My laptop isn’t working, but this time it’s a little more serious than a broken USB port on the side. I would have gone through the computer services at the university, but honestly it took about 2 weeks last time. While the guy I was working with did everything right and made sure everything was working I just don’t feel like I have that kind of time. I went ahead and called Dell.

Calling Dell is not much fun. First they asked me for a number off of my laptop, and I entered it in wrong, but no big deal right, because the prompt at the end reads back the number and says “is this correct?” and I can just answer “no”. Well, it wouldn’t turn out to be that easy at all. I said “no” the prompt said that it didn’t recognize what I said or something and this went on till I was finally transferred to a real human being who transferred me to technical support.

The technical support people were kind of hilarious. Here I am with a laptop that turns on, but doesn’t really do much else. The LED’s aren’t coming on and the keyboard doesn’t do anything. So, the steps were kind of completely inappropriate. Take for example asking me to open Microsoft Word or Notepad and type something in or restarting and hitting F2 at the Dell screen. Yeah, neither of those are going to work when the keyboard isn’t working.

It reminded me why I never want to do phone technical support again. This poor worker isn’t deviating from the script because they are incapable, it is because they probably get a hundred calls a week from people who don’t have a legitimate hardware problem and are just too stupid to restart their computer or something. It’s real and it’s not fun.

I am supposed to receive a phone call from a local tech who is going to come out and replace the motherboard, the keyboard, and the hard drive bracket, and that last thing is for something completely unrelated to today’s events.