No, Virginia, there is no customer service

It used to be that the whole idea of technical support was to make sure your customers were happy with your product and service so that they would remain your customer.

These days, technical support is usually 'augmented' (or entirely replaced) with internet FAQs.

In theory, this all makes a lot of sense. In practice, the customer is the loser.

I have come to the conclusion that most companies have a 'bag-lady' mentality. You've seen bag-ladies on the street. They either carry large bags or have a shopping cart full of their possessions so that they can keep an eye on every single thing. They even sleep with the stuff. This is the mentality of most senior management in Corporate America. They will tell you to your face that Quality and Customer Service is important. But only if they don't have to spend any money on it. Most Quality and Lean Programs fail just for that reason. Senior management will not commit to the dollars required.

This also results in the reduction of support personnel, cheap hires and information-free websites, that is, websites free from any kind of information. Forums were originally created so that users could modify their equipment and use it in non-standard ways, or for the makers of free stuff (applications, programs, operating systems, etc) could provide a level of technical support.

Senior management, of course, viewed technical support websites and forums and salivated. Think Cheap, Cheap, Cheap. And, for the most part, that's what they got. They got technical support personnel that know less about their products than the customers, so they provided 'expert' systems. They never realized that expert systems need to be used by people who know how to search. So they put FAQs on a website. Of course the FAQs only covered the barest minimum of problems, usually identical to the half page of troubleshooting at the back of the manual. "Unit does not turn on" Solution: "Plug unit into AC outlet."

In the past, I was able to rely on Cox Communications for excellent customer service. However, somewhere along the line, things deteriorated. Below is the story of how I got a very simple question answered. Management should be ashamed.

How to annoy your customers – HDTV version

Our lone HDTV set is in the basement so that we can watch while on the treadmill. The problem is that sometimes you have to really crank up the volume to hear the audio while running on the treadmill. So I decided to find out how to turn on the Closed Captioning.

This should be simple. So I thought.

Any HDTV system is not simple. In my case, I have to turn on 3 items: The TV, the cable box and the audio system. That plus I have two DVD/VHS players, so there are five remotes sitting around. And, no matter what the cable company tells you, they don’t give you a ‘universal’ remote. They give you a remote that will control some of the options of each device. For example, the universal cable remote will not be able to access the TV’s input switching. You’ll need to use the TV remote for that.

Well, for closed captioning, that’s what I did, reached for the TV remote. It had a nice CCD button. This was real easy. So I thought. The TV gave me a nice ‘denied’ icon and in the menu, Closed Captioning was grayed out.

So I went to the TV manual. There was plenty on how to turn CCD on and change the options, but no word on what is happening when the option doesn’t seem to work.

I got on the internet to find out what was wrong with my brand of TV. I had bought an Insignia. The price was right and I have no complaints on the picture. However, in this case, their ‘FAQs’ were useless. I went to the forum and thank God, I did not have to register or else this episode of ‘Customer Support Follies’ would still be longer. At the forum, I discovered that, if I had a cable box, the CCD was through the cable box, not the TV.

Then this should be easy, thought I as I grabbed the ‘universal’ cable remote. So I thought.

After spending about 10 minutes fooling with the remote, which did not have a CCD button, I was no closer to getting CCD. So now I go off and try to find another manual. The only manual, or rather piece of shiny plasticized paper, that comes with the cable box is how to hook it up. In English and Spanish. The remote has a manual. However there is not one word on CCD.

Back to the internet.

My cable company, Cox, is very fond of telling you over and over again that you can access their website and get answers to your questions. I’ve heard that thousands of times while on hold with their tech support. Still, I try the website first.

I started out by searching under ‘How to’. I got 84 results. The first result which had a 53% relevance (the next were all in the single digits), was the basic instructions on how to connect your box to the TV. It had neither the word ‘closed’ nor the word ‘caption’ in it. So much for relevance.

I switch to searching from the 'How-to's' to ‘All’. I got the same exact results.

If you’ve been keeping track, I have wasted about 20 minutes so far.

