Apr 05 2007
Mom Versus Dell Tech Support
I recently purchased a Dell PC for my mom.
Her last one had “bit the big bullet in the sky” so I had get a new one.
Mom likes to twist up tired old sayings. It is not intentional. At least, I don’t think so.
If you ask her what she means or correct her, she’ll shake her head, sharp and quick, like a cat with something in its ear. She’ll make her squinty eyes squintier (she’s Chinese, too) and state, “Well, you know what I mean.”
I purchase this new computer and have to get a Vista machine. Great. I was hoping to get XP because that’s the operating system that my mom is used to. Then I figured I might as well bite that big bullet in the sky and get the latest OS.
I also purchase 3 years of extended support because:
- I have no experience with Vista
- I don’t want to be the only one “on call.”
When the PC arrived all I had time to do was hook it up – I connected the monitor, mouse and keyboard and made sure that it had a working dialup connection.
Mom is on fixed income – no DSL for her.
Vista was easy enough to navigate but it is different than XP. I was glad I had purchased the support, as I would have a difficult time trying to walk my mom through a problem using my XP system as a guide.
Prior to my mom’s PC kicking the bucket, we managed to back up her files onto CDs. She calls me up telling me that she wants to copy the contents of the CDs to her hard drive but she can’t quite figure out how.
I figured, “no problem.”
I know – you’re all slapping your foreheads at the hapless heroine of this piece.
I tried to walk my mom through viewing her files but the start button wasn’t called Start and “My Documents” was not called that either. I finally told to have her right-click “something on the lower left-hand corner” and search for “explore” which got the file explorer open.
Then I tried walking her though viewing the C drive and figuring out what letter designation her DVD drive was assigned.
Based on her rapid-fire listing of what she was seeing on her screen, it was not the same as XP. I asked all sorts of questions like “Is there a “My Computer?”, “Do you see ANY listings like C, D, E?” and nope, nothing matched. My brain crashed and I told her that I couldn’t walk her through the CD-to-PC transfer without having Vista myself and she should call Dell support.
I figured that they could figure out how to walk her through it easily enough.
A couple of days later my mom calls. She’s totally frustrated.
“I called up Dell and I was trying to configure that weather widget and I couldn’t and then the Indian guy wanted to remote control so he could do the pointy thing and then he said I needed broadband or something or I could buy this Microsoft package to help me learn how to do stuff.”
Mom is not only ABC but also OCD and ADHD. I’m not kidding.
As usual I’m stunned by her pauseless delivery and have to rewind the tape to figure out what she said.
“What’s up with this weather widget and I thought you wanted to copy the photos from your backup CDs to your hard drive.”
“Well you know how I like knowing the weather and Vista has this weather widget so Manoosh uh, Manesh, uh.. I wanted to get his name right, why am I always getting these Indian guys I can barely understand, and then he says I can call him Mike.”
So Mom and I go back and forth like this and I can see she ended up with one of the more impatient support guys. We’ve had good support from Dell and like most support services, it all comes down to the individual. Mike wanted to use Remote Assistance to take control of her PC in order to show mom what to do – he didn’t want to walk her through the process on the phone.
I am sure that Remote Assistance would be too slow on dialup, which is why Mike insisted my mom needed broadband.
I was a bit annoyed by his response – I mean, what’s so difficult about explaining how to copy files from a CD to the hard drive?
Plus the whole weather widget thing was confusing.
“Mom, why were you asking Mike about the weather widget?”
“It looked cute! You know how I like knowing the weather.”
“But mom, if you were on the phone with Mike, you couldn’t get the widget to work – it would have to be connected to the Internet to get the information.”
“Ohhh…no wonder I was getting ’service unavailable’ – but why didn’t Mike figure that out?”
She continues with, “I wish I had gotten that other support guy – he was from Dallas and he was really good! I could understand him and he was fast!”
I reeled her back in before she veered too far off on a tangent and asked her what else happened on the call with Mike.
“Well, he’s telling me I needed broadband so he can do that remote thing and I say that my daughter got me this support so he could help me and why wasn’t he helping me?”
By now I’m leaning against my kitchen counter uncorking a fresh bottle of wine listening to her on the headset.
“And then he says why doesn’t my daughter come over to show me how to copy over the files!”
What. Did. He. Say?
“I tell him that you don’t have Vista, you don’t know Vista and that’s why you got me this support. He said he’s going to call me back tomorrow. Why am I getting these Indian guys? Why don’t I get someone I can understand and who can understand me?”
