Tim: >> After dealing with some alleged "tech support," >> sometimes you want to reboot the person. Bill: > Hmmmm.... > I could read that in more than one way! > :} Exactly! > Modem reboots/resets are a pain. Gotta hold a teeny, recessed button > in for 30+ seconds; or unplug the modem, remove the battery, put the > battery back in, and plug the modem back in. Either way, it's then > 15+ minutes for the thing to boot up. No fun with me, either, with a fibre modem bolted on the wall a foot up from the floor, with a tiny reset hole facing down (as well as all the furniture in the way). It's just about as hard to unplug its DC power plug from the UPS (which has no off switch, at all). Likewise there's a 10 minute wait before it comes alive, it's slow to boot, and the ISP is slow to configure things. Sometimes it won't authenticate and you can go through a few reboots. Our phone goes through it, good luck if you needed to make an emergency call and had to reset the box, first. The phone used to go through the modem/router, too, as VOIP, until I protested. That added another 5 minute wait till you could use the phone. And the modem/router had no battery backup. This was supposed to be progress!!! > My understanding is that the customer service reps are just > following scripts (and "orders"). What's bad is the hard time they > give me when I ask to escalate, and the high monthly fee I pay the > ISP. It's why I hate large ISPs. The smaller ones generally don't have call centres. They have techs running the place, notice their own faults soon, and know how to fix yours. > I wonder how much of that fee goes to the huge amount of advertising > they do. That would be no surprise. In many businesses, the cost of the product is often far less than the marketing. Especially if its mass marketing. All our essential services are like that after they were privatised, that just pushed prices through the roof, as they just priced gouged everyone up to the point that people were willing to pay. I was mind boggled by a news article trying to claim that privatisation had pushed prices down, where elsewhere in the same article was a table of prices showing how *everything* had gone up, very much. Unfortunately, we're too used to spin, but it's staggering to see someone try and say one thing while providing contrary evidence. > Then there's that almost universal tech support answer: > "We don't support Linux.". Which, generally speaking, is easier to support. The users tend to be less clueless, and it's more a case of "tell me the info," rather than "where do I type it in?" -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 5.0.16-100.fc28.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue May 14 18:22:28 UTC 2019 x86_64 Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages posted to the mailing list. It seems the modern trend with Linux programmers is to change existing software so that it's more annoying to use (e.g. making reboots required, when they never used to be), then denying that *that* is a nuisance, then saying it's necessary (ignoring that several years of prior versions didn't have that stupid requirement), then complaining about being criticised for making things worse. Don't try giving me an Emperor's New Clothes routine, it won't wash. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
