I was helping a friend of mine set up her new labtop with wireless Internet yesterday and it was much more of an ordeal than one would think. The wireless router comes with a CD that is intented to be very straight forward and allow those who know nothing about computers to do it. I go through it step by step and it is pretty simple until I get to the last step when it asked for the IP address and DNS domain name. I figured out how to find the IP address but really had no idea what a DNS domain name was. I called Time Warner Cable, the Internet provider, and all I really needed was the DNS domain name. I was hold for about 15 minutes before I talked to anyone. The lady on the line really knew less than I did, I could over hear here asking someone else for help. She then proceeded to tell me that she couldn't help me any further because we didn't have a Time Warner router and didn't have them install it. Whatever, this lady was pretty useless so I just said thank-you and hung up.
I then called Linksys support for the router. I was on hold for about 4 minutes and then got to talked to someone. Within 2 seconds I could tell where their call center was.....India. This guy had an extremely heavy accent and at times was difficult to understand, but was very helpful. Here's how our first exchange went:
"How are yo doing today sir?"
"I'm doing well."
"So, you're doing well then sir."
I was on the phone with him for about 45 minutes. It turns out Time Warner Cable has a lot of things about their Internet that make it very difficult to set up if you do not use their service. A few times it was own stupidity that held things up. (I had Internet Explorer set to Work Offline for awhile.) At the end of it all I got it working and all was good. The gentleman on the other end thanked me for calling and asked me to go online and fill out a survey about how the call went. He gave me a case number and told me his name was "Sam." There is no way his name is Sam, maybe Samallabudamatamaine, but not Sam. My guess is that he is told to pick a very American name to use when stupid Americans call for help, to reassure the caller.
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2 comments:
Another riveting tale sir. You are a goddammed modern Mark Twain. I could sit for hours and listen to you spin your hypnotic yarns. Maybe tomorrow you can write an entry about how difficult it is to change your socks while crying your eyes out about how miserable your life is.
Amateurs......sheesh
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