It's times like these I wish I still worked for a large corporation. Whenever I called support, I got the same guy, Dave. I never had to deal with the "I know you say the hard drive is bad, but let's try re-installing windows to see if it works first" crap. Wonderful support. Nowadays, I get some random guy in India who simply cannot understand english, much less technical english.

HP Support nightmare: The other day, I went to a client site, because his printer was broken. Basically, the rollers that fed paper into the printer would not feed paper. I take it apart, and see that the gear is broken that lifts the paper platen up to the rollers. So I call support. The guy tells me that we need to reset the printer. Umm, OK. So we reset the printer. This of course, makes it think it's brand new out of the box, so it must complete the setup procedure, which wastes an incredible amount of ink. During this process, which I know will NOT help, it runs out of yellow ink. So I tell the guy, to which he responds "We need to finish this process because it fixes the problem 90% of the time." Now, I know that there is no way in hell resetting the printer will magically "fix" the broken gear, and when I insist that this pointless test will not make any difference anyway, please send me a new damn printer, he gets snotty, and tells me I need to go out and buy more yellow ink so we can complete the reset. At this point I'm getting a bit Irate, so I ask for his manager in the hopes that this person will at least have some capability of reason. I'm on hold for 15 minutes, and he comes back and says" I talked it over with my boss, and we're going to go ahead and replace your printer."

I mean come on. I wasted over an hour running tests that had NOTHING to do with the problem. Does he really think I'm trying to just get a new printer out of him for the fun of it?

Then there's Dell support again, I bought an APC UPS Pro 3000 Rackmount. 2 of em. These things weigh about 150 lbs. The first one was flawless, the second one had a cracked faceplate, so I called our rep to see if he could send out a new faceplate. Nope. They can't send me the $3 worth of extruded plastic, but they could overnight me a whole new unit. That makes ZERO sense. I mean, this thing costs at least $100 just to SHIP it to me. Stupid.