irc... icq... msn... why not dell chat

today i spent my afternoon making friends with a dell operator on dell's online chat.

it was hosted on the US website but i bet it was outsourced as usual to India. especially since i chose to chat from 3-5! the operator's name sounded a bit mexican tho... *shrug*

the chat program itself was pretty impressive. a new browser window opened with a msn-like chat window.

most of the time it felt like i was talking to a robot though. but oh well i guess it's good that they have standard phrases to ensure a certain level of professionalism. reminds me of how teachers used to be able to choose from a bunch of standard comments for our report cards haha. i felt like i ought to be talking more properly but heck it's a chat right.

Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "Hello! Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Support. My Name is Gail. I'll be happy to help you with this in any way I can."
amy: "hi"
Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "I understand that your system is unable to resume from sleep mode, is that correct?"
amy: "yes"
amy: "it's been happening for really long"
Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "Thank you for verifying that for me"
Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "Are you still using Vista OS?"
amy: "yes i think so. the OS that came with my laptop anyway"

but then every now and then, he'd stop using standard responses and lapse into replies which would reassure me he was human after all. like making grammatical mistakes... and revealing that he didn't know what to do! [all humans make mistakes! :P]

Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "I see."
Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "Please allow me 3-5 minutes while I checking this issue."
Agent (Ariegail_Vergara): "Thank you."

on the whole though, the process was rather agonizingly slow and if it wasn't for the fact that i was occupied with doing other stuff while waiting for instructions, i would probably have been rather frustrated. and when he finally replied, he usually spewed a whole bunch of copy and paste instructions and would then have to wait really long for me to catch up on them.
not that i had much success with his instructions any way. and he told me to do so many things that i was seriously doubting whether it was all necessary or whether he was just trying every single possible thing, hoping to chance on the solution. easy for him to say of course. he's the one sitting there copying and pasting while i frantically try to find all the stuff on my laptop, turn things off and on, screw and unscrew panels, etc etc.

so after 2 hrs i still don't know if any of his instructions were any use. it would have gone on longer too if i hadn't been saved by the phone and asked out.