Here at work today, we thought we'd be enterprising by connecting an old laptop to a wireless network, plopping it onto a Lazy Susan in the conference room before taking turns playing Captain Picard, swinging the laptop around to people we'd just let enter by crying, authoritatively, "Come!," and showing them warp core efficiency flowcharts, personnel reports and starmaps at the edges of nebulae.
But for hardware, we chose Microsoft.
Suffice to say, I used to be quite confident in brushing aside all other complaints, economic or ethical, about Microsoft on grounds that their customer support was without equal. Polite, knowledgable, succinct, dedicated. Never disappointing, always impressive.
Since December, that seems to have changed. I had spent the last twenty minutes on the phone with a support technician before I concluded - myself - that the office terminal had been hit by the Klez virus. But before the conversation ended, I concluded that the fellow didn't know much more about code or operating systems than I did. In fact, I asked him and he answered: "Yeah, you're pretty much right. I have a screen in front of me that tells me the likely problem and steps to take."
Utterly ridiculous - on top of the fact that it took me about four attempts to pry that out of him. My queries of "Why are we doing this?" were met by silence or unconvincing dodges.
When I hung up the phone, I paused for a moment before rolling up the sleeves to clean out the five infected computers, and pondered what could be the fall of Bill Gates' empire. What happened to the computer nerds who used to be at the other end of the phone? Were their big-money positions relegated to some inner tier, now surrounded by a phalanx of off-from-college screen-readers to whom the word "tinker" meant "make 'Critical Stop' a ding instead of a chime" or "change the background to 'centered' instead of 'tiled'"?
After today's day-long ordeal, I may have seen a glimpse of pervasive mediocrity, perhaps intended by Microsoft to save money but more likely leading to a slow, inexorable collapse.
The boss made the first call: we wanted to hook the wireless network's base station into the wired network and set up connectivity software to enable computers on both networks to recognize one another.
The first Microsoft technician wasn't really sure about the whole plan, so he advised the boss to hold for a few minutes while he "Check[ed] it out."
Fifty-seven minutes later, he came back on. "Thank you for calling Microsoft Support for Broadband Wireless Networking, can I take your case number please?"
"You already have my case number," cried the boss, not at all relaxed by nearly an hour of anodyne string ensembles. "You were just talking to me!"
A string of confused half-words bubbled out of the man's mouth, and then, "Uh, what was your problem again?"
"Never mind," shouted the boss, and laid the phone in its cradle with a downward arc, generously exceeding the necessary application of pressure.
We spent about five hours wiggling about with it ourselves before we shrugged our shoulders, gave it an honest, "What the hell," and phoned Microsoft back. I made the call. The second fellow's native language was not English, but in fact the southwestern-most romance language, himself most likely from a country colonized by speakers of this tongue some 3,000-4,000 miles further to the south and west of the origin nation. Unfortunately, during my time on the phone with him, he demonstrated a classic lingual chasm. You see, when the performance value of a language is predicated upon prestissimo tempo and staccato articulation, one who does not speak the native language will be unable to comprehend verbalization that imports a) the rhythm of the native language and b) more than three-quarters of that language's pronunciation patterns into c) a language not at all improved upon by such modifications, even if nominally shared by both parties. In fact, speakers of this second tongue will become d) frustrated and eventually e) silently angry when the heavily accented, mile-a-minute speaker of the first language is f) clearly impatient with the other person's polite requests for several exchanges to be repeated - perhaps an effort to reengage g) more slowly and h) lacking the enunciative artifacts in a previous, unintelligible delivery - and, obtusely, i) does not realize the existence of items "a" through "h."
And, wouldn't you know, the poor fellow didn't solve the problem. At all.
In spite of the reported 250+ daily viewers to this site, I'm not putting chips on any budding IT techs to read this entry. Instead, the company will call on our trusty network printer provider; they're the sort of business that has its fingers in everything and works to supply every need for you. They've succeeded in expanding our relationship before - why not give them the old college try?
And besides, how difficult can it be to outperform Microsoft?
UPDATE: Good news for both our network aspirations and Microsoft's collective behind. "Ron" helped us out. "Ron" was very patient, kind and thorough. "Ron" is a pretty swell guy, so Microsoft gets to live another day.