I hadn’t called sup­port for at least six months. I did, yes­ter­day, because our router went on hol­i­days and I’d neglected to keep a local copy of Big­pond clients, etc., and knew they had a super-secret-accessible-without-authentication FTP site I could down­load one (for the record, it’s 61.9.192.138 under dist/ with anony­mous auth) from. Because I wasn’t going to pay a net cafe/couldn’t be both­ered walk­ing the 1km to the near­est one, and because I couldn’t find an open AP to steal wire­less from(!! and I drove nearly a kilo­me­ter try­ing to, even the usual places were out!).

That was yes­ter­day. Today, I called again because I couldn’t get it un-setup. And got the most com­pletely and utterly clue­less tech­ni­cal sup­port per­son I’ve ever encoun­tered. Not to sound misog­y­nis­tic or any­thing, but… well, no male tech has ever come close to this woman’s sheer level of clue­less­ness. She hadn’t heard about their MAC address lock­ing auth which has been going on since the begin­ning of time. Obvi­ously, this was an imped­i­ment to get­ting things work­ing when clearly it was a lock­ing prob­lem. She read me an SM server IP address off some sheet she had (which, so she claimed, was the way they did things now… yeah, righto. I’m now con­nected just fine with­out any such defined server, thanks) which I entered — of course — to no avail. Then I asked if she knew whether I should be using a SM or a DCE auth server, in light of the fact I’ve been con­nected for a cou­ple of months with­out any prob­lems (no joke… when Tel­stra works, it’s the most spec­tac­u­lar thing in the world. Get­ting it up and run­ning is often quite a dif­fer­ent story.) and she said:

“Uhhh I don’t know… SMTP server? Hmm…”

*josh bangs head against desk*

Some minute and a half later she realises, “Oh, that’s about email, right. Let me check that for you.”

Uhh, yeah, that’s what I wanted you to do three min­utes ago. *waits on hold*

“Well, I just spoke with my super­vi­sor and they don’t know either.”

Please, give more sup­port con­tracts to the Indi­ans. They know more than support-script-monkeys in Aus­tralian call centres.

So, next ques­tion — can you tell me when I’ve shown up as authenticating/connecting in the last 72 hours?

I know what the answer to this ques­tion should be, because they’ve been able to do it before. Hers was “Oh, hang on… oh dear, this is too tech­ni­cal for me.” *Raised eye­brow, before vio­lently rip­ping limbs from tech-support voodoo doll reserved for this pur­pose* Real­is­ing the irony of her state­ment, she laughed air­ily, “And I’m meant to be the sup­port per­son!” Oh, really? *Starts to warm sol­der­ing iron for use in doll’s eyes* Unsur­pris­ingly, she couldn’t fig­ure out what was going on enough to answer my question.

She pro­ceeded to launch into the stan­dard “Oh but you said you were using a router and actu­ally we don’t sup­port those so I’m sorry we’re not really trained in how to use them…” I was tempted to cut her off and start set­ting it up on another com­puter now to prove it still wasn’t work­ing, but thought the pain had gone on long enough. So she con­tin­ued with her “Bad user, you and your stu­pid non-desktop-solution that uses third-party routers.” Nev­er­mind that these routers fea­ture Telstra-licensed heart­beat soft­ware (at least, one would hope so, because bpalo­gin is GPL’d and router firmware cer­tainly isn’t!). I could see the “con­tact the man­u­fac­turer” rec­om­men­da­tion com­ing — it did — but then she threw out another gem that can’t pos­si­bly be ignored. She pro­ceeded to actively rec­om­mend a third-party sup­port com­pany to setup my Tel­stra Big­pond Inter­net con­nec­tion, as though they’d some­how be able to fix my (Telstra-induced) MAC lock­ing problems.

At this point I took the doll down­stairs, and left it sit­ting on the gas stove.

Adden­dum: I have encoun­tered good female techs plenty of times in the past… I’ve just never encoun­tered any male techs this bad. I think it’s prob­a­bly a result of moronic gen­der equity cor­po­rate poli­cies, whereby they employ use­less females to make up the num­bers — sim­ply because not many work in the indus­try, doubt­less at least in part because of the “clue­less female” flack that some appar­ently cop. Proud to be a part of the prob­lem. *rolls eyes* It was said in jest, live with it ;-)