Missives from the 6th Floor

I'll give you a hint - the call that sucked wasn't with a company spelled U-L-T-R-A. That one was easy - I called them, told them the problem (the cooling fan in her power supply failed), gave them the purchase date, the vendor, and the order number, they issued an RMA, then happily took a credit card to arrange a cross-ship. Total time, including hold, under 15 minutes.

The Garmin call, however, was something of a cluster-fuck. After spending nearly 40 minutes on hold, I got a tech who didn't know her proverbial ass from her elbow, insisted that it was my firewall causing the communications issue and wanted to remote into my machine. Despite being happy to blame it on a firewall, she didn't know what ports her application was communicating on, what servers it was communicating with, and couldn't describe what she was going to do to diagnose it if I allowed her remote access.

While waiting for her to consult a "senior tech" to find out port information (he/she didn't know either - how exactly does one become a "senior support technician" without understanding anything about the application one is supposed to support?) I installed Wireshark and offered to tell her what ports her application was talking on (turns out it was just HTTP, no firewall issues at all).

She wasn't interested - just kept repeating that I needed to turn off the firewall.

I got off the phone after nearly an hour disgusted with Garmin - so I'm trying to decide if I email them and tell them that the last guy who updated their website broke their update application.

The conversation between my machine and theirs pretty clearly shows that someone caused requests from the update application to get redirected to the front page of the website - which I'm pretty sure isn't what they really wanted.