Skip to content

30 August 2000
  • Met with one of our new employees today. His name is Greg. He’ll be doing distro stuff. I told him about my new apartment and then we chatted about the different kinds of services we could get at my place (phone, DSL, cable, etc.) Unfortunately, for whatever reason, my location seems to be devoid of 21st century technology. The cable service there is CableVision, which is also what Nat has. It has two lines (A and B) running into the box, and you cannot view channels without switching that on the box. It’s completely retarded. It’s like when I was 5 and we had cable out in the country because we coudln’t get a decent TV reception. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a flashback to 80’s technology.
  • Called Dell to get them to send out a guy to fix my laptop. An entire column of keys was totally hosed. The 8, i, k, and comma keys were intermittant at best.

    Dell’s technical support system is pretty confusing. First, when you call in, you have to go through a series of automated menus. Fine. It’s kind of annoying how slow those people talk, but I can handle pushing some buttons. When you finally get to the point where you want to talk to someone, they ask that you to punch in an “Express Service Code” to direct your call at someone who would be good at answering your question. Okay. Beep Boop Boop Beep Beep Boop. I get a guy, who then asks me for my “Service Tag”. I give it to him, some other info, and then before I can even describe my problem tells me to call this other 800 number.

    Uh, okay.

    I dial the new number, and I get the exact same menus as I did the first time. Fine. Whatever. I follow the menus and get a human. This guy’s name was Brooks. Brooks was cool. He mentioned how he was glad to get someone who wasn’t screaming and cursing at him. I asked him if that was common. He said it wasn’t too bad, but that in training they have a procedure for dealing with people like that.

    They transfer the frothing customer to the “irate customer queue” where specialists take the call, berate the customer, and then hang up on the customer. I like Dell.

    Then, while we were waiting for him to dispatch someone and such, he told me some stories. We had good times. We laughed. Today’s Gold Star goes to Brooks at Dell in Texas for his help and friendly conversation.

  • Went to Newbury Street to buy fidoras. Unfortunately, it’s still summer, so all they had were summer hats. Nat “Columbian Drug Lord” Friedman bought a white straw one. I’ll come back a little later and get one that goes with my coat. Nat owes me one, afterall.
  • Pamplona with Nat “Coffee Bean” Friedman. He jamed his phone into the table and got it stuck. It took him 20 minutes to get it out.

    You’re doing just fine, senor.

  • Picked Jacob up at the airport. His flight was 30 minutes late so Nat bought some stuff off of the Sprint PCS Wireless Web. Pretty neat, that. A lot of the services still suck but it has a lot of potential.
  • Went to the Cave to watch Friends, since the phone line got fixed. There were three seperate breaks in the line. Go Verizon! Anyway, TiVo’s modem seems dead, because we couldn’t get it to connect. BAD TIVO!
  • Destination: Toppers. Speed limit: INFINITY!
Comments? Feel free to trackback to this post or email me directly. This entry (permalink) was posted on at 8:00 pm.