With the website obviously useless, I dial technical support. I don’t ever do this lightly because you have to fight your way through the voice response system before you can get to real person you can actually ask questions.

First I had to ignore the prompt for Spanish. Then I had to punch a number to tell them I had an account. Then I had to punch in my 10 digit phone number. Since I have two accounts, I now had to punch in the 16 digit account number. Then I’m asked for the last 4 digits of my social security number or the four digit PIN. Now finally they ask me if I have questions on my bill, want new service, etc, until I get to punch in the number for tech support, which obviously should be the last possible selection. Now I have to punch a number to tell them it’s tech support for TV. Luckily this one is the first selection. This gets me into the next voice response system – tech support! After hearing that channel 9 is having technical difficulties, listening to how resetting my cable cox can solve almost all of my problems, I hit the number so that they won’t reset my cable box.

I’ve now been on the phone ten minutes and am still fighting my way through the menu system. But I’m stubborn. Of course I’ve convinced that the first live person I’m connected to, will know nothing, but I glory in the struggle!

Now the voice response system asks me to ‘say’ what my problem is. I tell it ‘I want to turn on closed captioning.’ There is a long pause. Similar to the long pause you get from customer support people when they realize that you actually want them to help you. Isn’t it amazing how close to reality the voice response system is getting?

The system, now confused that I don’t want a canned response, responds with a list of problems it understands. The last option (of course it’s the last one) is ‘I have another problem’. This finally prompts the system to say it will transfer me to an ‘agent’.

I’m now up to almost 15 minutes and not quite there yet.

I have to listen again as to how my problem could have easily been solved by going to the website then finally I get an agent. His speech is slow and his tone is lazy. I have a bad feeling about this.

But wait, we’re not home free yet! For security purposes I have to:

1 – Give him my ten digit telephone number.

2 – Since I have two accounts, I have to give him the 16 digit account number.

3 – Now I have to verify my first and last name.

4 – I have to verify my address.

5 – I have to give him the last four digits of my social security number or the four digit pin.

Sorry about the delay, he says.

Now we are at the 20 minute mark and I finally get to ask my question. But, as anyone knows, I’m just beginning the struggle.

“How do I turn on closed captioning?” I ask. Just what I expect now happens. He tells me he’s happy to tell me that if I hold on for a moment. In other words, He has no clue and needs to ask somebody.

After a short time, he comes back and tells me all I have to do is hit the ‘settings’ button on the remote. Been there done that. When I tell him all I get is instructions on how to use the Info button, he argues with me. He keeps asking me if I have the Cox remote. Is it the silver Cox remote?

“Yeah it’s the Cox remote, it has ‘COX’ at the bottom in blue letters!” I respond.

“I’m watching television right now and I get closed captioning by pressing the settings button,” he says.

Sorry buddy, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I read him off exactly what is on the screen and tell him it’s an HD box, it must be different.

So I’m on hold again. While on hold, I play with the control again and find out I can access the Closed Caption Option by hitting the Menu button twice. I don’t ask me why I tried that, except that talking to tech support makes you really desperate.

He comes back on the line to tell me what I just found out but I blurt it out first. I do that because although I can access the Closed Captioning, I can’t turn it on and make it stick, it keeps switching back to off.

He makes a series of nonsensical noises that was supposed to pass for help. One thing is obvious, he has no idea what I’m seeing or doing. I narrate what I’m doing as he again departs to ask for help. Do you see the pattern here?

When he gets back, I’ve figured it out. Apparently you can’t just turn on the Closed Captioning and exit the menu. You have to go back two levels, then exit. This is the true definition of user-unfriendly. Now, of course, I have another problem. The captions are now in the center of the screen. I ask about this and again, I’m on hold and he’s off asking for help.

I change a few channels and find out that the position of the captions varies from channel to channel and sometimes scene to scene.

The ‘tech support’ person comes back on and tells me the first relevant piece of information I’ve heard from him. Apparently the close captioning is done by a third party and Cox has no control over the position. He tells me to change channels and see what happens. Been there, done that. I had really seriously considered hanging up on him before he came back. I was nice, however, and thanked him for his help and got off the line.

