On the other side of tech support
So much for my vaunted effort at regular updates.
The last couple months has been fairly interesting, if not completely crazy. The website front was dominated by all these really cool new things I’m learning with CSS, PHP and databasing and all sorts of other goodies. Unfortunately, all of my code is currently locked away on my Linux partition.
You see, I spent a crazy week or two where I didn’t really find the time to do much in the way of side-work, so I didn’t crack my laptop out during those days. Having my computers at home meant I didn’t really need to open it there either. So after about two weeks, I crack open my laptop to Windows to do some random work, and for some strange reason, my clock doesn’t seem to be working. I assume that the battery may have fritzed for some reason, but it seems to work fine after I update the time.
Several more weeks of craziness ensue, leaving me little/no time to do any coding. Finally, the bugs at work get worked out, and things settle back to the quiet normality I’ve become accustomed to. So I crack open my laptop, start to boot up Linux, and it freezes during the boot process. A little concerned, I wait until I get home to crack out the CD-ROM drive and try running a failsafe boot, and it hangs in exactly the same spot.
So I boot into Windows, which works fine until I notice that the clock is way off again, and we’re talking DAYS off. So I reboot, and go into CMOS, and find out that me system clock just ain’t working. Clock works fine while I’m in Windows, but otherwise is dead as the proverbial door nail.
Given that my laptop is no longer under warranty, I open up the case (first time with a laptop, pretty exciting in and of itself) and try to determine the nature of the malfunction. I presume that the backup battery has failed, and I write a detailed message of all of my efforts/findings to date to Dell, asking to see if I can purchase a new backup battery.
About three days later, I get a response via email, telling me that I should download and run the time.exe program. Now, I’m not usually one to complain about tech support, given that’s what I do for a living, but please. When I send sketchy or limited results to someone, it’s invariably because I was provided with sketchy or limited information, and I always try to directly answer any real questions. The only explanation I can think of is that this tech read the first sentence of my report, ignored the rest, and sent a universal band-aid reply. It would be like a doctor taking a history, noticing that the first symptom is a stomach ache, and recommending Pepto Bismol.
Sigh. I suppose now I understand why people get frustrated when I give them news that they don’t want to hear.