Microsoft Vista includes with it a suite of shitty widgets, gadgets or whichever name MS chose that hadn't already been snagged by Apple. I'm pretty fond of the clock gadget since I've got friends and family members scattered across the globe. Courtesy of the clock gadgets I'm spared the task of having to remember time zones. I needn't explain more.
Ordinarily they should look something like this:
Its a clock. Pretty simple, huh? Big hand points to the minutes, little hand points to the hours.Well, I booted my system on night to find that the clock instead looked like this:
Totally unreadable, but the clock gadget is hardly a necessary component of the operating system. Other gadgets, such as the Contacts gadget and the System Monitor gadget exhibited similar corruption.I poked around on the web for a while, searching for any documented evidence—and more importantly fixes—relating to this kind of problem. There were a few, I tried them and none of them worked. Later that night the corruption miraculously disappeared after I did what amounted to nothing. The Microsoft fairies has swept through my machine and righted all wrongs. I could go to sleep a happy man.
The next morning I fired up my machine to find the corruption, like a nasty case of genital warts, was back in full bloom. My fixes had failed, even my attempts to roll back to a previously working image of my discs had met with poor fortune. Then I had an idea.
These components come native with the OS, I thought, so Microsoft should be able to solve the problem. I'd never contacted Microsoft's customer support line before; I've always had a natural aversion to dealing with Microsoft in that manner, but this time my logic went something like this:
- It's not a critical component of the OS
- Microsoft should be able to support their own software, even if I'm sure they can't
- The problem is going to be a tricky one to resolve since it involves the corruption of a set of files—these sorts of problems always push tech support staff to their limits
- I'm unemployed and I've got loads of time to waste on such a fruitless exploit
"If they can't fix the problem you won't be charged the $60," I was informed.
"Let's do it," I agreed. And down into the rabbit's warren I went.
The first tier tech to whom I spoke was a very personable woman. She patiently listened the problem I was encountering and asked me a few probing question. Had I restarted my system? Yes. Had I attempted to use the gadget restore feature? Yes. Had I checked for solutions online? Yes. Had I attempted to re-register my DLLs? Yes. We could both see where this one was going. "Would you mind if I took control of your system?" she asked. Of course I didn't mind. She then directed me to open IE and navigate to a particular page that would invoke an ActiveX control that would in turn let her view my system. That's when things went pear shaped.
"I'm telling it allow the ActiveX control but nothing's happening," I told her.
"What are the menu options you're seeing?" She then described a list of menu items that should have been visible but in fact weren't.
"The one you want me to select isn't there," I told her. "Shouldn't this be easy?"
She let that remark hang while she laboured further with me on trying to get the remote control app installed. This tête-à-tête continued for what was about another twenty minutes, neither of us getting any closer to solving the problem, we were too embroiled in trying to solve the problem of installing the tools that were supposed to help us solve the original problem.
"I think your tech support needs tech support." If she found the remark amusing she didn't let me know it.
A few minutes later I told her I'd solved the problem; not with the corrupted gadgets but with the installation of the remote control app.
"How did you do it?" she asked.
Heh, I thought, this is going to be great. "I used Firefox."
Yes, Firefox worked better with Microsoft's website than Microsoft. Oh the irony.
What then transpired was about two more hours of being repeatedly put on hold while the pleasant yet overwhelmed tech support agent ran my issue up the food chain in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Her final solution was to have me download third party clock gadgets that would in fact work, despite the fact that the native Microsoft gadgets remained corrupted.
"No, no, no," I told her, "that's not a solution, that's a workaround. I called to get a solution to the problem, not to be told about a workaround I already knew about. You're going to need to try harder."
"I'd like to transfer you to an escalation engineer."
"Okay, let see what else can be done. Thanks."
So there I was, two hours lost for nothing, and I'd been shunted to another part of the call center. The next person assigned to my problem was nice enough, but beneath the veneer of concern was a hint of resentment. After all it was 1:30am where he was and I'm sure he didn't care to be dealing with these problems at this time of night. In an effort to break the ice and get him to deal with me on a personal level—really build a stake in the issue—I told him that was soon to travel to India. I asked him about southern India, the place where I'll be going, while we ran a series of hard disc checks. He really didn't give a shit. Okay, I thought, we'll have it your way.
His way was ultimately just like the first tech's but longer. After a further three hours of aimless meandering the final solution was proposed: reinstall the operating system.
Think about that for a moment within the context of the "deal" proposed by ringing Microsoft's tech support in the first place: they either fix it or you don't get charged. What the OS reinstall represents is a bogus deus-ex-machina. No matter which problem you have with Windows, Microsoft can always, as a final resort, declare that your only remaining solution is to reinstall the OS. We'll take our sixty dollars now, please. No shit I can always reinstall the OS. The reason why I called was to fix the problem WITHOUT reinstalling the OS. The corrupted components shouldn't corrupt in the first place. And if they do, then Microsoft should be able to fix them without placing undue burden on the affected customer. Apparently that's not the case.
And neither was I surprised. For years the tales of Microsoft's tech support have swirled around technology companies. Most of us working in the tech industry are savvy enough to support our own equipment without having to resort to hotlines. On this occasions the reasons for my deep-rooted suspicions of Microsoft's tech support were confirmed. The company itself is as needlessly complicated as the software it produces, so much so that the software itself is in fact a replication of the complexity of the company played out at a different scale. It's all one big mess with a powerful marketing arm. If you get caught in the labyrinth, like I did, don't expect to find an easy way out.
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