What am I going to do at work today? I am going to spend a few hours wrestling with my work laptop and HPE support as I try to make this error go away.
Right now I cannot log on, except from a full reboot, and even then I have no network access (wired or wireless). It is a bit of a productivity killer.
There are a couple of frustrating things with this*.
First, this is the same problem I had a month ago. HPE, who provide our work IT support, struggled with it for a few days. Eventually they swapped the SSD into a new laptopo chassis, and when that didn’t fix the problem they just nuked the hard drive. The re-image cost me two days work that time. And now the problem is back.
The other frustrating thing is going to be spending all the time dealing with support people. It is a cheap shot to complain about Tech Support. There are a lot of smart hard working people in that line of business. They are generally constrained by the “one-size-fits-all” processes they are required to follow. And they do have to deal with a very very large number of clueless idiots (I know I have briefly done the job). But it would be nice if they were a little consistent in how they deal with people’s issues.
When I dealt with HPE about this the last time, three different people gave me three different approaches. One support person told me the others were lying to me. And I encountered Kafkaesque things like HPE taking a backup of my machine before they re-imaged it, but asking me to wait 2 days to get access to the backup when they returned it.
Would Don always look as suave if he had to spend an hour on the phone to tech support?
This sort of stuff is not good for my blood pressure! So today I resolve to be calm and professional, when dealing with the support team – while still being firm. And I reserve the right to be point out contradictions and idiocy in their instructions to me. All the while wishing I could do this with a stiff drink in my hand. Wish me luck.
* When I ran this blog before I sometimes felt I was doing a bit too much ranting. It’s something I want to avoid with this incarnation. So when you read a post like this, I hope you understand I am approaching the whole thing with a positive and hopeful mindset. As naive as that may be of me 🙂
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