When contacting a tech support center, you are stuck with the luck of the draw. Sometimes you can be connected to somebody who truly knows something. On the other hand, you can get a person who can’t help you because they don’t know the right thing to do.
This is what happened to me when I had a problem trying to get mobile broadband. For some time I had two devices; a USB version and a MiFi, or free-standing, version. Some devices don’t take USB. The MiFi provider had changed their policies about automatically billing for monthly access, and for three months in a row I was caught short, with no access, because my efforts to pay for my MiFi and set up billing did not work.
When all else fails, Americans don’t wait around. They move on. I figures, why not just get a better broadband and just use one. Heck, it will save me money and I can use all my devices on one unit. So I bought a MiFi from my USB provider and tried to set it up, but it wasn’t helping me get started. I called tech support and got a nice-sounding woman who tried to help by suggesting rebooting the system, moving the unit closer to a window and using a paper clip tip to hit the reset button. She suggested that Windows 8 might not be right for the unit. This after I had already been assured that it would work and the box was mangled beyond return status.
Nothing worked to get the MiFi working, and I was getting upset enough to do what many a computer user has threatened to do: take the entire laptop and all the accessories and unceremoniously drop them from the fifth floor roof.
Instead, I took her advice and later retrieved an old laptop with Windows Vista (old technology), called tech support back and got a fellow who went over what had been done so far, then suggested I press F5 on my Windows 8 machine. Suddenly a choir singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” sounded throughout the land when the Internet sprang to life. The call took ten minutes, while my previous calls took up nearly an hour. It was all because he knew one thing to do that the others could not. Also that I didn’t know to do in a pinch. He explained that the system was locked up, so F5 reset it.
I’ll have to remember that when life itself has me all locked up.
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