robotech_master (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
robotech_master) wrote2011-02-18 05:57 am
robotech_master) wrote2011-02-18 05:57 am
Any way you want it, that's the way you need it…
My new job at work has been proving to be interesting. I'm starting to get over the worst of the "I don't know what the heck I'm doing" jitters and learning how to do what I need to do. I'm now taking phone calls to support a major retailer's store brands of Internet-capable TVs, Blu-Ray players, Internet routers, A/V cables, and the GPS devices the company sells.
I was nervous at first—what do I know from Blu-Ray players?—but it turned out that, just as with the computer support job, a lot of the questions are the same ones over and over again: either they're having trouble getting their TV or Blu-Ray player to talk to the Internet so they can stream Netflix, or—God help me, I'm not kidding here—they're upset and confused by the black bars to either side of the picture on their TV screen. There's also a hefty helping of "Why won't my Blu-Ray player play [very recent Blu-Ray release]?"
I can already tell I'm going to become even more cynical about Hollywood than I have been over the course of this job. I used to be bemused and I'm on my way to being actively angry that Hollywood has gotten so paranoid about people cracking encryption that they actually break their own product every few months and people can't play newer-released movies until they update the firmware on their DVD players.
Firmware updates are not a walk in the park. Every time you update firmware on a device, there's a non-trivial chance that something will go wrong and you'll brick it until you can get a techie to fix it. They ought to be reserved for emergency matters like fixing security problems or manufacturing defects. They shouldn't be required every few months as a sop to movie studio paranoia.
Has there ever been any industry so full of itself to burden the people who are buying its product with a complicated procedure fraught with difficulty? "You might be a thief, so you have to jump through hoops to use our product." And honestly, as many 720P and 1080P rips of movies I see circulating on BitTorrent, it's not like it's even effective anyway. It's no wonder that streaming services like Netflix are becoming more and more popular.
Anyway, so far the job isn't as tricky or stressful as Geek Squad was, and I'm no longer required to try to make sales. So on the whole, I think this is going to be pretty cool.
Right now, my iPod and iPad just finished syncing, so I'm off to Carthage for a long-delayed chiropractic visit, then back to Springfield for a three-day weekend at VisionCon.
I was nervous at first—what do I know from Blu-Ray players?—but it turned out that, just as with the computer support job, a lot of the questions are the same ones over and over again: either they're having trouble getting their TV or Blu-Ray player to talk to the Internet so they can stream Netflix, or—God help me, I'm not kidding here—they're upset and confused by the black bars to either side of the picture on their TV screen. There's also a hefty helping of "Why won't my Blu-Ray player play [very recent Blu-Ray release]?"
I can already tell I'm going to become even more cynical about Hollywood than I have been over the course of this job. I used to be bemused and I'm on my way to being actively angry that Hollywood has gotten so paranoid about people cracking encryption that they actually break their own product every few months and people can't play newer-released movies until they update the firmware on their DVD players.
Firmware updates are not a walk in the park. Every time you update firmware on a device, there's a non-trivial chance that something will go wrong and you'll brick it until you can get a techie to fix it. They ought to be reserved for emergency matters like fixing security problems or manufacturing defects. They shouldn't be required every few months as a sop to movie studio paranoia.
Has there ever been any industry so full of itself to burden the people who are buying its product with a complicated procedure fraught with difficulty? "You might be a thief, so you have to jump through hoops to use our product." And honestly, as many 720P and 1080P rips of movies I see circulating on BitTorrent, it's not like it's even effective anyway. It's no wonder that streaming services like Netflix are becoming more and more popular.
Anyway, so far the job isn't as tricky or stressful as Geek Squad was, and I'm no longer required to try to make sales. So on the whole, I think this is going to be pretty cool.
Right now, my iPod and iPad just finished syncing, so I'm off to Carthage for a long-delayed chiropractic visit, then back to Springfield for a three-day weekend at VisionCon.
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Video games, but I suspect that Sony was a major driving force behind the concept in both industries anyway.
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I did tech support at a hole-in-the-wall isp for 10 years.
You know those sites that have tech support humor? Coffee holder broke, that sort of thing?
I can't read them, they make me cry, because I've had those calls. I could only imagine dealing with general consumer hardware. Actually I don't have to imagine. I dealt with an internet connected TV (I occasionally get support calls where noone has a clue how to help the guy). The first problem was that our modem doesn't have 'wireless' built in.
The second, call back problem is that getting a wireless router apparantly doesn't let the TV and computer communicate with it wirelessly; they don't actually, you know, have wireless capability.
On the fourth call (the third dealing with no, the $5 phone cable you bought at the dollar general is not the same as a network cable, even if the ends kinda fit and do snap in) I basically had to puzzle out how to tell the TV to do DHCP since it apparantly had decided there was no DHCP server, since it had not been able to detect one (when it wasn't plugged in).
He had called the TV support number he had but they told him we had to give him and IP for the TV, and to make sure it did not start with 192.168, 10., or 172., because those were not real numbers.
/sigh.
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