It’s just past 1:30 in the morning and I just had the most emotionally frustrating day ever. Before I go to bed, which I pretty much did at 7:30pm, I feel like I should get some of this out of my system.
Mondays just plain suck, but today wasn’t going so bad. I had lots of plans for my work day and was looking forward to kicking off the week. I started my day at the Second Life help desk for OnRez then cleared a bunch of support tickets. My Dell Laptop, which is my main PC, decided to start freezing up and being a total jerk! So I decided to finish up before lunch with a post to my daily work blog and run some maintenance while I made lunch starting with diagnostics.
I’ve had had some memory issues with the Dell a few times in the past and just a few weeks back a Technician came out to replace my motherboard and my memory modules…tho only half the memory was replaced because he said he only received 1G and they had ordered two. I usually don’t take advantage of customer support unless I really have to, since I hate sitting on the phone and I never really feel satisfied by the results…not particularly Dell…when I called to custom build this machine I had a great experience and was super happy, but when the diagnostics started freaking out and giving me the exact error I had received, which required the mother board and memory to be replaced… I was PISSED!
So I get my info from the last call and dial customer service. I should have hung up when my call started off with some voice response system that no matter how clear I spoke would not recognize what I was saying when it asked for my Customer ID! So, why wouldn’t they transfer me to an associate *obviously* over seas and extremely uneducated on the product he was supporting.
A call that should have taken 30 min lasted 2 hrs. Not only did it eat up the middle of the afternoon, but it was the most frustrating call ever! The man on the other end of the phone either didn’t understand English AT ALL, or was totally not paying attention to me when I was speaking because he interrupted nearly every sentence I spoke with “I’m sorry?” in the manner of asking me to repeat myself. Horrible! To top it all off… everything that I was instructed to do left me in a worse state then I had begun!
I hung up the phone with a dispatch # and a laptop that functioned for maybe 10 min before completely freezing up and becoming non responsive. I’m not a total idiot when it come to computers. I haven’t kept up with advancements, but I am well aware of the components and functionality. So when I pay for a warrenty and service contract I guess I expect that if I need some service, I should get it.
Well, I undid everything the Dell Dude told me to do and I can run email app and my browser at the same time. Second Life is not happening. My Onrez viewer freezes up after a few mins and becomes non responsive crashing my whole machine. I can’t even load the First Look viewer. Pretty big inconvenience since my job is IN Second Life. Luckily, I am spoiled and I have two computers. My desktop is a Mac Mini, which I mainly use for Media, Communication (AIM/IRC/Skype/Twitter), and my daily calendar. Unfortunately, the Mac does not handle SL’s heavy graphics very well and makes it difficult to be productive in that environment.
Surprisingly I received a message on Twitter from RichardatDELL, who according to his twitter profile is a member of their Digital Media Team, offering some assistance. How nice is that!? I’m actually very impressed to see Dell involved in social media networks, like Twitter…I mean, it’s a given that a portion of the user base would be Dell users as well. I assume he was tipped off by some key word search in Technorati or the likes.
I’ll be sure to report back on my progress, but for now I must sleep. I’ll leave you with this link to Sun of God on Memes.org that Chris Abraham Chat-spammed me with a few min ago. Haven’t watched it all yet ’cause I wanted to finish this post 1st.
Nitey Night!
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008, 8:08 AM | 
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