weill aspects

originally posted september 17, 2003

1-800-NOT-OK-COMPAQ

My laptop is going away for a long, long time.

Last week, my laptop started freezing up randomly. I called Compaq's technical support line to try and fix the problem. Today, I can look forward to sending it to a horribly backlogged repair center where someone will run diagnostics, rubber-stamp it as "not broken," and return it to me a month later.

My cell phone, which is also my home phone, has been used for 293 minutes of calls this month. That's just seven minutes shy of my monthly allowance, and exactly 213 minutes more than my previous monthly record. Nearly all of these minutes have been spent listening to Muzak or talking to people with all sorts of accents.

When Compaq became "The New HP" last year, a number of measures were put in place to cut costs as Compaq and HP merged their operations. One of these measures was to outsource nearly all of their technical support to India. An average call now consists of the following parts:

  1. Punching in numbers to navigate through menus.
  2. Waiting on hold for 30 minutes.
  3. Giving my name, telephone number, address, and computer information to someone.
  4. Waiting on hold for 45 minutes.
  5. Giving my name, telephone number, address, and computer information to someone else.
  6. Waiting on hold for 5 minutes as they pull up my file.
  7. Walking through a few tech support scripts.
  8. Being told to download a patch, reformat my hard drive, mail the laptop in for service, or await shipment of a replacement part.
  9. Being assigned a case number, which would in theory simplify steps one through three for future calls.
  10. Repeat.

Nine years ago, I bought a bottom-of-the-line Epson laptop and became the nerdiest kid in eighth grade. It was replaced under warranty seven times before Epson simply cut me a check. By that time, I had become used to waiting on hold for extremely long periods of time (my record: three hours before being disconnected) and I was on a first-name basis with everyone in Epson's call center.

Now, I get to deal with one of the industry's largest call centers. They operate on some kind of bizarro schedule: during the day I get connected to techs in India, where it's the middle of the night, and I speak to Canadians or Americans when I call at 11:30 PM. Compaq's 24-hour availability is a plus, although I would rather forget having stayed up until 2:00 in the morning last night due solely to hold times.

It isn't often that I see a company's support fall so far short of my expectations. Before daytime support people were replaced with Indian script-readers, I could actually talk to a semi-competent human and get my laptop fixed in a week's time. Now I have to deal with people like the following. Pause for one second at each ellipsis:

Customer Support Rep: May I have your address?
Me: That's 2... 5... 0... 1... Liberty... Avenue.
CSR: Could you spell that?
Me: L... I... B... E... R... T... Y...

It took eight minutes that one time to read off the simplest bit of information that Compaq requires.

Compaq's last resort, to avoid the backlogged repair center, was to ask me to bring my laptop in to Staples, Radio Shack, or Best Buy. I called each store and asked them what they could do for my Compaq laptop.

Compaq tech support lie #1: Staples is not equipped to do anything with my laptop unless I bought it from them.

Compaq tech support lie #2: Radio Shack does not service Compaq laptops; they merely box them up and ship them to Compaq.

Compaq tech support lie #3: Best Buy, which supposedly repairs systems on site, won't touch my laptop unless I can prove I bought it there. In that case, I can have Best Buy ship it to a Best Buy repair center which will then forward the laptop on to Compaq.

My laptop will only work if I press down on the casing immediately above the hard drive. Compaq grudgingly shipped me a new hard drive, but this behavior persists with the new one. I have absolutely no faith in them to repair my computer, but somehow I have managed to get by for nearly two years using Compaq's rapidly-deteriorating support.

This laptop isn't my only PC, but it does have all sorts of useful stuff like documents, Quicken, and all my archived e-mail. I'll back up what I can before sending it off to the big repair center in the sky.

Shoot me now.

Back to September 2003, or to the year 2003.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.