[ale] Enterprise Linux's

Sean Kilpatrick drifter at oppositelock.org
Tue Oct 11 09:15:25 EDT 2005


On Tuesday 11 October 2005 06:33 am, Geoffrey wrote:
> I've never really understood the "pro-American ONLY" approach to 
> things. ?I can understand showing preference for American products, or 
> even preference for another nation's products (think: BWM, Mercedes, and
> even Mushu Pork). 

I do not care at all _where_ help-desk support people are sitting.
But I care a _lot_ about their knowledge base and their ability to
impart that knowledge to me.

Like others on this list I dropped MIndspring/Earthlink when they moved
their tech support to the Philippines. It was bad enough struggling to
understand someone who had a very limited grasp of English and a thick
accent, but what made the experience unacceptable was the lack of
knowledge. On three different occasions I spoke to MIndspring "help
desk" personages who had no clue what a DNS server might be, could
not extract meaning from my comment that "I can't even ping your DNS
server," and who had no idea what  TCP or SSH might refer to. All three
times these poorly trained people were in the Philippines.  Amongst them
all I never found one who could speak any Unix commands, or could even
comprehend that their might be an Operating System other than Windows.

I gave up.

I signed on to Mindspring back in the mid-'90s because their tech
help was so good. I was running OS/2 back then but I always got a techie
who could speak enough Unix to work me through my problem. Not any more.

Geoffrey is right: a help desk that can not communicate doesn't help.

Sean

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