Three nights ago, for some reason, our 3-month-old DVD player stopped 
communicating with our television, into which it was plugged. The audio worked 
but the video didn't.

After trying to figure out what was wrong and re-connecting cables and 
rebooting, etc, for fifteen minutes or so, I called the 800 number listed on a 
sticker on the machine and was soon connected to a nice woman, who, by her 
voice, seemed pretty young to me, who told me her name was "Jenny." She had a 
peculiar accent, which to my non-linguistically-trained ears I would describe 
as 2 parts American Television, 2 parts Kate Middleton, and 6 parts Hindi. (I 
don't recall if I asked her if she was in Bangalore. I usually do, because the 
question interests me. I've probably asked this questions ten times, with "yes" 
being the answer 6 times, "I can't talk about that" being the answer twice, and 
a hangup/disconnect being the answer twice. 

After leading me through ten minutes of useless exercises (which I had already 
done) such as powering on and off, etc, Jenny said, "Now, here's what we're 
going to do. Hold down the 'Stop' button for ten seconds. "  Sure enough, that 
worked, and within another minute my wife was watching her Jane Eyre DVD. (Why 
"Jenny" couldn't have listened to me when I told her I had already rebooted, 
etc, saved me ten minutes and just told me to hold down the stop button for ten 
seconds (thereby saving me ten minutes of time & frustration) is not too hard 
to fathom. She's paid to follow a script, and she follows it. Facts don't 
concern her. (Nor should they, I guess, at the minimal wage she's presumably 
paid)). 

The best part of the whole encounter was when 'Jenny' helpfully and politely 
explained that the whole "hold down the stop button for ten seconds" business 
was explained on page 26 of the manual that shipped with the machine I had 
bought, so that if this problem ever came up again I could just turn to that 
instead of calling the help line.

Regards,


jrs




 
On Jan 29, 2012, at 3:02 PM, Heather Madrone wrote:

> Wait. You have actually had success in recent years with a call to a support 
> center?

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