• Dick Riculous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Sheila is an idiot. Not because she pressed the SHIFT key, any novice could make that mistake. She is an idiot because after the SHIFT key failed to yield any results, she didn't bother trying any other key! If I'm told that I can press any key on the keyboard but the key I've chosen doesn't work, I think to myself "oh well, lucky there are still another 104 keys here to try". Anyone with an ounce of common sense would surely come to the same conclusion. To escalate the problem so high and threaten to dump the entire unit without bothering to try one of the other "any" keys is just plain retarded.

    I'm more inclined to call the support staff retarded for never bothering to ask which key she tried to push. If I were on the support staff, and I discover that she can't get the setup to continue despite pushing a button when it asks to "Press any key to continue." I would immediately ask which button she tried to push.

  • Dick Riculous (unregistered) in reply to Dick Riculous

    Addendum: They had the entire support staff there and none of them could figure out that somebody should have asked that question?

    Isn't the first step of troubleshooting figuring out what exactly the user did, especially at the point where the error occurs?

  • (cs) in reply to Jaime
    Jaime:
    amischiefr:
    Jaime:
    amischiefr:
    That first story sounds made up. I mean come on, a female CIO?
    I work for a 100 billion dollar company and both our current and previous CIOs were females.
    You're just saying that because you're a woman. I bet you sit at home watching the kids while your husband works.
    I'm a dude. Die in a fire.
    LOL, pwnt! And you got him angry too! Well done, Obvious Troll!
  • Raniz (unregistered) in reply to smxlong
    smxlong:
    On the one hand, Sheila can't be blamed for thinking that "any key" means any key.

    On the other hand, a person with even rudimentary problem-solving skills would try other keys before contacting tech support.

    It's a double-WTF.

    Tech support should have figured out what was wrong before sending the second replacement keyboard.

    I'd say it's a triple-WTF

  • (cs) in reply to Volcanon
    Volcanon:
    I kind of wish I'd done it via chat so I could show you guys...

    Not too long ago we had a tape drive fail in one of our servers. It threw a media error and couldnt eject via software commands, etc. Basically the drive was hosed. This much was obvious. However, upon contacting dell they insisted on sending us a new tape and a cleaning tape. I told them "theres no way all 10 of our tapes went bad simultaneously" but he wouldnt have any of it. It was definitely in the realm of possibility that all 10 of our 1 year old tapes failed all at once.

    Obviously after we got the new tapes and it didnt work he sent me a drive to replace it and that worked just fine.

    At least you got some free tape out of it...

  • luctus (unregistered) in reply to lolwtf
    lolwtf:
    "I bought my DSL modem from home" She lives in an electronics store and doesn't know this stuff?

    Usually people who live in stores know even less about the items than the people who merely work there...

  • Gerrit (unregistered) in reply to CS Hater
    CS Hater:
    THEY JUST DO NOT LISTEN! Their training should include a very simple concept: If the issue goes off of our standard decision tree, then send it to someone more knowledgeable right away.

    That doesn't always help. I had an ADSL problem once (with KPN in the Netherlands). I thought I lost the connection. Doing the usual stuff like turning the modem off for a while didn't help, but I did notice I could ping computers on the net. After some experimenting I found everything worked with an MTU size of a few hundred bytes - slowly. I called the helpdesk and the guy I spoke to realised this didn't fit into his script and connected me to 2nd tier at once. He did listen.

    But the 2nd tier guy insisted on going through the entire script, and I found that not only did he not know what MTU size means, he didn't even know that network traffic is organized in packets. That's a 2nd tier ADSL helpdesk. It turned out they have a 3rd tier helpdesk which of course was very busy, so they would call me back.

    I also learned that apparently I had a SLA of three working days, and as I had my problem on a thursday they called back on monday night. Which was too late, my connection had spontaneously returned to normal on saturday.

    In the 1970's, when the phone line was dead, we would go to a neigbour, call the state owned phone company, speak directly to someone at the exchange, who would usually get it working again within half an hour, within minutes even. KPN is the same company after privatisation. Three working days... Sometimes I think government monopolies weren't always that bad.

  • farthead (unregistered) in reply to Keloran

    Holy crap! you work at Comcast too?

    and yes, the people are are completely retarded.

  • db (unregistered) in reply to Dick Riculous
    Dick Riculous:
    Anonymous:
    Sheila is an idiot. Not because she pressed the SHIFT key, any novice could make that mistake. She is an idiot because after the SHIFT key failed to yield any results, she didn't bother trying any other key! If I'm told that I can press any key on the keyboard but the key I've chosen doesn't work, I think to myself "oh well, lucky there are still another 104 keys here to try". Anyone with an ounce of common sense would surely come to the same conclusion. To escalate the problem so high and threaten to dump the entire unit without bothering to try one of the other "any" keys is just plain retarded.

    I'm more inclined to call the support staff retarded for never bothering to ask which key she tried to push.

    This is probably how it went:

    Client:"The keyboard is broken. Send me a new one."

    Support:"Why do you think your keyboard is ..."

    Client:"Are you stupid or something - this is costing us money. Just do your job and send me a new keyboard."

    Support:"What were you doing when ..."

    Client:"Just do it"

    I've seen this sort of bullshit many times - it's the ugly situation that inspires things like all the Dell script WTFs designed to counter it.

  • not even an apple user (unregistered) in reply to Groxx
    Groxx:
    I've had similar conversations with Dell, AT&T (ooooh boy, have I had ones like that with AT&T....), Verizon, and HP.

    With Apple: within 5 minutes, I'd found the precise answer to a very specific, programmer-related problem, and found out how to launch the built-in video card diagnostics which told me my old laptop's video ram had died (a pretty rare occurrence). Other calls have been similarly technical and highly specific, and I've never been transferred, and never spent more than 30 minutes total, including rebooting my machine a few times.

    Support matters. I wish Dell would realize this. And effectively, no, that's not a bot. It's just someone in India with a hundred pre-translated sentences and zero computer-IQ. You can even hear the robotic-Indian accent in the chat log.

    They're probably good because they aren't mindnumbed by continuous calls. "Ooh! Dave's phone's ringing! We've actually got a support call! That's the first one this week!"

  • (cs) in reply to Micirio
    Micirio:
    Anish:
    "Amazingly at that moment, the software support staff became disconnected from the conference call. "

    Why did the support staff became disconnected? Did they figure out what happened and hung up?

    I'm sure they hang up to hide their laughter from the client.

    More than likely they were updating their resume. This was a stupid simple problem that should never have been escalated.

  • Nick Jones (unregistered)

    I have had that sort of conversation with Dell sooo many times! ;)

  • rainer (unregistered) in reply to Tyler

    Ubuntu does it right - their onscreen installation instructions ask you to hit the Enter key.

  • Agent K (unregistered)

    Hello? Chris? Chris? Is that you, Chris? You there, Chris?

  • mathgrant (unregistered) in reply to (username *)me
    To install this software please tear out all the keys on the keyboard not used to type the below using only one key per character:

    1 the 2 quick 3 brown 4 fox 5

    jumped 6 over 7 the 8 lazy 9 dog 0

    snip

    Press any remaining key to continue....

    presses S

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    that "they're all idiot's too" story reminded me of an old Beetle Bailey cartoon: "beetle, you didn't obey orders!" "that was a stupid order!" "listen, that stupid order came from the stupid GENERAL, stupid!" "oh, goody, now we're ALL stupid." (the general is glaring at the sergeant)

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