PC Help Lines

The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn't get her new
Dell computer to turn on. John Dower, a Dell Computer Corp.
technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked
the woman what happened when she pushed the power button. "I've
pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens," the
woman replied. "Foot pedal?" the technician asked. "Yes," the
woman said, "this little white foot pedal with the on switch."
The "foot pedal," it turned out, was the computer's mouse, a
hand-operated device that helps to control the computer's
operations.


One woman called Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install
batteries in her laptop. When told that the directions were on
the first page of the manual, says Steve Smith, Dell director of
technical support, the woman replied angrily, "I just paid
$2,000 for this !@#? thing, and I'm not going to read a book."


Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is inundated by some
8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one related
by technician John Wolf: "A frustrated customer called, who said
her brand new Contura would not work. She said she had unpacked
the unit, plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for 20
minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what
happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked, 'What
power switch?'"


Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So many
people have called to ask where the "any" key is when "Press Any
Key" flashes on the screen that Compaq is considering changing
the command to "Press Return Key."


Some people can't figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, an AST
technical support supervisor, says one customer complained that
her mouse was hard to control with the "dust cover" on. The
cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged
in. Dell technician Wayne Zieschang says one of his customers
held the mouse and pointed it at the screen, all the while
clicking madly.


Disk drives are another bugaboo. One customer was having trouble
reading word-processing files from his old diskettes. After
troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the
problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with the
diskette. The customer's response: "I put a label on the
diskette, roll it into the typewriter..."


At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a technician's
request that she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk. A
letter from the customer arrived a few days later, along with a
Xerox copy of the floppy.


At Dell, a technician advised his customer to put his troubled
floppy back in the drive and "close the door." Asking the
technician to "hold on," the customer put the phone down and was
heard walking over to shut the door to his room.


The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling. A
Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax
anything. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician
discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding
it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.


Another customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer
worked. He had cleaned it, he said, filling up his tub with soap
and water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and then removing
all the keys and washing them individually.