I have just spent two hours... repeat-TWO HOURS.... of my life I will never get back on the phone with tech support. When I bought this computer back in March, I was coerced coaxed into purchasing an extended service plan. Fine, I thought, since I am computer-brained just one step less than a garden slug. It wasn't likely to bankrupt me as long as I shun food for a few months very expensive, so as long as it means that figuring out what was wrong when whatever was wrong went wrong was not my responsibility, it was fine.
Until this afternoon, when in a flight of whimsy, I decided to reboot. I don't reboot often, since when I asked my friend Dave who has an old Mac that he uses mainly to download porn I did extensive research which concluded it was pretty much 50/50 as to the benefits of turning it off every night or leaving it on. So I choose to leave it on mainly because I am too ditzy to remember to turn it off at the end of a long day of downloading porn after a long day of writing.
So to cut to the chase: I rebooted. Immediately I got a very forbidding black screen, with a lot of technical gibberish. Okay, actually, it said "WHATCHAMATHINGY NOT FOUND. Hit any key to continue." So I did. And did. And did again. I filled up the screen with the results of hitting any key in vain. Then I cried for a while and drank two beers in ten minutes did the logical thing and called tech support. I paid for it, after all, shouldn't I use it? I thought so too.
Apparently no one told tech support about my receipt-given deity-given right to call them, 24/7, and request assistance. I talked for nearly an hour to awretched example of the public educational system whose uncle must work in HR nice young man obviously working on his marketing degree. He spent most of our call trying to sell me an extension to my extended service plan. I think he's also the kid who emails me all those offers to extend my more personal equipment.
My equipment is fine unextended, by the way, thanks so much for wondering.
After I turned him down several times, he laid the phone down in the bottom drawer while he went to the bathroom put me on hold for fifteen minutes while he pimped me out to someone else who needed a good laugh routing the call to a higher tier of expertise.
In this case, it was BillyBob.
BillyBob had to be the friendliest, most polite, kindest man I have ever talked to who wasn't on the other end of a 976 call. We had fun laughing about how "them durn women" are "always gettin' riled up" when "them silly machines of thars" don't work. BillyBob was of the opinion, I was sure, that if I'd just stick to baking biscuits barefoot and pregnant, this sort of problem would never come up.
But in the end, BillyBob also came up short. Perhaps he was an unsatisfied customer of the first techie. His final advice was that I take it back to the shop I'd purchased it from and "make them fix that thar little bug you've got."
BillyBob should hope I never meet him in person.
When I was crawling under the desk to disconnect all the cables, I accidentally hit the floppy disk eject button had a sudden stroke of genius and checked the floppy drive. Lo and behold, yep.... I had left a diskette in there.
Well, there you go.
Why my two hours with the experts failed to come up with the simple question "Is there a disc in any of the drives?" is beyond me. Why I never thought to look in the first place.... that's out there too.
I'm going to go take off my shoes and make some biscuits now. See y'all later.
(previously posted on Blogspot)