6 May
1997
6 May
'97
4:10 p.m.
In message <51194C00BD39CF11839000805F385DB204C50957(a)RED-65-MSG.dns.microsoft.com>
you wrote:
About 9 years ago when I was in our end user support
organization, I had
occasion to speak to Jerry. He was threatening to give QuickBasic a
scathing review because he couldn't get it to compile Mrs. Pournelle's
Reading Program (what else?) under Windows 386. He called up our
QuickBasic group manager and just about carved him a new orifice. I, as
the Windows support lead, was asked to call him on this very urgent,
sky-is-falling problem and help him out, since as you may have noticed
from years of columns, he never, ever calls support himself. The
conversation went something like this:
Me: "Hi Mr. Pournelle, this is Kai with Microsoft Product Support..."
Jerry: "What the HELL are you DOING calling during my DINNER TIME?!?"
Me: "I'm sorry sir, I understood you had a very urgent issue, and I had
no way of knowing..."
Jerry: "YOU PEOPLE are MORONS! <blah blah blah blah>"
And things went downhill from there. Later on we finally got to the
problem, which as I recall was related to a bizarre SCSI adapter in that
silly Cheetah 386 he had, the one into which he would put any piece of
hardware any manufacturer ever sent to him for free.
Not a great experience. I spoke to him again a few months later on a
different issue, and he was no more lucid or logical on that occasion.
Kai
I have read many letters here and I hope this is NOT what we are going
to continually hear - Microsoft reps patting themselves on the back
because they and the company can NEVER BE WRONG. Let's keep company
reps out if they only want to glorify the company (that basically has
the computer world in turmoil with poor quality non-innovative
software).
--
Lindsay Thachuk
in Western Canada with the World's Best Computer
- the Acorn RiscPC with the only StrongARM in ARMstrong