Is the technical support provided by large companies getting to the point where it is quite redundant?  With the quality of help that you get, you'd think that they should just use automated phone and e-mail support.

Here's what happened to me recently:
My ISP is now providing Norton Anti-virus & firewall for all of it's users, but there was a problem with the 'installation' web page.  The crappy Norton software's stated system requirements includes a minimum of 256 MBs of installed memory.  

Unfortunately, the doofus who programmed the web page made the web page so that it does  a  physical memory check before allowing any downloads.   One of my brothers has the same ISP and has 256 MBs of installed memory, but his motherboard takes a whopping 32 MBs of memory away from system RAM for the built-in video card.  This meant that he couldn't download the Norton software.  Even the other software provided by my ISP which doesn't need 256 MBs wasn't available.

I e-mailed the ISP tech support and told them to fix the web page - I even showed them the web source code which needs to be adjusted.  All I got back (after 3 days) was an e-mail apologizing for the delay and pre-written documentation about the Norton system requirements.  Judging from the response, its easy to conclude that the fools (tech support) did not send notice to the bozos (web programmers) about the problem.  The web page only needed a fix which takes a few SECONDS to apply.

In the end, I had to hack the ActiveX control which provides the web page with the amount of installed physical memory.
It only took about 2 minutes to hack the code, but I shouldn't have had to bother with it at all.  Some other users on my ISP could have the same problem, so the fools (tech support) could have saved a bunch of people (including themselves) a lot of grief if they only applied a little common-sense.

It's normal, trust me... My laptop got returned 3 times for the same problem and it still persisted and I bet that it was only something like a bad contact (the DVD player failed even with a new one installed 3 times). At least I could conclude that it wasn't actually the player, but they sure as hell didn't check if it worked after replacing it.


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Some things disturb me, but they won't go away! Make them go away! *slumbers off, not looking back*

They need to be seriously stomped by ninja pirates, that's for sure.

Many companies just don't seem to care about support... And that's a problem.


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Some things disturb me, but they won't go away! Make them go away! *slumbers off, not looking back*

Platypus wrote:

Many companies just don't seem to care about support... And that's a problem.

Lack of communication within the various departments of companies seems to just keep getting worse.
I had an account problem with a book club and I experienced the lack of communication problem there too.  Even though I straightened everything out with the service rep I talked to on the phone, the stupid accounting department kept sending me mail about money owed.  I had to send a letter to the accounting department to fix everything, even though the stupid service rep could have just fired off a message to the accounting department.  Unreal.