I'm ranting a lot today, must be the holidays!
Last night I had the pleasure of talking to the worst trained technical CSR ever. And he worked for Microsoft. If you want to skip the whole story just read the two sentences in bold.
The problem was with my Zune. Over the weekend it stopped syncing. I went to the Zune site and tried every solution on the site until I got to the last (re-install the Zune software) which worked. The only problem I had was that I lost my play counts which I use to filter out listened to Podcasts and audio book tracks.
Then I noticed something new. An icon would appear by all my songs that said I don't have sync rights. But everything would sync and the icon would disappear. This happened every time I connected my Zune, and on every track I downloaded with my Zune Pass before the re-install. The songs I downloaded after were not effected.
So I decided to call Microsoft's Zune support to see if there was a fix and give them a heads up on the bug. What I got was a real winner.
1 - He repeating my problem back to me incorrect 4 times. You can't see your songs? Your Zune won't sync? You can't download? and back again to You can't see your songs? Finally he understood.
2 - I told him everything I tried so he went to get a supervisor. Hold. Hold. Hold. Okay, try to restore your library through the account management. I told him twice already I did this, knowing that was going to be the first thing he suggested. But he had me try again anyway.
Now this is pretty par for course for a level 1 CSR. But things get really stupid after this. He gets his supervisor again and comes up with a new solution. Resetting my DRM. Not a bad idea, but a little scary so I want him to just e-mail me the link so I can try it later. I don't want to make things worse. Get ready.
3 - He keeps trying to get me to search for a knowledge base article number that is too short. I ask him to just read me the full URL. Dead air. Do you know what a URL is? Nope. He had no clue what a URL was or a web address or a browser!
4 - He decides to walk me through it since he can't figure out what a URL is. This is a painful process of click here, click there when we get to this: Open your DRM folder. Where is it? On your computer. Duh, where on my computer. C. The root of my C drive. Huh? Wait, do you know what a folder is? Nope. He had no clue what a folder or directory was!
Where is Microsoft getting these people?