It was a mammoth effort. I'm not going to relive the tortures of today's IBM product support gauntlet, because it was just too horrible. Suffice to say that 8 calls to tech support is more than any one man should have to bear.
IBM's support people weren't that incompetant. No more than I would expect from a support group working for such a huge company. Only a couple of massively mixed-messages. Ranging from the initial just-before-closing-time call, prompting a reply of "Yeah, just call back at 9am in the morning and they'll sort you out with a return authorization" to a rather narky (5 calls and 18 hours later) "I don't know why anyone would tell you that, as a matter of course this can take up to 48 hours blahblahworshipsatanihaveacrucifixupmybutt". It doesn't matter though, because with sights set on my righteous goal (a working laptop before the close of business today) I decided that I would call them every 45 minutes until they gave me the return authorization code I needed.
It worked. I have a new laptop. It works.
UberJaymis: ihaveanewlaptop
existangst: HAH
UberJaymis: another one
UberJaymis: my second in 2 days
existangst: ITS 1:30 AND ALL MY FAVORITE PPL ARE TALKING TO ME!!!
UberJaymis: it's giving me the shits already
UberJaymis: who else is your favourite people?
existangst: well theres you
existangst: and then there is Silp, Kirk and Guy in the channel
existangst: and Leon in msn
UberJaymis: whoo
existangst: all i need now is sondra
UberJaymis: partay
UberJaymis: FUCKIN
UberJaymis: DUDE
existangst: and hayley
UberJaymis: I MANAGED TO REMOVE SOME OF IBM'S USELESS SHITE PROGRAMS FROM STARTUP
existangst: and luke
existangst: and then i would be right
existangst: COOL
existangst: DID U BORK YOUR COMPUTER IN THE PROCESS!
UberJaymis: they've made some pretty cool stuff with this laptop, and then they go spoil it by default installing all this fucking newb shit all through it, and make it fucking hard to turn off
It's not borked. Well not in any serious way. There is a single stuck-on pixel on the screen. It's always white. I'm trying to decide whether I should call up IBM and get a replacement because of it or not. I'm really not keen to deal with them again, because they would probably tell me to do a factory reformat to fix it. (Aaaaargh I am sure the Demon Crowley is responsible for those paint-by-numbers support checklists.) That would piss me off no end, however I'm sure that having a constantly white pixel defacing the otherwise unspoilt vista of my LCD will cause not a tiny amount of perturbation so who knows.
Advice anybody?
You know they purposely put that pixel there to get back at you for ringing them so much, don't you?
uhhh... ok.
Do i really use caps as much as that?
i was going to express my lament at not being one of angst's favourite people, but then i realised that given the opportunity to define my favourite people, angst would not be top five.
so ner...
He fuckin' loves me to bits.
Yeah but I never ever get to speak to you anymore crush.
So love you as i do, you slip from my thoughts eventually :(
What instant messenger are you using these days?
Send the broken-ass fucker back Jay. You don't have to put up with crap from tech-monkeys, especially IBM tech monkeys!
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin-e.html
That is so cool
Jay and I discovered that a few days ago. I was stoned and he had a hurting brain. Guess who liked it more?
Jay wants to tell you a story about elepahnts.
That must be the fastest moving link on the net right now, and Dave found it, not me. But yes, my brain was all throbby throbby, and those images were like a chopstick straight through the optic nerve.
Elephants to come. Probably. Dave is blasted, so maybe not.
