People, you are *not* alone when it comes to poor technical support
What is it about technical support that support personnel think that if they simply provide an answer, even if it's wrong, they have done their job? I find it really odd and a sad comment on the state of our society that this passes for customer service. First off, a caveat. Our company blog site is managed by the marketing department and they act as the in-house support liason to those of us who are blogging. The marketing people then route our support questions to technical support from the company that designed our website because they did the WordPress install for us. (WordPress is the software we use to host the blogs.) Our in-house marketing people are really helpful and responsive, and I know they are only telling us what the tech guys are telling them. So, this blog in no way includes the in-house support staff in my general comments about technical support. So, here's the scenario. For my very first blog, I wanted to write about Groovy and include a code snippet. Well, the editor page for WordPress mangled the formatting. So, I called tech support to figure out the problem. Now as I mentioned, the in-house support has been great (Thank you Greg!), but unfortunately still hasn't been able to solve the problem in a satisfactory way. The techs said that I can't use the <pre> tag. In my opinion this is a bizarre answer to the problem. It's like the old joke where a man goes to the doctor and says, "It hurts when I lift my arm like this." And the doctor responds, "Then don't do that." Considering that a blog is just an html page, and the <pre> tag is a perfectly valid tag, why can't I use it? It seems to me the problem is with the WordPress blog editor, especially because this is not the only problem with the editor. The editor barely works on Linux and Mac, both of which I use, and many of the developers in our company use. The editor page itself doesn't display correctly. It doubles up the Post text area. Fortunately, the functionality still works basically, so what I write in either Post box does get published, but it's rather annoying that the page doesn't operate as it should. Additionally, most of the tools such as inserting a link or indenting text, etc. don't work and the html formatting is bizarre and reformats things in unexpected ways. It reminds me a lot of MicroSoft Word. And that's never a good thing. So, how did we solve the problem? First, our in-house support made a jpg of the code snippet and inserted that in the blog. That's a great short-term solution, but is not really a workable long-term plan. Second, I went out and bought a blog editor. I know, I know, I never thought I'd say something like "I bought a blog editor", but for 18 bucks I got this program called ecto. (In fact, I'm using it to write this blog right now.) It's great. It works. So, I fixed the code snippet and used a <pre> tag even. And this makes the WordPress editor smell even more, since, the published post works just fine with the <pre> tag. So the WordPress editor is clearly the culprit. Which gets me back to technical support. The tech gave me the wrong answer, didn't own up to the fact that the WordPress editor is lame, and I'm sure he clearly felt his job had been done, even done well. It's no wonder that most people hate technical support. I work in a software company as a developer, and so I at least know enough to know when the techs are trying to pull a fast one, and it still makes me angry. It's really just sad. So, to all of you non-technical people out in the world, you are *not* alone. Tony
