Jessa recently bought a new computer from HP, and, unfortunately, the graphics card was defective-on-arrival. After doing a fair amount of troubleshooting ourselves (and, truthfully, correctly diagnosing the problem), it was time to call up HP support to get the ball rolling on getting a replacement. Listening to Jessa talk to support reminded me why talking to tech support is never a fun proposition. At the core, I think, is that neither person on the call trusts that the other knows that they are doing.

As technical customers with years of training and job experience in technical troubleshooting, Jessa and I did a lot of legwork before we even called technical support. As such, our hope was to be able to start somewhere closer to what we had narrowed down. The early questions the tech asked, such as, “what have you tried so far?” seemed like we might, but the hours we spent afterward doing things like turning it off and on again, reinstalling software, reinstalling drivers, resetting to factory settings, and, finally, getting the computer into a state where it wouldn’t stay booted, made us lose trust in our tech. He asked what we had done, then did it all over again, and got nowhere closer to the problem (and, in fact, made it worse). Continue reading Talking to Computer Support →