Tech Support

I've recently had three extremely different tech support experiences. They seriously serve to illustrate the difference between good tech support and downright crummy tech support.

It all starts with a water leak. At first I figured it was my pipes, but after a couple of tests I was convinced it was a larger problem, so I involved the water department. To make a very long, very painful, ongoing story short, it took them three months before they believed it was not my problem (despite over a gallon a minute of water leaking out from under my house) and despite having access to technologies like ground penetrating radar (which has been used on this issue), the expert wound up using a dowsing rod to "confirm" that it was my problem and not theirs. There's still water leaking out from under my house, and we're into month four. Apparently one of the nearby houses has a two and a half gallon a minute leak, so it may even get fixed some day. But not yet.

About a week ago my cable modem went fritzy. Lots of errors, lots of dropouts, DNS failures, etc. I did what troubleshooting I could, figuring I'd screwed up a DNS setting or picked up a bad set of servers off their DHCP server or something. No dice, so I sent in an issue ticket. On a Saturday. Within half an hour I had email saying my cable modem had a firmware incompatibility, and needed to be replaced. Within an hour I had a phone call to schedule service. I opted for Monday, but less than an hour after that the engineer in charge of my issue called to say he was in the area, had the hardware in-hand, and could stop by in the next ten minutes. He came, he installed, he tested, and he wished us a good day.

Finally, in developing software for the AVR, I've had a really super good experience with the AVR Studio 4 and WinAVR toolchain. But... AVR Studio likes to stick full pathnames in its project files. The relnotes for the release of AVR Studio I'm using mentions this, but I figured I'd ask to see if a bug fix was in the works. Whoa! I was contacted by Atmel shortly after placing the issue (again, on a weekend), and was asked to supply some examples that illustrated the problem. I did, and got mail the next day saying the issue was in the pipe now, my examples were attached so their developers could use them to test, and it should be in the next service pack release. WOW!

Now if only I could get the water department to respond like that... Yep, still leaking...

Tom

P.S. To tie this back to machining: I grabbed a picture of the logo off the back of the AVR Dragon, rasterized it, and used it to burn the logo into a sheet of stainless as a way of exercising the laser machining center at work. Gotta love tools like this...