Tech support so good I had to apologize to my mom

Ever since our move our shipping computer has been on the fritz.  We’ve been able to ship things, it just freezes several times and takes twice as long as it should to finish our work.  So the powers that be decided that we needed to upgrade (actually we were down-grading from Windows xp media center to Windows xp professional) in an effort to get us back on track.  Well, that would have been great if you can do that and aren’t a mac person.  Let’s just say, it didn’t go well.  For some reason when we tried the new install, it wouldn’t take the product key.  We called tech support.  I believe at first, we were talking to someone in the US, then they transferred us to a group in India. And I have to say, I now know why.  Because as an American who’s done a lot of customer service phone work, I know that we’re not the most patient nation.  Nor are we the most pleasant to deal with when things are a bit confusing and time sensitive.  The tech support people I dealt with were all so nice and so helpful, that I was questioning if it was even real or not.

Now, here’s the part where I have to give you a little back story – back in the day, when VCRs were the latest and greatest thing, my father and I weren’t so nice to my mom, who’s, well let’s just say technologically challenged.  My mother had just finished watching a video and had asked us how to turn off the VCR.  My father’s response was, “see the power button?  Go ahead and press that… press it again… and again… one more time…” and on and on.  Finally mom turned around and said something like “Why the hell did we get this thing?  this is rediculious!”  Then it finally hit her.  She really only needed to hit the power button once.  She turned around to see me and dad chuckling behind her back.

Now back to the tech support.  The very nice tech guy asked us what kind of computer we had and we told him it was an HP.  He then said, “Ok, here’s what I need you to do. We’re going to restart the computer and when you see  the HP screen come up, I need you to repeated tap on the F4 key.  Don’t just hit it once.  Don’t hold the F4 key down.   Repeated tap the F4 key for approximately 15 -30 seconds.”  At this point, I almost blurted out to the tech guy, “I’ve done this little prank before buddy… you can punk someone else.”  But I held my tongue and made a mental note that I would call mom and apologize for that awful, but rather funny joke dad and I pulled on her because some tech support guy is pulling the same joke on me!

After all that, and spending all of today on the phone with one version of tech support or another, I think our computer is back to it’s old self…