Stupid people.

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Wow... all this time when I read those trouble shooting pages whose first suggestion is "plug in your computer" it just never clicked that people could really be *that* dumb and I figured they were just talking down to the users.

TallyMan a word of advice, in my experience of the French the majority can speak English. The trouble arises when the person they are about to converse with is English. The French are see the English as lazy and arrogant when it comes to learning other languages; so they simply refuse to help out. May I suggest that you tell them that you are an Australian or New Zealander you will be amazed at how fluent in English they suddenly become and don't worry they don't really get accents.

This happened to me when I worked on an internet help desk

Generally this sort of issue has an acronym PEBCAK

Problem exists between chair and keyboard

Oh NO!...NO NO NO!... you made a loop there...
Whoops..

Damn. I'm stupid.

Slightly Off-Topic: A lot of the free software is written by employees of big companies like Sun or IBM. Other parts are written at universities and research centres. Perhaps the quantity of free software is still the product of hobbies, but very important core elements of Linux and Linux-application wouldn't exist in the current state without the work of paid employees.

This may well be a fact, and my friend does paid programming work in the open source world. If its viewed as infrastructure its entirely possible that employees get paid to program, much as a labourer might clear earth to put in a sidewalk. Neither makes the company money, but its work that enables other activities.

They really need to start issuing licenses for computers. Just like a driver's license, so that way people without them can't use a computer. That would make myself (and I;m sure alot of other geeks) very, very happy.

Still slightly OFF TOPIC: It is easy to understand. A company like IBM does not make its money by selling software licences,but mostly by selling hardware and consulting. To create free software makes so e.g. for IBM a lot of sense.

I've been dealing with tech support on and offline (I actually am tech support at work... for over 20 years.

Back in the day, you could get decent tech support. They would actually train the person on the other end on hardware or software, and you could actually learn things that weren't in the manuals, white papers, or tech advisories.

Now, anything to do with IT that doesn't require laying hands on a particular piece of kit in a particular location is either being outsourced as fast as possible (at least in the US), or if that isn't fast enough; actually bringing people from the outsourcing countries in, to learn the skills and go back to their home countries to continue the process.

What we have now are what I call 'script kiddies'; people who have a bare minimum of understanding, who have a 'script' in front of them; a series of questions (that always starts with the fabled 'are you plugged in?', and you know this. You can even hear this, when you sickeningly realize that you actually know more than the guy on the other end (and no...his name's not 'Bob', either...

Then you wind up playing 'support roulette', by hanging up, and hoping the next idjit knows a little more than they did before.

Oh, and I've long written down any serial number for any program, whether on the packaging or generated by the software, and store it with the install disk. I've seen too many mistakes in my time...

There was a time when they didn't have software keys or serial numbers for software. Back when I first started, there was a program called Wordstar. It fit on a single floppy, and wasn't copy protected. By a year or so after it was released, about 50% of the copies out there were illegitimate, and they went out of business.

Email tech support is also a very weak area with a lot of companies, if you email a question they don't have a scripted answer to they tend to give you the reply for an entirely different question that they do have the answer for

Dell were (are?) hopeless in this regard. I nearly bought a computer off them a few years ago, but had a very specific technical question about the hardware, nothing too complex so sent an email to their tech support. I got a reply back from what they called a "robot". The robot gave me a 7 page document of questions and answers none of which answered my question. I decided that if their pre-sales support was this bad I wasn't even going to find out what their post-sales support was going to be like, so bought from a different company.

I vaguelly remember Wordstar, I seem to remember a friend having it on his Amstrad PCW computer. Can you remember the 5 1/4 inch floppy disks with Lotus 123 on them? The disks had a primitive DRM on them to prevent copying and they somehow managed to record how many installations you had done with the disk, limiting you to the number of licences purchased. Pretty neat stuff.

If I recall, they repetitively wrote to one sector of the disk until it went bad. By checking that sector they were able to ascertain if you were allowed to install again.

Yeah...I had some program that bypassed the security on Lotus...but the statute of limitations has run out...

Yup, Wordstar was on a 5.25" floppy. It turned up again in some Modem software about 10 years later, but then faded away...