to Safari (I have been having recurring problems using FireFox to log in to various sites)(4) et voila, the problem disappeared. A quick search of FireFox forums (5) told me why I was having the problem and what to do to fix it. I checked a box in preferences about cookies and it worked.

• I did not have to start a new browser
• I did not have to delete all or any cookies, 
• I did not have to restart the browser. The changes were made on the fly. 
• most of all I DID NOT HAVE TO RESTART MY COMPUTER
• ticking the box in preferences has fixed all my FireFox log in problems
• I did, however, cancel the "service".

To summarize, the score is consumer 3, service providers 0. Why? Because they gave such poor support we switched services and got our money back.


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(1) A little background. I'm a graduate in Math and English at a university respected worldwide with a fair amount of Nobel prize winners. My career has been working with computers since the early 70's with fortune 500 companies, including IBM and at Amdahl. I have been an applications programmer adept at least a dozen different computer languages including FORTRAN, PL/I C, Java, and machine language for three different computer architectures.  I am an expert in the internals of IBM mainframe operating systems. I have used pc's since the early DOS days and have pretty much used every level of windoze up until Vista. I have exclusively used Apple equipment and software since OS X, because my experience says that windoze is a piece of junk, witness VISTA. I have been both an beta and an ALPHA tester of various operating system software and hardware, including LINUX and IBM's SHARK. I have traveled all over the US as on site technical support and had accounts that I visited in New Zealand and Austria.


(2) If "I.E." is so good, then why do other companies have to come out with things like Safari FireFox, Opera, Chrome, and a whole lot of others.  68% of market uses something else besides I.E.. FireFox owns 28%- it is quite likely that the browser is FireFox. 

If windoze is so good, why do sophisticated users knowingly spend more money for Apple OS X and hardware??? Answer: windoze caters to the inexperienced user who does not know that they are being duped. 

(3) My pet peeve is that spell checkers need a college education in English. I have to dumb down my emails and blogs just to find typing errors. It knows about "spam", but not "spammer" or "spammers". Try typing in the plural of millennium, millennia.


(4) Every browser has it faults.  My preference is FireFox because it has a richer variety of extensions, add-ons, and themes than Safari. it has a wider variety of add-ons and custom "skins". Besides, I had to switch from Safari because its java looped while trying to send an email from Yahoo. But I have to use Safari when using this blogger because FireFox jumps the screen every time this blogger saves this blog. I don't use I.E. because I don't want to have to restart my computer to make minuscule changes.


(5) The FireFox forums are vastly superior to the mere application forums like the one I mentioned above. It is inhabited by sophisticated computer user and its developers. Apples forums are pretty good, but they have been dumbed down and you sometimes have to contact them directly. 


IBM can have the "over whelm the enemy" approach. But IBM has an excellent support line used by expert computer callers. You call in to Level 1, who tries to answer with pre-canned answers. If the customer is not satisfied with the answer, they have Level 2 call the customer. Level 2 only deals with that one product, has all the reams of IBM documentation for it and the source code. After a good bit of research, if they cannot answer the question, it is moved to Level 3, who are experts on the product and how it works. They have all the info that Level 2, plus field experience with the product, plus direct access to the developers (a cranky lot, to say the least). If there still is no answer, it opened as a bug, and IBM hates bug - the Problem gets the attention of the developers. (I was level 3 on storage software and hardware for awhile but I moved on to more interesting things.)

TTFN

(Bright)