A bit over a year ago I purchased a new Dell server sans O/S to set up a Linux system at my house. It’s happily humming away in a corner, running Mandriva 10, doing a variety of tasks. Thinking of switching to SuSE, for no apparent reason. But that’s another post for another day.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a new Dell desktop to be used for my development machine. Nice specs… 4GB of fast RAM, 250GB x 2 in a RAID1 configuration, dual core CPU, dual video outputs… it’s a nice box. And it, too, came without an O/S installed. Wow, talk about bad OOBE.

If you don’t know what OOBE is, it’s pronounced “ooh-be” (not “oh-be”) and it stands for Out Of Box Experience. The OOBE rating is definitely way down there for this system.

And it gets better. You see, Dell has received lots of bad press over the past few years about how bad their support is. I got to experience this first hand. I should preface these remarks with two pieces of background information… first, I’m not a rookie at this… I’ve owned and managed and even fixed personal computers in my house for over twenty years. Second, my first tech job was working in the technical support department for a software company, so I have a general idea of how things run. I always… always give the technical support rep that takes my call the benefit of the doubt. I will always offer information that I think is appropriate, but I will always follow their instructions and give them every opportunity to solve my issue.

Or in this case, the opportunity to hang up on me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I got an IM from my wife while I was at work to let me know that my new Dell box was here. Woot! I always like getting new hardware. It’s shiny. Once I got home from work I started opening the boxes, but I had to wait until after dinner was over to complete the setup. It wasn’t a trivial exercise. My new box, remember, had dual monitor ports, and I have two flat-panel displays to set up. So I had to arrange my desk to make it work. I had to remove my old computer and get the cabling ready for the new one. Argh, the video cable for one of the monitors is too short. No, that’s okay, I have some extension cables left from when I used to use a KVMA switchbox. So I get one of those and hook it up. (One monitor is digital, the older is analog.)

So everything is hooked up. I plug the computer into the UPS (I have a UPS for every system in the house) and fire it up. Boot screen… nice, there’s the memory, there’s the RAID disk… and there’s the kicker:

Missing operating system

Argh. Now remember my last Dell was shipped without an O/S since I was going to install Linux. I checked my order… nope, ordered Windows XP with this one. Looked in the box, yup, there’s the software disc collection. I realize that I can just install the software myself, it’s not like I haven’t been through this before, but I wanted to call tech support just to verify that (a) there should have been an install done already, and (b) are there any weird things I need to know about the system restore.

So I called, and got put on hold. Twenty minutes later, “Stephan” answers. I put his name in quote because he is clearly not a “stephan” and his accent is so thick I can barely understand him. There’s something to be said about using web chat for support, at least that way if the person can type you can understand them. I ask Stephan, and he says to me that yes, there should have been an O/S loaded on my box. Hm. Okay. What’s next.

Stephan wants to run some diagnostics, which is fine, except that his instructions are… bad. He tells me about menu options that aren’t on my screen, he suggests that I make changes that he doesn’t really explain, and finally he puts me on hold. Now before the call starts, the first thing he did was take my name, serial number, and phone number. You know, so he can “call me back in the event we get disconnected.” Hm.

We get disconnected. I wait. He doesn’t call back. Strike one.

I wait some more, then call back in. This time I get a woman, Yolanda. She is also of the same nationality as Stephan, as best I can tell from her accent. I give her my serial number, and expect that she can call up the prior call information. Because I had already given all of that information to Stephan. But no, she makes me go through the entire thing again. Strike two.

Hey, Michael Dell, have you heard of a database? Know how to use it? My rates are quite good…

So we do the exact same series of steps that Stephan did, with – predictably – the same results. But hey, they have to follow the script. After going through all sorts of tests to validate that the drives are fine (I had already done that) she comes to the conclusion that we have to reinstall the O/S. I’m shocked.
I really do respect the job that technical support people do. I really truly do, as I have been in their shoes. It’s really tough to diagnose issues over the phone. But as a technical support rep myself, and a consultant today in “real life”, I am (I think) fairly adept at recognizing technical competence in other folks and taking advantage of it. Once someone demonstrates knowledge, let them use it! Let them help you help them!

Several wasted hours later, I finally have a working machine. I still don’t have any idea why my system was shipped without an O/S. I have to believe that it truly was not prepped properly since I didn’t even have the recovery partition that both Stephan and Yolanda tried to access.

The sad thing is that a week before I ordered the system I used Dell’s pre-sales web chat to clarify some points about the computer I wanted to buy. The pre-sales tech was awesome. She was friendly and knowledgeable and got me to exactly where I wanted to be. It seems obvious to me where Dell puts their training dollars.

I was a fifteen-year Gateway customer until their quality control dropped. Now I’ve purchased two Dell systems. I don’t need technical support very often, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

Even if only barely.