Bill Gates runs Apple, in Texas…

The world is full of people who have an overblown sense of self importance. Usually such people think that everyone else is beneath them. So, it seems odd that a guy who thinks he can threaten Apple makes those threats to someone in tech support. If thisn guy is as big as he thinks he is why isn’t he calling ‘Bill Gates’ himself? And if he doesn’t have Billy’s ear why does he think that the folks in tech support do? Apparently nobody told him that an informed threat is more menacing than one full of errors. Hyperbole also makes a threat less credible: If you can afford $30k to run a full page ad in the New York Times complaining that Apple won’t extend your warranty to eighteen months than you can afford to pay for the repairs and save yourself the embarassment of having your recording passed around the call center.

The moral of the story is that if you want your warranty extended be nice, play the broke student card, beg… don’t threaten tech support that you will use your pull to keep Bill Gates from building a new Apple campus in Texas and make it sound like you can afford to piss away $30k because you are stupid and refuse to come to terms with it.


The son of god uses a Performa…

I don’t know how to describe this guy, other than he’s nuts. Sure, we all tell tech support some crazy things to get help; but sane people keep it confined to the likes of “We are planning on purchasing 500 of these for out office, except we need to clear this one hurdle.” This guy has none of the filters that sane people have that help differentiate between reality and fantasy. He is the kind of guy who starts talking to you about hard drives at Fry’s and once he starts rambling you pray that the display case would topple and crush you out of your misery. He claims to own Apple Computer, yet bought his daughter a Mac Performa at Sears in 1974, he keeps military secrets on it, is the son of god, and has the president answering to him. The really scary thing is that people like this walk amongst us. You can hear the relief in the woman’s voice when she finally gets to transfer him away, only to have her hopes dashed as he keeps the call going.



Disks are Unimportant

When you call tech support, never, ever, admit that you have software on your machine for which you don’t have the install media. The tech support agent sounds a little suprised that this guy is admitting this. Pretending to be stupid is not a good way to cover this kind of mistake, no matter how much amusement it gives the tech support agent.



I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.