fun in the sun? oh no, my friends, fun ON the sun
2002-05-24, 12:48 a.m.
as a support technician, i find it annoying when i have to deal with other technicians on the phone, especially when they're completely inept and useless.
i've had three major issues with my various dell systems- one with the old system and two with the new one.
for the old one, they said they only guaranteed working at its original specs, and my addition of a CDRW was a variable they couldn't handle. result: they wanted me to reformat my hard drive to fix the "windows protection error." my action: boot to safe mode, uninstall various programs, and tinker with the registry and fix it in about an hour.
with my current system, i installed a usb camera and it overwrote some .sys files with newer-dated, but older files. they said they couldn't help me, but they read through a website or two and i had to pry the address from them so i could find the answer that they wouldn't tell me.
also, when i got the system, it had a 20.4gb hard drive (we configured three systems over the phone, and in all three i specified the 45gb drive). so i got to play the whiny, bitchy, annoying customer and i goaded them into sending me the 45gb at no cost (they wanted me to pay the difference for their mistake). anyway, when the 45gb came, they wouldn't give me the simple little command to ghost everything from the 20.4 that i had been using for a few weeks over to the new hard drive. so i installed a new os and everything on the new hd. the only problem is, with the instructions they gave me, the other hd was still hooked up, so the 45gb wasn't set up with an active partition. for those non-computer-savvy people, that's bad. so it said "missing operating system" on the drive i just installed windows on. i called tech support, and i eventually specifically asked if it could be an inactive partition, to which the tech replied no, that isn't it. she scheduled a tech to come to my dorm to fix it. while i was on hold so she could schedule it, i ran fdisk and surprise! no partition was set to active! i set it to active and booted to windows fine and told the tech to screw herself (i was a little nicer than that though).
now, the real question tonight is: how did i go from squeaking gates to inept technical support in under 5 minutes?
the answer: if only i knew, maybe i should call dell.