[OT] I found a bug in Excel 2016

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 10:38:41AM -0400, Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Here is my story:
> 
> http://www.schveiguy.com/blog/2017/05/how-to-report-a-bug-to-microsoft/
[...]

This brings back the memories of those horrible tech support phone calls
I used to make back when I was a customer of a Certain Large Phone
Company that basically held monopoly over the region's DSL/phone
networks.  Even though this was almost 20 years ago, based on more
recent experiences with tech support phone calls I'm highly skeptical
that the situation has improved since.  Perhaps the only "improvement"
is that now instead of level 1 support monkeys reading off a scorecard
they have a phonebot with voice recognition tech answering questions
from the same scorecard.

In one incident, I spent countless hours bouncing between level 1
support scorecard-reading monkeys and level 2 it's-a-problem-on-your-end
level 2 support people before they agreed to escalate my problem into an
actual ticket.  Which, upon the very next phone call, had disappeared
from their ticketing system, so I had to start from ground zero, again.
After who knows how many rounds of this nonsense, I finally got through
to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, who finally,
after 3 *days* of telephone ping-pong, figured out that I needed to talk
to the accounts department because apparently there was a problem with
my account that caused the system to disconnect my DSL line. And of
course, there was no notification of this problem at all, no phone
calls, no letters, no email, no nothing.  You'd think that after having
asked me for my account info for the n'th time after X phone calls and
supposedly checking my account on their system, the tech support people
ought to have noticed that something was wrong with my account status.
But no, they're apparently committed to continue providing free tech
support even after a customer's account has gotten into an invalid
state. Very generous of them.  Their proposed solutions to my account
problem were to reboot my Windows (I was running Linux -- but don't even
try explaining what that means to them, it's not on their scorecard),
unplug the cable and plug it back in, power-cycle the modem, make sure
my monitor was turned on, buying a new network cable and trying that
instead, ad nauseaum.  None of which is even relevant to the actual
problem, but hey, it's free tech support!


T

-- 
People say I'm indecisive, but I'm not sure about that. -- YHL, CONLANG