Eliot Sherman: The bovine conspiracy and the computer industry

This column probably won't serve as fair warning, since most of you have already purchased a sleek, lightning-fast 200 gigs of something or other computer that doubles as a home entertainment system and just about writes your papers for you. But here's a taste of what might happen if you bought from a certain company that won't name, as I'm in the habit of avoiding lawsuits.

I will say this -- their mascot is not a genial collegiate stoner, but a cow. I suppose I was a victim of strategic marketing; a cow, I thought, is a docile and trustworthy animal. What could possibly go wrong?

What indeed.

The time came for my computer to develop serious glitches, unsurprisingly, right around midterm week when all my papers were due. I turned to the technical support wing of this company, which is, as they often reminded me, available 24 hours a day. That's because all the calls are either routed to Bangladesh, making conversation difficult but not impossible, or Kentucky, making conversation completely impossible.

Before you even speak to support personnel however, you have to survive 20 minutes of music that is guaranteed to make you hang up. This includes a versatile mix of music written before my parents were born and delightfully contemporary hits like the background music for 1998's Practical Magic.

If you can endure that, you may actually get a real live person on the phone. They'll ask you for your customer identification number, which is a 23 digit alphanumeric code that no one knows and is useless since they can retrieve your information by entering your phone number. However, it does give tech support personnel a regular opportunity to sigh in exasperation at the customer's incompetence and wonder how Bill Gates got so lucky.

Once you ask your question however, you will be put on hold for another 20 minutes. It's company policy. If you're trying to find the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop, or if you're trying to repair your motherboard with one hand tied behind your back, it's always 20 minutes. I've taken great joy recently in calling these jokers up, waiting for a technical support representative and then saying "No way! I'm putting you on hold!"

Maybe I need a hobby.

In any event, once I explained that my keyboard was broken and that hooking up another one did not work and I have a warranty and could it please be fixed, the service person was forced to think long and hard about why this clearly could not be done.

He finally came up with a reason: that I had installed Microsoft XP since their standard issue operating system, Windows ME, was a piece of crap. I would have to remove the offending piece of software that was not licensed by the company. But how could I uninstall said software without the use of my keyboard?

Then a long silence, followed by, "Could I interest you in our new stylized dust jackets for all notebooks and desktops?"

Who are these people? Whatever happened to customer service? As I watch the brightest minds in business stream in and out of a certain building in droves, I can't fathom why the computer industry still resembles that Saturday Night Live skit about the obnoxious technician and the joy he takes in verbally abusing his co-workers who happen to think that rams and mice are animals and really shouldn't have anything to do with computers.

Here's an idea: a service where people are happy to fix your computer, and maybe even make house calls at extravagantly marked-up prices. I'd buy that. Especially if they also could bring pizza and movies.

In truth, I'm probably just behind the curve when it comes to these machines. But I'm as addicted to e-mail and high speed Internet access as the next person, and I have a lot of trouble remembering a time when MP3s didn't exist.

I even keep a lid on the fact that Instant Messager is slowly slaughtering the English language by dicing it up into barely comprehensible abbreviations, because the service is just so damned convenient. I mean these computers are the gateway to keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives. You should never let anyone tell you that this Gateway sucks.

Eliot Sherman is a sophomore from Philadelphia, Pa.

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