Total time: Over an hour. Just to find out how to turn on CCD. And I virtually did it all myself. I had had the wild thought that calling tech support would be a shortcut.

The Illusion of Hard Work

Maybe I've mentioned it before, but for some reason, bosses do not consider starting earlier than normal as putting in 'extra time'. Have you run into that? So far, in many decades at several companies, I've not found one manager that actually realizes that if you start a 1/2 hour earlier and leave on time, that you've put in overtime.

When I was working at a major medical manufacturer, all of upper management (department managers, directors and executives) had a curious work pattern. Not all of them, but the majority performed this ritualistic work 'dance' on a daily basis. I call it the Illusion of Hard Work. No matter what the normal starting time for employees, management would drag in somewhere between 9 and 10. The first order of business would be to grab their coffee and head into a meeting to chit-chat with their fellow managers. As lunchtime approached, the more 'diligent' would suddenly find that their employees needed to do some 'important' job before they took lunch. Managerial lunches were of the hour to hour and a half variety so that they would get back just in time to demand a lot of information from their employees before they could leave for the day. In a typical company, if you do personal stuff during work, it's considered stealing from the company. However, if the company requires unpaid overtime, that's good business, despite the fact that they are stealing from you.

Now the manager stays after quitting hours. Note that he's done very little so far. He stays to 7, 8 o'clock. Note that one of the reasons this happens is that the manager can A) demand stuff be done before you leave and B)Make you feel guilty if you leave on time.

If the company is lucky, the manager actually does accomplish some work in the afternoon/evening hours. However, as you can guess, the total amount of actual work can be counted in minutes. The manager then goes home to complain how hard he works. The next day the dance begins again.

Bag Lady Mentality

Have you ever noticed the homeless and watch what they do? Consider the Bag Lady. Here is someone who walks down the street with all of her possessions in a bag or shopping card. As she passes by anything that looks interesting or looks valuable, she grabs it out of the gutter and puts it in her cart or bag. Think about it, this is the way that most executives run their company. In those time when there isn't any easy growth to be found for their company, executives search everywhere to pick a few scraps out of the gutters of their business. As a comparison, the Bag Lady never gets out of the gutter from what she finds, so the business never gets out of the doldrums with penny-pinching attitudes. In short, you can't remain a World-Class company with a bag lady mentality. When you constantly trim the edges off of something, it gets smaller and smaller. Even businesses. When executive bonuses are threatened by a flat or declining economy, businesses shed people, services and pretty much all dignity. It's the bag lady mentality that accounts for the decline of customer service and product quality. When a company is World-Class, it does not have to make rules for employees to be nice and helpful to customers. Proper treatment of the customer is, by the time a company is truly world-class, ingrained and part of the company 'fabric'. When the company begins to trim the fabric, those tasks that used to be done by the so-called 'unnecessary' people begin to be delayed and even dropped. Employees, who want to see the company succeed begin to take on more and more tasks. This is called an increase in productivity. It's temporary, however, because without proper 'feeding' of the company, the employees begin to feel like their efforts are useless and update their resumes. At this point, the good workers find work elsewhere and the dregs are left. Even if some good employees are loyal enough to stay, the attitude sours.

It bears repeating: Businesses are like crops. You have to properly invest in a company, even in flat and declining economies, for there to be any growth. If you consider the farmer, what does he do the year after a bad crop? He plants MORE. By comparison, most US businesses eat their seed corn. Think about it!

Courage

There was a time, and you have to be old to remember it, when a company was a team working toward a goal. There was a time when all shared the effort and all shared the results. Wow, have times changed. As management bemoans the fact that employees are no longer dedicated to the company, all they have to do is look in the mirror to see the reason.

We've covered a lot of ground in examining the aberrant behavior of people warped by the experience of management and one overwhelmingly dominant characteristic is that of projection. Projection is a term used in psychological research to describe the situation where a person, consciously or unconsciously 'projects' what they believe onto another person or persons. Racial or other prejudice is one such example. You see a lot of it when liberals brand those who don't think like them (and that's a whole subject of deviant psychology) as uncaring, hate-mongers, etc. The clearest example is someone who hates another person 'because he/she hates me.' In other words, a person justifies bad behavior by turning around and blaming it on someone else.

