Geek Rant

I really, really hate tech support. Mary's mother just bought a laptop--her first home computer in a long time--and we were very excited, both because it was a shiny new 12" Powerbook, and also because she got DSL and a wireless router to go with it.

However, I have spent all week struggling to get the wireless network to work. There are two problems. The first is that although it cheerfully says that the router should work fine with Macs, there is absolutely zero instruction on how a Mac owner is supposed to set up the network. The instructions tell you to use some Windows setup assistant thing to get it going, and because it is a third-party router, not an Airport, there's nothing I could do about it.

Secondly, the tech support people have absolutely no training. It was perfectly clear that the woman on the phone was simply listening to my problems, and looking up the answers in the same manual I already had handy. And it was even worse when Mary's mother called by herself--the Verizon tech support people swore it was a problem with her computer, so she drove all the way out to an Apple Store because Verizon told her it was Apple's fault. It wasn't, of course. I eventually figured out how to manually configure the router myself, and it's all working fine now, but grr!