Ahh, luxury. You’ve never dealt with Austarnet tech support. They used to be Chello in Australia, they’re a sattelite broadband ISP.
I’ve complained about the fact that they call me “little lady” and tell me I’m “smart for a girl”. I’ve complained about the fact that they told me to cut down my neighbours trees to solve the problem (seriously). I’ve complained that the tech support guy told me their system is incompatable with almost all systems including some in their office, and that personally he wouldn’t have them in his home. One got angry at me for not knowing to call the finance department instead of the tech support department, despite the caller not leaving a name, a reason for calling, a return number or the instruction “Ask for finance, not tech support” - we thought she was calling because of a technical issue. Also, I got told off because the tech support guy told me my account was paid up to date, when I should have known that the tech guy doesn’t have access to that information. They do nothing about their rude, useless, untrained, unprofessional staff.
Today, my internet connection stopped working. I rang tech support, and the moron who answered told me that NT is “notoriously unstable”, and that he would do his best but I should consider changing to Windows ME. Yeah, I’ll consider that WHEN I HAVE A GUN TO MY HEAD. I run NT because their fucked up software crashed all the other operating systems I tried it with. Constantly. This is the problem they said could be solved by cutting down my neighbours trees - we considered that, but found NT did the job without upsetting the neighbours. See, it’s a catch-22. The only system their stupid software runs well with is NT, but they don’t support NT, so if you run NT, they’re supposed to refuse to help you if you have trouble. Either that or you have to pull out your 3D card, your network card and a bunch of other stuff that clashes with their Harmonic card just so you can get on the net. Even that doesn’t mean your computer won’t crash, just that they’ll blame it on the state of the economy, or the alignment of the planets.
Anyway… today I rang and spoke to the “tech” guy, and told him what was going on, and he started talking about how NT sucks until I yelled at him, then he began talking about reinstalling my TCP/IP stack. I asked him if he could just check to see if there were any authentication problems with my POP, and he said “Oh sure… nope. There are other people connected to your POP browsing fine… I’m logged into it right now”. I got sick of his voice, and hung up on him, and rang back. A woman answered, I told her what my problem was and she said “Are you dialled in to (my) POP?”. I said yes, she said we’re experiencing power failures there, techs are on it, it will be back up in 45 mins. I asked her how long they’d known, she wasn’t sure, but was shocked to hear the other guy assured me that other people were logged into my POP because they weren’t. What surprised me most was that it only took two calls to find the one person in the organisation with a clue. Normally, this takes weeks. Could be because, in the words of one tech, “we don’t got many women working here. That’s why I’m surprised that you know how to use a computer because most women don’t”.
They only hire the men who write “YES” in the box next to the question “Are you a neanderthal with no clues, brain damage, less than usual education, an attitude problem and nothing better to do than uninstall and reinstall customers TCP/IP stacks all day for no good reason?” - but only if they spell “YES” wrong.
So, if you’re lucky, your Gateway tech will go to Hell - and Hell will be eternity calling Austarnet for tech support.