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Aug. 11th, 2011 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydionI got 4 hours of sleep broken into three parts, so I'm exhausted and in pain. I spent another three hours with tech support, and now my computer is running better than it did when I bought it, the printer is working, and we're pretty sure if I buy new ink I'll actually have a scanner again. I've got a couple hours of cleaning to get my work station back together and all I've had to eat today is sugar to keep me from passing out, as I wasn't able to leave the work station during the sorting out process. All three techs I dealt with were very cool. The only one with a mutually unintelligible accent was the one who hardly needed to talk to me at all and we had a chat window to handle the numbers and words that were problematic. I really do mean mutual. My dialect of English has a few extra vowels in it compared to American standard, and I'm suspecting that one of the common language groups in India has incompatible vowel phonemes with the set in my linguistic paintbox. The result is that about one out of three tech support people finds my version of English incomprehensible and vica versa. The other two out of three on average works fine both ways. My dicey phone lines aren't helping. To be clear, this isn't in any way an issue with their language skills, which were pretty impressive in writing, just an issue with clashing dialects. In any case all three were polite, patient, and knowledgeable. Extra hero points to gentleman number three who had to listen to my pain sounds and cursing as I crawled around on the floor and lifted stuff on a day when I'm extra not bendy and my pain meds are all worn off.
Was it worth two hundred dollars? Probably. They not only killed the worm, but they cleaned up all those annoying extra programs in the load tray that I was afraid to delete as I had no way to tell what was essential and what was crap. They did the full optimization, and I no longer have to email things to Squirrel for printing. If I hauled it into a shop for fixing the worm, it'd likely cost $100.00 to $150.00. For the extra fifty, I get full tech support for a year, and I don't have to take everything apart and haul it somewhere and back. It took one day instead of several days, and I got to see what they are doing, which I like.
Did I want to spend the money? No, but I'm less pissy about it than I likely would have been if I'd had to find someone new to deal with it, then go through all the crap involved. (The store that sold me this box no longer exists closer than Seattle, so I can't take it back to it's home store for fixes anymore.)
Was it worth two hundred dollars? Probably. They not only killed the worm, but they cleaned up all those annoying extra programs in the load tray that I was afraid to delete as I had no way to tell what was essential and what was crap. They did the full optimization, and I no longer have to email things to Squirrel for printing. If I hauled it into a shop for fixing the worm, it'd likely cost $100.00 to $150.00. For the extra fifty, I get full tech support for a year, and I don't have to take everything apart and haul it somewhere and back. It took one day instead of several days, and I got to see what they are doing, which I like.
Did I want to spend the money? No, but I'm less pissy about it than I likely would have been if I'd had to find someone new to deal with it, then go through all the crap involved. (The store that sold me this box no longer exists closer than Seattle, so I can't take it back to it's home store for fixes anymore.)