There are some people I will not understand.
Among them this day are Technical Support staff. This is a truly humbling admission since I am one of these people myself.
My consistent experience with people in these jobs leads me to believe they are all deaf. Any other explanation would require them all to be incredibly conceited.
Note: there is never a thing about computers I have not been able to teach myself. Somehow my piss poor parents sent me to computer classes on summer in the mid-80s. Since then, it has been non-stop poking and prodding, My first exposure to Macs was in high school where we did strange things to them that our teacher couldn’t figure out. In college, I taught myself HTML and Unix at a time when Lynx was the only real web browser. I remember telneting into a CD store years before Amazon.com ever existed. I maintain a $50,000 computer network as a part of my job.
There is nothing mysterious about computers. It always has been and always is a matter of understanding why a computer does one thing, and the rest progresses naturally.
But I mention none of these things when I call technical support. I try to defer to the ‘expert’. I state the facts ass I know them, hoping the Techie will interpret my data and provide me with a solution.
Not a chance.
The first step is to ignore every test I have ever done, and proceed to talk me through the most menial of possible tasks. Thirty minutes later when they’ve finished with the tests I spent five minutes completing 3 days before when the problem first appeared, they present me with the most insane of possible problems, and almost innevitably suggest wipeing out everything and starting from scratch,
These are boys reading from manuals. They wouldn’t dare skip ahead a few pages, for fear of their very slide-rules.
I have told no less than 10 companies about my problems with my computer’s hard drive. I point out the exhaustive series of tests I have performed, and the time I spent on the phone with the manufacturer of both the computer and operating system, who could not find any problem on their end. The hard drive is locked up in a world of its own and will surrender it’s secrets to no man.
And I always leave off by pointing out it appears as though a pin has broken off on the jack. Just a little metal stub left.
and ten companies or more have now told me, each one a different story, how it must be something else wrong with my hard drive.
look me in the fucking eyes. try to stay with me.
a
little
metal
pin
has
broken
off.
no I can’t test your hard drive because nothing can read the drive. and no i will not take it to a PC somewhere to get test results for you… thats what I’m fucking paying you for. And if one more of you fuckers feeds me a line about the high costs of CD burning for data recovery, I am going to shove the whole fucking drive somewhere uncomfortable for you, and maybe then you can count the pins.