iSupport

When you buy a computer in our country and you need support for the operating system that is installed on it, who do you call? It's better be Ghostbusters, cause neither the store nor the the technical support will help you with any of the big three. If it's a free Linux distro, obviously you are on your own. But when it's a Microsoft or Apple, it seems like you should be able to call somebody with your woes.

One day, at work, I was trying to convince the guys that neither Apple nor Microsoft have any support just like Linux , so there is really no difference between them in this category: whichever you get you are on your own. They agreed with me about Microsoft, but one of them was convinced that Apple guys will be up to the challenge.

Now, I do not live in the US, as you might have guessed. Here we have one company which is officially responsible for importing, selling and supporting Mac products. I am not gonna name names, we all know who those guys are. Anyway, they have a local support number, so we called it and asked a question I have thought up for the occasion.

Please be the judge of whether this is a fair question to test the support level: I asked, how to copy a path of the file I see in Finder to the TextEdit application. I did not really invent this question, I was something I really needed to do once, based on a true story, so to speak.

Well, it started with the guy from the support asking me to give him my full name and phone number. I said that for the purpose of our conversation my first name should be enough. He became really angry but told me to ask my question anyway. I asked the question. He told me to wait a second and put me on hold. After about a minute he told me that he is "not familiar with anything like that", his exact words. He told me that there might be some script that does that and when I asked where I could get such a script he told me: "On Google".

I let him go then and there, of course, I think I have proved my point. Have I really needed him to answer this I would have acted differently. I thanked him politely for his trouble, while he warned me that next time, if I did not give my phone number they would not even try to help me at all.

Really scary.