You can see now where management, especially upper management gets a lot of it's ideas. And a lot of projection gets mixed in with lack of trust. Most management realizes it can't trust itself (think Sarbanes/Oxley), projects it onto the workforce. That is why feces occurs.

One of the clearest examples of how wrong management thinking can go wrong is, surprisingly enough, snow. Or rather, plant closings due to snow.

I went to a college that subscribed to the co-op plan, where you went to school half the year and the other half you worked in your chosen field. This particular winter quarter I was working at the company that I would eventually join when I graduated.

We arrived that day at work to a snow storm and the snow continued to fall. Management made the right decision and sent everyone home at 11 am. By that time the parking lot was so bad, that we were pushing cars out of snowbanks to get them moving. Leaving that day was a physically arduous task. HOWEVER, by 1 pm, the snow stopped, the sun came out and began melting the snow. By the next day, the snow was gone.

Need I ask you to guess what happened next? Yep, management never, ever again sent people home 'officially' due to bad weather. And I mean NEVER. You would think that they'd have some compassion on their employees and open later. But...no. They'd been burned once. They had lost a half-day of productivity and they weren't going to lose that again! Yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds. These days management has come up with an explanation for their policy that abdicates all responsibility from them and adds a tool to their arsenal of punishment against their employees: They tell their employees to use their judgment on whether to come in or not.

Think about it! Now management doesn't have to make any decision on bad weather, and if some employees take personal time to take a half-day or day off due to fears about the weather, they can use that against them at their reviews! It's a management Win-Win! First, they don't have to do their job by making a decision, then they can use the results to reduce costs. That is good business!

All hyperbole aside, this is management at it's shoddiest. They hold the threat of low/no raise over a person's head so that they have to drive through some of the worst conditions, risking injury, damage or life just so that they don't have to possibly be wrong. In plain words, it's cowardice.

The current place that I work has a 'snow phone' that we can call to see if the plant is open or closed due to weather. Since I've worked there, over 8 years, the message has never, NEVER, changed. We are always open for business as usual. This past week we had a 29 inch blizzard. The message did not change.

Stupid cowards.

Beware the ISO 9000

My last two posts (rants) expressed my concern over lousy customer service. Customer service isn't rocket science. You need to remember one thing: Don't treat the customer like an idiot. It's amazing how difficult a rule that is to follow. But you must remember, more than any other department, management hires the cheapest labor for customer service and hopes they get lucky.

Somewhere along the line, you've heard of ISO 9000 or ISO 9001, etc. Most companies push this as some endorsement of quality. Guess what? It ain't. In fact, despite the altruistic aims of the ISO levels, it actually guarantees the reverse, given the low grade management prevalent in the US of A. ISO 9000 is an audit that confirms that all your processes, that is, everything the company does, is documented. You can probably see where this is going. When every process is documented to the highest degree, ipso facto, you can hire any idiot to do the job, because it's all there, right? Wrong! Beware ISO 9000. It is based on the fact that repetitive motion is quality. I know a lot of people that do the same thing over and over again and it's still pretty stupid. ISO 9000 does not make any value judgements about a company's processes, it merely confirms that they are documented. A process could say to take a large foam clue bat and whack the customer and that would be perfectly fine to ISO 9000.

I am not a welcome person into any 'quality' procedure. Never will be. In the first course I ever had to take on Quality, the instructor asked us to define quality. I immediately responded that quality was getting more than you paid for. For example, if you take your car in for an oil change and all they've done is an oil change, so what? Now, if they vacuumed out your car in addition, everybody would agree that was a quality job. The instructor flatly ignored me and called on somebody else. The upshot was that quality was defined as meeting requirements. If it was pointed out that you can follow requirements and the TV set would still blow up just after the warranty period, the instructor would respond that you didn't have the correct requirements.