After hearing how the support guy wanted me to help her, I wasn’t up to defending him. I was irritated by his comment and frustrated for my mom’s sake.
Mike doesn’t call when he says he will and I manage a quick visit to my mom’s to show her how to copy the files to her hard drive.
Mom’s not stupid and she’s managed to move from Windows 95 to XP Home and now she has to learn Vista.
“Why do they keep having to change stuff on me? I can’t find anything anymore! They are just out to get your money!”
You said it, Mom.
I’m in the market for a new PC for my wife. She is looking at moving to a Mac.
My work just got in a bunch of new PCs with Vista but, because it is a big corporation they wipe them all and load the current desktop software package (XP).
I prefer to work in a Linux environment but, when you write code you have to write for what people use…
My mom would have loved to get a Mac but it would have cost me 2.5 times as much PLUS we’d (me) have to get all new software PLUS she couldn’t call me for help.
My mom wasn’t asking me to buy her a PC but when it comes to big dollar purchases I’d rather do the research and look for deals (she’d just buy anything – her last PC was overkill for what she needed) and pay for it myself. I want her to save what little money she has!
Course this means that I gotta make more money!
You think you’ll get your wife a Mac? I have a couple of friends who love ‘em and I heard they boot up and shutdown quickly.
My sister has the latest Mac box and I gave it “test drive” while I was stateside. It was nice but I probably wouldn’t buy it because it’s too darn expensive.
“It.”
“It†is the word that drives me crazy when I am trying to help someone with their computer over the phone. “It†is the word that has aged me. People are usually terrible at verbally explaining what they are doing on their computer when I am trying to help troubleshoot for them over the phone. They will say, “I clicked on ‘it’ and nothing happened.†“I don’t see ‘it.’” “I want to get ‘it’ to come up on the screen.” Steam percolates from my ears. I take a deep breath to calm myself before asking, “When you say ‘it,’ to what are you referring?†I usually have to do this ten or twenty times in the course of one phone call.
Please tell me that I am not alone.
Hey, Jake: You are not alone!!! I hear about “it” all the time. I probably do “it” myself!
Tech support is difficult, which is why I have a great deal of respect for those who do it. I also know that it’s up to the company that provides tech support to support their personnel!
We all hear about how lousy tech support is. But what about how lousy the callers are? Huh – I may have to expand this to a post.
Anyway, when it comes to internal support (like you calling your company’s IT department) I have heard horror stories about how people will call about the same problem over and over again.
For example, I was talking with one IT guy and he said that this woman would call every so often complaining how “it won’t print everything” and he would ask her to describe what she was doing.
This went on for months with her believing that it was the software’s fault.
He finally walked over to her building to watch what she was doing.
Turns out that she would click Print before the file had even finished being saved – she wouldn’t wait for the hourglass to stop spinning to indicate that the save was complete! That’s why she’d occasionally get an incomplete print job!
When he explained it to her, she went through the steps again and she STILL wanted to print – she was click-happy to just “get it done.” She didn’t want to wait for the file to save and it was the software that was “wrong.” He had to tell her to WAIT! as her hand went for the mouse.
This is when you think, “Wow, they don’t pay support enough.”
Support over the phone. Ah, that brings back memories of way back when. The art of ducking calls. Working the “death shift”. (Starting at 5:30 AM when you normally couldn’t get out of the office at 2:30 like you were supposed to.) Overhearing the person in the cube next to you tell a customer that they needed to talk to their XYZ provider. Then thinking “That’s US!!!”
Dialing in to customer sites to fix issues, download logs, upload patches, etc. And thinking 2400 BAUD was fast.
Getting a call from “that customer” that you knew was going to take a while to deal with as he asked some seriously Freaky Shit questions.
ack: sounds like you’ve been on the giving end of support!
Zeus’ thunderbolts – 2400 BAUD rate! Wow. Those external what, Sportster modems? I recall – LO! in the days before laptops were standard for consultants – when I had an external modem perched on the PC tower.
If you had an external, remember watching the green lights to see the connection?
Or how about when you dialed in via the terminal? Something about “atdt ….” and waiting for the handshake.
Oooh! post idea!
Yup, I started out in Tech Support way back when. Laptops being standard? Heck, they didn’t even EXIST! You had luggables, really.
External modems were standard back then. Yup, i’ve dialed a modem more times than I can remember. And downloaded or uploaded in xmodem or zmodem protocol tons of times as well.
That was also back in the days when customers would hand over the keys to the kingdom so freely it was scary. (root passwords)
[...] Mom calls Dell Support. They tell her she should get DSL so they can use Remote Assistant to view her computer. [...]