I'm not normally the kind of guy to complain about tech support, since I have worked in that business and know it's not easy. But the corporate IT process is just fundamentally broken. Let me describe.
My laptop started freezing shortly after login time. Sounds like bad RAM to me, so I boot up the wonderful memtest86+ to see what it says. Sure enough, bad RAM, So I contact our helpdesk and start the process.
A very nice person in the Philippines picked up the other end of my IM session. I explained the situation, and he said "Ok" a lot. When I described how I had run memtest86+ and discovered the bad RAM, his inscrutable response was "I can check that for you." I wonder how he's going to do that, exactly. Anyway, he issued me a ticket number and would have ended it there if I had not asked him what to expect next (a call from someone more local, apparently).
I got a call from someone at least in the same country with me, who told me I had to call Lenovo, since they have the warranty on this particular laptop. I'm not sure why I have to call them, since they're supposed to be the IT department around here, but sure, I'm game.
So I called up Lenovo, who helpfully looked up my laptop and told me I must have some third-party RAM since it only shipped with 2 gigs and I now have 4. So back to my IT guy, who told me to open up the laptop and pull out the third-party RAM and see if that solves the problem.
Now, I've opened up a laptop before (an old iBook, and boy was that scary), and I've seen a ThinkPad splayed open before, and I have to say that scared me too. But it turns out it was fairly easy, since it's just RAM and not a whole motherboard, which I had replaced twice on my old ThinkPad.
Anyway, I pulled out the Kingston RAM and re-ran memtest86+, proving that the Kingston RAM was bad. Back on the phone with IT, he told me I had to call the reseller who put that RAM into it originally. Again, I'm not sure why I have to call, I don't have a relationship with the vendor; that's why we have an IT department, right?
Now I think I will have a new 2 gig Kingston RAM stick coming to me in the mail, and then I have to ship the original stick back to Kingston. Again, I'm not sure why I have to ship the thing, since I haven't ever bought anything from Kingston, but I'll do anything at this point.
What should have happened? I don't really have a complaint about the guy in Manila, there's not much he can do from the other side of the planet, and besides I still feel a little guilty about what we did to them a century ago. But local IT guy should have looked up my laptop in his asset management system and seen that I have some third-party RAM, told me that either one of them could be bad, so I could check which one was wrong to start with. After I determined that the Kingston one was bad, he should have called up the reseller himself and then called me back to tell me he was having new RAM shipped to me with a return shipping envelope for the old one.
I mean, really. This is why we have IT, isn't it? What if I didn't know anything about computers?
