Tuesday December 6 2011
Love the Apple Store and their Genius bar. Geniuses fix things for you when you have an Apple issue. Unlike a certain PC brand I will not name, and which I will never buy again, where you get on the phone to someone in another country that I will not name, with someone you cannot understand, and they try to help you fix your problem by giving you some fix that has nothing to do with anything. Comparable to if your car has an engine problem, the mechanic tells you to change the tire.
A painless upgraded operating system to my Mac laptop yesterday by the Geniuses at the Apple Store meant - no matter how you try to avoid it - a day or more, if you yourself are not a Genius, and I am not, of reinstalling programs on the new computer. A day of comedy: chatting online with one company, trying to dig up old misplaced serial numbers, racking the brain to recall old sign in names and passwords, and, when I needed help from the Apple store with a password, fun 'conversing with' the computer-generated menu voice (Yelling, by the way, does not help, because the voice cannot understand you when you yell):
"No." "Yes." (What is my issue?) "Well, I dunno, I need a password." "No, PASSWORD. I said I NEED A PASSWORD." "No!" I SAID NO!" "STOP! SHUT UP! JUST GIVE ME THE MENU!" "MENU!" I yelled. "CUSTOMER SERVICE!" I hollered. I pushed the zero button and the unflappable, implacable voice recording kept saying, 'I can't understand what you are saying.' "REPRESENTATIVE!" I shrieked over the top of him. "JUST GIVE ME A FREAKING PERSON!" "HUMAN! I screeched. "I WANT A HUMAN!"
(Some people hearing only my side of the 'conversation' were laughing.)
Anyway, a day is better spent rolling around in the dirt outside
and running around getting the brain farts out and the blood circulating.
The horses are the smart ones.
I just had a troubleshooting visit from our tech guru. I had reached a point where my computer would auto connect to the web, only if I resorted to the trickery of restarting, blocking firewalls, turning off and on again etc. Average start-up twenty minutes. No foreign-speaking computer phone systems though. French speaking computer guy, but I can handle that in person. The horse photos make me yearn for some nice simple dirt.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds familiar! I love though that I first thought that the horses on the photo had an apple issue (read: wanted one) and would go to a human because they mysteriously have apples for them.
ReplyDeletejan
I feel your pain. I've lost two hard drives and had two other drives wiped since JUNE. I still haven't gotten all my stuff properly restored on either of the affected computers.
ReplyDeleteMy strategy with the recordings is to scream obscenities at them until they say, "Please hold, connecting you with an agent."
I had been a loyal customer of a certain four-letter computer manufacturer for over 10 years and just quit them and went to a certain seven-letter manufacturer after three out of three new computers were defective out of the box and their customer service was incompetent and kept disconnecting me.
So three months later the hard drive crashed on the seven-letter computer. And THEIR customer service disconnected me too.
We just can't win. I think every big company's idea of customer service is to just stall you until you give up and go away.
Amazon is the only exception I've found recently -- Costco a close second.
What do you call 25 large corporation CEO's at the bottom of the ocean?
A good start.
Good luck!
No. Not fun at all.
ReplyDeleteI'd be asking for an animal, not a human. To lower my blood pressure after all that craziness.
The more technology we have, the more crazy our lives can get.
~Lisa
And now a similar anecdote from faw away land:
ReplyDeleteYesterday I had my debit card blocked due to too many wrong PINs entered. Oops. I called and talked to the machine. I had to speak commands in German into the phone, and there was no Press-0 alternative (I tried). I kept saying the words and the machine would say, "Sorry, I didn't understand that" and this went on for over 5 minutes of me trying to say words and failing. And my German's good I've been told.
So my husband made me try the next morning, because he couldn't believe the machine didn't understand me. When it didn't, again, I "AAGH"ed and passed the phone to him, "I cannot take this anymore!" and then he said the word, got the human on the line, and scolded him, "Your system does not accept my American wife's accent."
*sigh*
Last week I got a tunafish pizza by mistake, and the pizza delivery guy said, "Why didn't you just have your husband call?" *hrrrmmm*
ha! I have so been there. It seems the favorite way for "them" to handle a computer situation is after hours of struggle, boot it back to the "factory setting". UGH.
ReplyDeleteI'm a MAC girl now. So far, so good....
LOL I have heard that one-sided conversation several times... my hubby usually ends it by insisting, "I want to speak to someone in America."
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the accent thing, too. I never realized how much harder it is to converse with someone with a heavy accent... especially on the phone. For some reason, face to face, it doesn't seem as difficult.
You are right. Horses have the life!
It really helps to have Grandkids who are all computer geniuses!!! They can do anything with any computer! Next time, just call your local high school kid! lol!
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