So essentially, all skill, craftsmanship and genuine quality is legislated out, to make room for the idiots of redefinition.

What makes this even more terrible is the people that are attracted to Quality. Generally these as the people that believe that making Powerpoint slides is actual work. At my present job, we have a Quality Leader/Kaizan Specialist on the division president's staff. Once the president dragged him down to our department because production was having difficulty with crimping connectors to cables (an actual quality problem!). The President told him that this was the perfect project for a Kaizan (a type of quality process meeting) and for him, the main Quality guy, to look into it. That was the last time we ever saw that guy. The threat of doing actual work scared the hell out of him. However, when we started having Quality training again, he was totally there, showing how good an organizer he was.

This type of person is worthless. Actually worse than worthless because they have to pay him. I believe that, if I were ever to become president of a company, I would interview every single employee and ask them one question: "How good are you at powerpoint? As soon as someone answered 'Excellent' or 'Highly Skilled', I'd immediately fire them, because, they are obviously not doing any work to help the company.

How Ebay wastes its own money....

I've always said that the two killer apps for the internet were shopping and porn. Those two items drove a lot of new internet technology. Porn is the reason you can see video clips on websites. Do you actually think that an entrenched bureaucracy like TV would acutally want to put their news clips on a website for people to see without commericals?

Anyways, I have been selling a lot of the stuff I had stored in the basement (for decades). I play fair, sell cheap and follow the rules. Only, and that is only, do I look for help when something is not covered by the online help. Ebay does follow the twisted ways of corporate America with respect to customer service. You know the drill--hire the cheapest labor and hope you get lucky. If I were to run a company, I'd rather know who was interfacing to my customers rather than hiring whoever I could get to take chicken feed.

I have a problem with leaving feedback. There is always more important things to do with my Ebay account that keep up with that. Besides, I'd rather find out what my customers say about what I sent them. I don't want to leave positive feedback then this idiot does nothing than complain when he gets the stuff. Fortunately that has not happened. You do get the odd anal orifice that insists on telling you how you are listing things wrong, how you are describing things wrong, and that THEY KNOW BETTER. I have a method of dealing with people like that. You nod and smile and walk away. DO NOT ENCOURAGE AN IDIOT!

To pick up the story, I, being a good Ebayer, decide to leave some feedback. The problem is, every time I leave multiple feedback, for more than one item/person, nothing gets saved. Everything I left feedback for is still on the list. WTF?! I try this over a period of several weeks and it still comes out the same. All I can do is leave feedback one at a time.

So I decide to go for help. Ebay is unique in their way of rationing Customer Service. First you have to click through the helps faqs until you reach a contact page. Now you can't just leave your question. That is not allowed. You have to select a canned question (and, of course, you know that virtually none fits my problem) and then they give you a phone number and a code. The code is good for about an hour, after that you have to go through the whole process again to get a new code. Just as an aside, does this sound like you are a valued customer that Ebay wants to help? If you answered 'yes', you need serious therapy, commit yourself immediately!

I get the phone number and my special code. I call. You know the drill--lots of menus and the entry of the code, all the while you are inundated with reminders that help is available quicker on the website! Just as an aside, does this sound like you are a valued customer that Ebay wants to help? If you answered 'yes', you need serious therapy, commit yourself immediately!

I finally get to the warning about monitored phone calls (for Quality!), then it clicks over to a busy signal. I try several times until my hour is up. Same busy signal. Just as an aside, does this sound like you are a valued customer that Ebay wants to help? If you answered 'yes', you need serious therapy, commit yourself immediately!

I relent and leave an email and the website promises me that they will be back to me within 48 hours. This part is at least true (for the first email that is....more to come). I made an unfortunate mistake when composing that email. I started by leaving a detailed account of my problem, then complained about the problem getting through on the phone.

Yes, you guess it. I got a email saying that they're sorry I had problems getting through on the phone after which they copied, directly from the website, the page on how to call into Ebay.
Not a word on feedback. Just as an aside, does this sound like you are a valued customer that Ebay wants to help? If you answered 'yes', you need serious therapy, commit yourself immediately!

