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A Cat in a Dog's World...
Honesty, as the saying goes, is always the best policy. But sometimes a little white lie is needed to get the job done. Forgive me, father, for I have told a falsehood. You see, I have a Mac. A couple of them, actually. In fact, I don't have a single Windows PC at home, unless you count the Virtual PC instance running inside my Mac. Most of the time, this is fantastic. I've got all of the software I need, and it all works together to let me have the illusion of being creative (see my other post on that topic).
But when something goes wrong, like when my wireless router went south this past week, nirvana fades fast, since the majority of companies that offer tech support really can only deal with Windows. So, when I called their tech support (pro: it's free; con: they're really not set up to deal with anyone who knows a little about networking), and the first technical question they asked me was "What version of Windows are you using?" I realized that I wasn't going to get anywhere by telling them I was running Mac OS X.
So I did what a lot of Mac owners do. I said, "Er, Windows XP." "Home or Professional?" he countered. "Professional Edition," I answered confidently. Of course, like a lot of Mac owners, I'm pretty fluent in the ways of Windows as well, so I was pretty confident that I could pull this off.
"Alright," he said, "Now go to the Start menu and choose Run."
I did nothing. "Ok?" I prompted.
"Now type in C-M-D and hit return."
Still nothing. "Uh huh?"
"Now type I-P..."
At this point, I knew where he was going. But, since the router wasn't giving me anything - no link lights, no IP address, nothing, doing anything at this point would have been pointless.
"C-O-N-F-I-G," he continued. "And what does it say your IP address is?"
"Nothing," I answered confidently. "It says that it's not connected."
"What's not connected?" he seemed confused.
"The network interface. It's not connected."
"Ok," he continued. "Then go to Start button and choose Control Panels, then Network."
I pulled up my System Preferences/Network panel. "Yeah?"
"What does it say about your Network Interface."
"It says it's not connected," I replied cooly.
"What's not connected?"
"The Local AreaNetwork."
This continued for a while longer. He had me bring up the System Hardware Manager, we went through the command line interface a couple more times, and I seemed to answer all of his questions correctly. Finally, after a half hour, I'd finally won.
"Alright, it seems like your unit is broken," he concluded. If it were me, the fact that the router never exited the power-on self test, that it wouldn't establish a link on any port, and that a hard reset just made it ask for a firmware upgrade would have been a giveaway, but hey, I'm just the customer. It hardly mattered; I'd gotten to the point where they were going to fix my problem. "I'm going to transfer you to a second level support technician to give you an AMA number so you can send it back."
"Great," I answered, feigning appreciation as best as I could.
"Hi, this is someone-or-other," came the voice on the other end of the line. "You need an RMA number, is that right?"
"Yes," I said.
"Alright. Now, before I do that, I need to verify a couple of things. What version of Windows are you running?"
eaokiatwork at 2:11:00 AM PST Blog about this entry |
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Two things come to mind:
1. the real issue is that since Mac's require so little support, there is no support industry. In a society that takes built-in-obsolecence as a give, Apple, with the Mac, made the mistake of satisfying their customer. Infrequent upgrades...no aftermarket support industry.
2. This speaks to a real opportunity for a Mac utility that provides a set of fake windows Control Panels and utilities...to use in such situations when they are forced to deny their mac-nature and deal with windows-biased support organizations.
2/16/06 3:11 AM