The Joys of Technology

Friday, January 19th, 2007 @ 8:42am

I suppose one of Murphy’s laws could be, “The more you need a piece of technology, the more likely it is for it to break.” I have experienced that on this weekend. Not only with one items, but two as a matter of fact. First, my iPod is in for minor repairs which will take two weeks longer than a mistake on BestBuy’s part. Secondly, my laptop harddrive decided this weekend would be the perfect time to fail. Both of these items I really needed for my long trip this weekend, yet I’m having to cope without both. Oh well.

I do love tech support however, I tried to call Sony up since I wanted to replace my laptop harddrive ASAP, and needed to know if a new harddrive was compatable with an older standard on my laptop. A simple question with a simple “yes” or “no” answer… at least so I thought. My conversation with Sony went something like this:

Me: I need to replace my laptop harddrive. Are newer ATA-6 harddrives compatable with the ATA-5 standard on my laptop?

Sony: (Some mumbo jumbo about how they can’t provide support for new hardware, even though I only asked a simple question that could be solved with such a simple answer)

– Here I explained the problem I have, the steps I tooked to come to the solution that my harddrive no longer works.

Sony: You need to [some steps to reinstall Windows] and [some more steps].

Me: I can’t even follow those steps, because the bios doesn’t even recognize the harddrive.

Sony: Then you need a new drive.

Me: … (Internal Thoughts: Well d’oh. )

I decided at this point, I would be better off with my time spent on google, and sure enough I found the answer within 2 minutes. It frustrates me to no end that tech support can not answer such a simple question reguarding their product. Customer service should be just that, service, and should not feel like a diservice to the very customers you are supposed to be serving.

I have bought a new drive already. It is a good thing though, even though my old harddrive went bad. I’ll have a lot more space for doing things (2x the space infact) and might even try to install Linux. Who knows?

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The Return of the Battery

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 @ 11:32am

…one week later. So I have a test in my Art 200 class today, and planned on leaving a little early so I could show up and have a few minutes of review study. So I go out to my car, and you can probably take a guess at what’s happened. Nothing.

So now I have to get my car taken to the shop on the worst possible day of the week. I just hope it’s fixed pretty soon, because I have a test tomorrow night so I either need to find rides here and back or get a car from my parents until I get it fixed.

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The Battery

Thursday, February 9th, 2006 @ 10:19am

So yesterday was just one of those days. I had left band slightly early so I could try to make my lessons on time on the other side of town. So I walk out to my car and try to unlock, and it won’t unlock with the keyless entry, so I just assume the batteries in the key unit are dead. So I manually unlock my door, and put the keys in the ignition and try to crank and nothing happens. No lights, the engine doesn’t turn over nothing. I figure, no problem since I can get a jumpstart and be on my way. Jeremy was busy with a lesson at the time so I called Mike to come help jumpstart me. So we were outside for around 30 minutes unsuccessfully trying to jumpstart my car.

It gets better. So then I pick up my phone to call my student to let them know I won’t be able to make it, but my screen was dead. Completely black. I couldn’t make any outgoing calls unless I already knew the number. So Jeremy finally finishes with his lesson and I call him to make sure I can get a ride back if I can’t get started. So then I call campus safety as a last resort, and they were somehow finally able to get my engine going, but by this time it’s 6pm and my students are by now 30 minutes away so there’s no way I could make it. So now I had to go home and find some sort of software that would allow me to pull everything from my phone, my contacts, ringtones, everything so that I can hopefully transfer it to a new phone.

I think my mouse batteries are dead too. What’s next?

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