First World Problems
Totally a first world problem but the surrealism of the situation threw me off.
I had an ol’ clunker of a Dell computer that I was trying to inject a few more years of life into. It was still good and I couldn’t afford a brand new box at the time. Wanting to install an extra hard disk, I cracked the case open only to find out the thing’s skeleton wasn’t the traditional “screw it into place” sort. Instead you have to put a pair of clips on your device and then slide/snap it into place.
There was a pair of spare clips on the machine’s front end!… for an extra floppy drive.
So, I called Dell in the hope to maybe order and get a pair of hard disk clips shipped. I figured it’d be just a handful of bucks. Totally worth it.
- First person had no clue what I was talking about and transferred me to level 2.
- Level 2 had no clue what I was talking about and transferred me to his supervisor.
- Supervisor admitted that his office wasn’t made to handle these sorts of calls and thus gave me the phone number for another call center more specialized in spare parts.
- Called the new number. Explain my situation only to get told by the girl that I had ended up in the billing department. She transferred me to their technical support.
- Tech support guy had no clue what I was talking about and transferred me to another guy. (At this point I realized I had been given the number for a call center in India, and I could barely understand what they were saying.)
- Other guy had no clue what I was talking about and transferred to yet another guy.
- Yet another guy had me describe in excruciating detail the part I wanted, the computer’s model number, the computer’s serial number. Then proceeded to tell me he didn’t believe the computer could support a second hard disk. (BS, dude. The computer had two full-sized IDE plugs, the original HD and the optical drive used one of them.) I hand-waved his concern and stated it wasn’t his problem to deal with: I’d assume the consequences.
- This guy put me on hold for 10 minutes only to hand me off to a lady who pretty much made me go through the entire story all over again.
- And so, after an hour of this insane foray since my first call, the lady proceeded to tell me that the pair of floppy disk clips I was holding in my hand at this very moment did not exist. I froze, thanked her for the help, hung up, turned away, and went to get myself hammered.
Story credit: Reddit / Shurikane