I stayed calm, told them they should be ashamed of themselves that they did not even come close to addressing my issue and if they worked for me, I'd have fired them. Then I told them to go back and read my email.

This time it took 4 days to get a response. To be frank, I didn't expect to get any response. This time they told me they were sorry I was having problems with feedback and copied into their email the whole webpage on how feedback works. Just as an aside, does this sound like you are a valued customer that Ebay wants to help? If you answered 'yes', you need serious therapy, commit yourself immediately!

I had less restraint this time in reply. In gist, I told them they had better get to work answering my email because I wasn't going to go away. I was not going to get frustrated, that they would continue to hear from me.

This time it took a week to get a response. During that time I was seriously thinking of doing the serious detective work to get a phone number to reach somebody in charge. And, yes, they finally did look into my problem and answer my question satisfactorily.

Seriously, I laugh out loud every time I hear that canned voice telling me that my call is important to them. When you get the above kind of behavior, you realize you are not important and they just want you to go away. The sick thing about this is that if I pressed this issue about customer support, some poor email-answering slob will get fired for doing the exact process that some director or vice president has told them to do. It's those anal orifices that should be fired.

Finally Ebay sent me a survey on how my call to customer service went. After I finished laughing, I filled out a survey of canned answers (nowhere to really tell them what happened) and gave them all zeros. Mainly because there was nothing lower than zero or greatly dissatisfied.

You would expect them to look into it and want to know what went wrong. Ha! I don't expect to hear from them. That wouldn't be in the vice president's process.

True Tale of Printer Hell

I've mentioned a lot of the pitfalls that management blindly falls into, but below is a true tale of how supposedly 'good' management can fall all over themselves in doing just the opposite of taking care of the customer. This is what happened to me.

Once upon a time, I had a Lexmark Color Inkjet Printer. It had cost me over $250. It had a single cartridge for black and the three primary colors which was hideously expensive. I only used it when absolutely necessary and tried to balance to the color use so that each $60 went as far as possible.

One day, my son announced that he wanted a good (non-dot matrix) printer for his computer and asked for a laser for his birthday. Not being able to afford one at that time, I researched ink jet printers and found that Canon printers had the cheapest cartridges and, in fact, usually had one for each color. I bought him one and, after use, he was thrilled. The print quality was great, maintenance costs were very low. In fact, it was so good, I gave away the Lexmark and bought myself a Canon S750. This printer faithfully served me for over ten years. I could always rely on the print quality, I could use it a lot, since each cartridge was cheap, and the only software it installed was a driver which dutifully informed me of ink levels every time I printed. When I bought a wireless print server, it had no problem and still performed as if it were a dedicated printer.

Life was Good.

Good things don't last. Late last year, the dear S750 gave up the ghost. After over ten years of service, it didn't seem like a good idea just to fix it. Technology had moved on. There were new things. So I went to the nearby Staples to buy a printer. It seems like a good idea, they had a $30 credit if you bought a printer, all their fliers said so!

I was entranced by the HP D5460, it was more compact, had a cute little LCD display to keep you informed and even had slots for camera memory. How could I go wrong? Little did I know at the time.

First Staples reneged on the rebate. They happily pointed out that the excruciatingly small print on each flyer meant that the printer had to be of a certain price, bought during a certain phase of the moon, and bought only on a pluterday. But we all expect rebates to be fantasy.

On returning home with the printer, it first informed me that it couldn't load drivers with the printer on the network. It firmly insisted the printer be attached to the computer or it wouldn't install. So twice I had to lug the printer over to two different computers to install drivers. And what an install! 135 Megs later, I had all sorts of applications, including one that announced "Buy supplies from HP!" which couldn't be uninstalled without breaking the printer driver. I dealt with that later, however, installing the drivers this way now broke the print server software, which now had to be reinstalled, again on both computers. I did that and was thrilled that now everything worked! I printed a test page from each computer. Looking good.

The next time I printed, nothing happened. After I had printed two pages, the printer sensed that I now needed new cartridges and refused to print unless I went over and pushed the 'Ok' button, acknowledging that I understood that the printer was desperately out of ink!

