I Should Hate Dell (4 comments)
I spent an hour and a half on the phone with a Dell tech support representative this afternoon. One of the movie channel computers has a broken hard disk drive, and I called to ask for a replacement. Convinced that there were things I'd not thought of, he demanded that I do more testing to confirm the drive is dead. That's just doing his job; I can handle that if the tech knows what he's talking about. But this guy spent most of our conversation looking up information in the wrong manuals, both from the RAID controller and the disk itself. And that would have been forgivable if he'd have just paid attention when I said things like "I haven't changed the SCSI IDs. They're set exactly the same as the identical drives using an identical controller in an identical machine which are functioning perfectly with their factory settings." But as it was, he chose to ignore perfectly good reasons for replacement. Mainly, the drive has two status LEDs on it: one stays on all the time and the other blinks really fast all the time, even when there's no cable connected to it. Not only that, but I have three identical drives that don't exhibit that behavior and all three work correctly. It could be coincidence, but there should be a limit to second guessing when the machine has a "we'll get a tech to fix it for you within four hours" warranty.
In other news, Mel got a scale this week. I stepped on it and found that I had almost 20 pounds of me that I didn't know were there. I'm pondering doing something about it. For now, I'm going to track my intake and see exactly how badly my penchants for red meat and Mountain Dew are affecting my diet.