[nylug-talk] State of tech support in America (Rant)

[sixtyfourbeets]

My sister had Sprint service and they have the most dropped calls.
No scratch that, they have the most amount of calls that went straight
through to voice mail.

I decided maybe my sister was avoiding me and decided to give sprint the
benefit of the doubt.
I saw Sprint had a special for their broadband card and took the bait.

For about 3 months everything was cool, if I was dropping my connection I
didn't really know it.
I networked my laptop to my desktop and use the broadband card as my primary
internet connection.
I don't know if that was when the problems started or if there was a problem
before, but thats not
really the point of this rant.
I started watching the log files on my laptop and noticed my connection was
dropping off more often than I realized.  Sometimes when the machine was
just sitting idle the connection would drop off and reconnect.

So my broadband card seeming slower apparently coincided with the
disconnection issue.
I called their tech support and everytime they said nope sorry everything is
fine on our end.  Meanwhile my log file was showing me a 'peer disconnect'.
Lovely.
I called back to Sprint tech support and was passed to their 'advanced tech
support' or some nonesense.

I spoke to some chatty guy who told me about his interest in Spider Man
comics because he saw I was from NY wanted to talk about the movies.
WTF!!!  Can you fix my connection or tell me whats wrong please!!!!

So he ran some dumb applications to test my connection.

Ok great, don't you have any kind of log you can look at to see what the
connection looks like on your end?  No I'm sorry sir I only have these
applications and we're not trained on how to setup PPP.

This is the state of 'advanced tech support' in America?!!
We hire people to be nice to one another instead of actually fixing a
problem the customer
is, quite frankly, suffering through!
Sprint can't be bothered to populate their tech staff with actual
technically competent people.  I interviewed in New Mexico in one of their
tech support centers, I took their idiot computer based tests.  Basically a
generic program that measures my ability to comprehend what is being said to
me on the phone.

Apparently I'm not qualified because I did too well on their retarded test.
(My apologies to all mentally disabled people for comparing you to the
people at Sprint).

This is the state of tech support in America.  It is nonesense when you read
about companies complaining about there not being enough technically
competent people in America.  The race is to the bottom of the barrel to
hire the least common denominator and what counts is how nice we can be to
one another over the phone.  Fixing the actual problem is not on top of
Sprints priority and the problem goes all the way up to management.
Because company policy dictates they hire some twit who gauges a prospective
employee on how 'affable' they
can be.  $%#%$%$YY%$%$%$%$%$%$#$%%$^!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fix the problem!!!  Or atleast be smart enough to know what the problem
might be!!

How Sprint was able to buy Nextel is really beyond me, but Wall Street loves
a good story.

Steve M