Boxing Day

Is the day after Christmas, commonly known as Boxing Day, not celebrated in the USA? In Canada, most stores are open for shopping (who would want to rush back into the stores so soon after the Christmas madness?) other businesses have it off. Of course, where I work, doing support for Dell in the USA, only have 35% of their normal staff come in. Guess what, it was busy as hell, they even called people to beg them to come to work for at least a few hours to deal with the mass of callers. And what did all these callers have in common? They all had spyware or viruses infecting their computers.

I had no break between calls, it was constant. Of course everybody who called had dial up so it took forever to get them working. None had current antivirus programs so you couldn't even run a virus scan to get all the virusese on their computers. Many you couldn't even get past a blue screen at boot up. It was a nightmare.

The one amazing thing is a guy has a brand spanking new computer and the first thing he wants to do, is use Kazaa on it. When he tried to run the program it gave him an error saying it couldn't connect to the remote server and would not actually open We all know that Kazaa allows people to share pirated software and songs. What's even more annoying is the stupid fuck in sales actually sold them a software support package to support the program for downloading pirated software. Tried to explain to the guy Dell doesn't recommend the use of Kazaa nor support as it is a file sharing program. Guy flipped out whining he doesn't care if it gets viruses or spyware on his computer he just wants to download stuff. Finally walked him through how to disable his firewalls and told him to try Kazaa to see if it works..of course he has dial up so couldn't try it while on the phone. So told him to try it and call in if it doesn't work.

What I wanted to do was just say Dell won't support the theft of software, and transfer him back to sales to get his money back from the moron who sold him the software support contract to begin with. I would have flat out refused support if it wasn't for the fact the customer would just insist on a supervisor anyway...and of course there were none available due to having only a third of our normal staff. The managers and mentors in this place are morons.