Rest assured, I didn’t buy it directly, but I get to use it for the first 90 days of owning MS Word (buying it was probably a mistake too, but for another thread). I call with a Word problem. The woman can’t fix it. She says my computer is running so slow that her diagnostic tools won’t work, so she wants to send me to the Windows “team” to speed up my computer, allowing them to fix my Word problem. Getting to this point takes a good 40 minutes. After getting reassurance there wouldn’t be a charge for the Windows fix (which is older than 90 days), she sends me along.
The new woman seems considerably dumber. I describe the problem, and she’s asking me to perform some routine web browsing to see if my computer is noticeably slow. Well, it never was noticeably slow, I was sent to her by some other MS asshole. But I tell one suspicion I had – just yesterday, I had switched on MS Speech Recognition to try it out. It did a pretty bad job taking dictation, and I decided not to use it. But once I turned it on, there seemed no way to turn it off, and every time I booted, there was the program open on my desktop. So I asked her specifically to shut it down so it wouldn’t restart every time the computer did. (FYI, it was not on the list of programs on the “Startup” tab of MSconfig.
Anyway, she’s dicking around for a LONG time, even asking me to move my computer closer to my wireless router, because the signal strength was too weak. My computer said signal strength was “Excellent”, but she must just have been fishing for time and ideas.
We’re up to nearly an hour (not including the Word woman) and she’s trying things in MSconfig Startup. Suddenly I see ALL the file boxes uncheck, and the window disappears, and the computer restarts. Sure enough, once I get to the desktop, the Speech Recognition window is gone, but I tell her I’m concerned that some of those programs on the Startup list might be necessary. She “explains” that she only closed the one program causing the problem, and everything else was as it is. She pretends to show this to me (she is remoting to my desktop and controlling my computer), but I can’t see anything, and she apologizes for opening it in a way that I can’t see, but everything is fine.
Then she puts me on hold to “make some notes”, and I decide to open MSconfig for myself, and sure enough, EVERY startup program except my anti-virus is disabled. Obviously, she had no idea what actually needed to be disabled, and then she lied to my face (well, into my ear) about what she did. And that’s what I told her. And she “explained” I misunderstood her, and reassured me than none of those other programs had to run at startup. Maybe it’s even true, since here I am on the web after a restart, but she outright lied to me.
Oh, and then she said my Windows problem is resolved, but she had spoken with the Word “team”, who were going to have to escalate my issue, without even making another attempt to fix it after the Windows “fix”, so someone will call me tomorrow.
And after a couple of tries at getting me to agree that this was “all right with me”, which it wasn’t, she wished me a good day, told me someone would call tomorrow about Word, and hung up on me.
