AARRGGHH!!!!!!!!

Ian if you ever read this you can take that smug look off your face.   My computer has gone wrong again.  yesterday I mentioned that we had an electrical storm right over head and this caused some problems with my network.  Well today my computer finally stopped recognising the external card reader leaving me with no way of uploading files that had been captured by my camera.   I had put this off for too long - I contacted Dell.   That is 5 hours I would not wish on my worst enemy.    The long and short of it is that I now have a none functioning computer.

The problem was diagnosed a software conflict and so I was instructed that I would have to reinstall the operating system.   This mean I would have to rebuild the computer as though it was a brand new computer - a problem but not a fatal one.    So I followed the instruction given to me on the phone and reinstalled the operating system.   We then tried to install the drivers and the whole process fell to pieces.  I couldn't get the drivers to work.   I downloaded the drivers from the internet - still didn't work.  I then started to ask for an engineer to attend and sort the problem out - this was not possible as my warranty didn't cover this.   However, I kept insisting on this - so the technician on the phone had to go and talk to his supervisor.   Another hour wait for the supervisor to ring back.   I went through this again and we tried to install the drivers again.   I then found out that I had installed the wrong operating system on the computer, my wife has a 32 bit Vista laptop and my desktop is 64 bit - no wonder the drivers didn't work.   It was not 10 at night and I had had enough.   We will pick this story up in the morning.

So what have I learnt from this episode?   Well first that even premium support from Dell means dealing with the dreaded Indian call centres.   This is nothing against the people who are usually very helpful and obliging but, and this is a big, huge massive BUT, they don't speak english english and no matter how many lessons they go through this will never change.   I have nothing but respect for their technical prowess they just cannot communicate well down the phone.   This is not the people's fault it is the fault of Dell.   They have cut corners on support by out sourcing to India.   telephone communication is a pure verbal communication with no non verbal communication involved and so the message has to be very clear.   When either party doesn't understand exactly what is being said then this is an accident waiting to happen.  Tonight one happened.  I made a mistake, however the person on the phone was not bale to overcome this because he couldn't check which disk I was putting into the machine.   However, his instructions were not clear, especially when things went wrong.   The only moral I would learn from this whole sorry story is to buy a really good support package, one that sends an engineer on site to sort your problems out.   Tomorrow I hopefully will address this deficiency.   However, there will no doubt be more twists and turns in this story.  Oh happy days.