It was then that I noticed a single page stuck into the printer docs that announced that the low ink indication really wasn't a low ink indication, but more of an indication that you should buy new carts and be ready. Such genius.

Well, printing seemed to be fine, but I went back to staples to buy ink, figuring just once won't be bad, I can then get more online later. Sticker Shock! Ink was now three times as expensive as the Canon. Even online it was 2X expensive.

Needless to say, despite the low ink warning, it did print fine for a long while afterwards.

I missed the ability to know what the ink levels were, just in case I was going to print pictures. There seemed to be an application, called the HP Solutions Center, which would tell me the ink levels. I did not install it at first, because I had experience with 'Solutions Centers' and knew that was the equivalent of 'Abandon hope all ye..."

And even this was not so easy. I put the CD in and the Solutions Center steadfastly refused to install because my drivers were now newer than on the ones on the disk. What a concept, refuse to install supplementary applications for any reason. I was positive that 'Buy Supplies from HP!' would still install.

I got the new 'version' and installed it and watched the noisy HP driver pop-ups which dutifully told me that the print levels were not available at this time. In fact, they never seemed to be available. Further, the Solutions center told me that my printer was not active and will I please turn it on. But it still printed.

So I did what I thought that HP provided for....I call Tech Support. After negotiating 3 voice response systems, I was finally connected to A___ at the 7-Eleven, opps, I mean India. She would be very happy to help me and would I like her to fix it by remotely accessing my computer? Sure, what the hell. After much entry of information, name, assisting tech and the 10 digit case number which I would eventually memorize (8026646878, yes it will haunt me), the application, which happened to be VNC, hung as on 'Starting session'. This was because I was trying to use Firefox and could I please use IE. That didn't improve the situation, in fact, it continued to look identical. The hang occurred three more times in succession including a fourth time when my Indian 'friend's' computer hung also. Of course then followed an intense session of trying to figure out what was wrong with MY computer. My cache was cleared so many times, you could see yourself in the shine. A___ seemed to love to do the same things over and over again, hoping something different would happen. Finally she ascertained it was because I was using IE8 and would I please go and download IE7 and install it. After an hour of this, I decided I had had enough, told her so and hung up.

But it's not over....

HP send me an email, asking me about my support experience. Hmm, is there something lower than zero...then I came to the question: If you need to contact HP Support again, how would I do it, with all the usual suspects: email, website, phone, etc. Unwisely they added a choice called 'other' where I could fill it in. I typed in that I would buy another manufacturer's printer. Clever for me, but a bad idea because...

The next night at the same time, A___ called me back. She had the problem solved! (At least hers). Surprise, surprise, suddenly we could connect and she had control of my computer. In IE8. Sigh, at least she was consistent, she still had the idea that doing things 4 or 5 times in a row was some kind of charm. Luckily I have another computer, so I walked away and played my games while she played hers. Some of what she did was repeatedly try to reinstall the Solutions center and clean the cache, etc. Finally she announced that the firewall was causing a problem. Even though it has been turned off since I installed XP. She spend another 20 minutes opening up ports in the disabled firewall, since that was so boring to her, she began to chat me up. Really, wow, now I've got a date in India.

Finally she announced that all I had to do was reboot and it was all fixed. And...would I mind talking to her supervisor. At least he spoke English with less of an accent. He proceeded to tell me that A___ was his best tech (I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling him I felt sorry for him) and thank you for being so patient. At that point the system came up and to no surprise, the situation remained the same. The moment I told him it still didn't work, he vanished faster than any metaphor I can think of. My dear friend A___ was back and telling me that there was something in my print server that was blocking the messages and I should talk to them. AND she would be sure to call me at the same time tomorrow. I was beginning to realize the power of threats.

Linksys' support site was brilliant and to the point: They support bi-directional communications to the printer, however, most printer software does not support networking.

A___ never called back. I guess we are officially estranged.

Don't try to count the number of stupid management tricks, you'll lose count quickly....