A few months ago, I had heard and confirmed that Microsoft was outsourcing yet more of its PSS divisions overseas. While that has had the effect of people I went through training with lose their jobs, along with other people I know having to train their replacements (something that certainly lands on the first 1 or 2 levels of hell), it has never really affted me personally. I've never had to open a non-Premier level support case with Microsoft in any manner once I left the company, and neither did anyone I had heard of. Until now.
I've had issues running a very simple console app as a scheduled task. It just doesn't
run, and the ST folder details list the last results as 0x80. the KB gave me nothing,
and I wasn't able to find anything inside of MSDN on this. Remembering that I had
2 "in the box" incidents avalable to me for free, I fired one up. I decided to go
the web-response route, as I didn't think about this until about 11pm last night,
and I really didn't want to deal with it at that point. I submitted the case, and
logged off for the night.
Today at lunch, I checked on my case via support.microsoft.com, and found that there
was as of yet no response... ok, it's a sev C case, they've got 24 hours. I RDP'd
home and checked my personal email, and found I'd gotten a response this morning.
It was a long, drawn-out email containing instructions that involved no less than
two reboots, and had a problem statement describing my workaround. Granted, having
to implement a workaround *is* a problem, but not the root. So, I added my comments
into the case using the web form, and proceeded to finish my sandwich.
To sum up: Incorrect problem statement, support pro communication not listed in the
case notes, and all the information they wanted? It involved video drivers and other
such things... nothing to do with the task at hand. This is only day 1.
This may not have anything to do with the fact I'm working with an foreign outsource
company... it may have more to do with the fact I'm working with a v- instead of a
regular FT SP... no way to really tell. Maybe I'm a little difficult to work with
in this particular area. Having done tech support since forever, and having had one
of the highest customer satisfaction/speedy case closure index scores in all of MS
IIS support while I was there... I have a hard time with people that can't keep up.
Tonight if there is still no response, I plan on calling this one in. I'm probably
looking for a solution staring me in the face, buried in an MS SOX object in their
internal KB... my kingdom to search that DB just once more.
More to come, I fear.
- G
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