Tech Support – Sad, But True

I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I received this obviously enhanced joke photo regarding the outsourcing of technical support by USA companies to India, in this case making fun of Microsoft. I have no idea where this photo originated, so don’t ask.

Frankly, I laughed at it, but realized how sadly to the point this photo tends to be these days. Being a bit of a geek and a male one at that, I tend to not call tech support very often, preferring to stumble my way through without the added frustration of Tech Support Hell that is more often than not what you get these days. But, the last time I did give up and call, I can picture this guy on the other end.

I had purchased an HP Personal Media Drive to use for backup purposes in my HP desktop PC. Unfortunately, the CD with the software for the thing could not be read on my HP PC, so I called HP to try to get a replacement after failing to find a way to simply download the software from the HP support site. Rather than just getting a friendly rep on the other end happy to send me a replacement, I got forwarded all over what I had to guess was India to several heavily accented tech support people over the course of an hour. None spoke good enough English for me to understand them very well and all were obviously reading from a script and absolutely would not vary from it.

I finally hung up when the last one insisted that I crawl under my desk to retrieve the serial number off of my PC. My call had NOTHING to do with the PC. All I wanted was a replacement software CD.

Grrrrrrrr…….

I searched the HP site and found a comment form for the president of HP. I filled it out with some very non-complimentary comments. A few weeks later, I got a call from the president’s office apologizing and asking if this experience would keep me from buying HP in the future. Of course, I said YES!

I encourage you to do the same with all vendors who insist on providing tech support with people who barely speak the language, only know how to follow a script and who can’t tell the difference between replacing a defective .25 cent CD disk and honest-to-God tech support.

Geez. Nuff said. Rant over.

PS – I did finally read the CD. I popped it into my old SONY desktop PC (retrieved from storage) which, strangely, could read it and copied it over to the HP on my network.

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