I HATE updating electronics…
2 UPS five years old. One started beeping, replaced it last week, replaced the other one today. Crawl under desk, unplug everything, shut off UPS, shut off UPS again. Shut off UPS a THIRD time! Plug the battery in on the new one, crawl back under desk, plug everything back in. Crawl back out. Forget to turn UPS on… crawl BACK under desk, turn UPS on. Yay, lights, power, action!!!
AND had to update a Direct TV receiver that had lost it’s tiny electronic mind. Resetting every hour, more or less, for anywhere from 2-6 minutes. Usually right as a segment came on that I really wanted to see…
Sooooo, unplug the old from everything, plug in the new. Follow the online instructions and guess what… Yep, didn’t connect. Called DTV, 8 minutes on hold, get the ‘auto attendant’ which is going to ‘help’ me. So I decided to give it a try. Of course I get an error that won’t clear. Low voltage on one 13V input…
So, I move the plug to a different output on the UPS and restart.
BACK on hold, waiting for a live tech… Finally get ‘Debbie’. Yeah, right… Redo ALL the steps to verify my identity, address, what is going on, etc. etc. She asked FIVE times for the last four of the RX card, after saying she had my ‘account’ in front of her. Finally got a reset, and a completely different set of cues. She wants me to skip steps to get through the install, but I said no, since she was on the line, I was going to go step by step, setting everything including connecting the TV controller to the remote control. Got that done, and then had to sit and wait for the scheduler, etc. to load. Once that was done, did channel checks, and it FINALLY came up live and operating.
That was a half hour I’ll never get back…
And they wanted me to return the obsolete RX. So I start jumping through THOSE hoops online. And get a cue that I have to call DTV for an RMA. Another 10 or so minutes on hold, finally get a live body, he goes through the whole spiel yet again! Finally get it to the point of connecting to the actual RMA department…except the line is busy. So the live body says he’ll call me back. AND HE ACTUALLY DID!
Now talking to the RMA department, who jumps me through all the hoops YET AGAIN. Name, address, etc. etc. “Oh, according to our records, that item is obsolete, so we will not be recovering it. I will note your record and you can dispose of it at a local recycler…” ARRGGHHHHH!!!
Dumped that damn thing in the trash… I HATE upgrading electronics…
I hear where you are coming from.
A recent cell phone problem was caused by a Google App update.
The fix was accomplished in a few minutes once I reached a Tier Two Tech Type. (I was going to say Tech Rep, but the alliteration was so much much better this way.)
But to get to the two minute fix required literally hours on the phone. And each level of Tech support wanted a repeat of the troubleshooting steps that the previous level had already done.
The good news is that I now know how to boot my phone in SAFE mode, and I had not even known that was a thing.
GOOGLE DELENDA EST!!!!!!
Dealing with a bad UPS is a pain but you CAN save some money if it’s just an old dead battery. The battery in most of them is simple to replace and a new battery is cheap compared to a new UPS. Assuming of course the UPS didn’t sacrifice itself to save something else.
The Belkin I bought in the mid aughts uses two 6V 7 AH gel cell batteries. They used to be cheap until recently, but they are not easy to replace. Doable, but not easy.
The gotcha on that one was that the steel cover could touch the circuit board when you were putting things back together. Had to replace a bit of ground wire traces, *and* put in a piece of shielding plastic to prevent further profanity.
That UPS would beep when it was activated, driving one of the dogs up the wall. (She hated the phone ringing too–not fun when we got on the phonespam list…) The UPS is now banished to the shop, and the puppy thinks that strange beeps are just part of life here. I have the computer set up so it doesn’t crash in a power fail. Usually.
Yeah. I love/hate tech in general.
Too bad my internet stopped working last night. It was fun while it lasted.
All I was trying to do was get them to send the emails to me, and not my son. He’s moving out of the coverage area. I’ve been paying the bills via autodraft, and I’m listed on the account as a contact person who can make changes.
Why do I have to wait for 12 minutes to talk to someone in India, to fix something I bought five miles from my house?
I may, or may not (REALLY could go either way) have phone service after I hung up on the person.
1982, John Naisbitt, “Megatrends.” The model was SUPPOSED to be: “High Tech, High Touch.” And, who knows? Maybe, compared to an alternate timeline, we are experiencing delightful things; maybe we are in a Marvel “What If?” movie.
Oh yeah. Right with you there. And the trouble is the stuff is everywhere gumming up the works. Not fun. I’ll be keeping the old truck for a long time… and I have a dial phone on my desk, along with a sort of smart phone I carry.
All my data equipment is on an APC 2200 UPS that I got for free. It was ordered with an equipment package as a standard item, and the customer didn’t want it because all their data equipment ran on a room sized single UPS. There was no mechanism to return it for credit, the customer didn’t care, and it was not on my company inventory. Therefore, it simply became mine. My co-worker also got one from another job at the same customer. It is still working perfect, but in the next year it will probably need batteries, since the battery install date says June 2013. During a long term power failure, I change the configuration for “Poor” quality power settings and it works as a filter simply cleaning up the power from my generator. The only data equipment that runs on the battery at night when the generator is off is my cable modem and router and they could run for days.
I had to look it up; that’s a WAY cool freebie!
I was intrigued that you can use it to clean up your generator power, since I’m seriously considering finally biting the bullet and getting a 9000 Watt generator for the house in case the power drops out again.
They sell a comparable model with an inverter, which I guess is supposed to clean the power, but it’s about 50% more for the same output.
If you have any modern stuff in your house, like a new stove, a new refrigerator (yes, the fridge) or such, poor line quality will kill those pretty quickly. Microwave, any electronics plugged in and such.
It’s worth it if the genset is a ‘whole house’ system to get one with a decent inverter or something that cleans up the voltage.
Same with electric power coming from the street. If it’s ‘dirty’ with lots of variances and stuff, that will kill all your electrical stuff in ways that seem mysterious and almost haunted, like touch-lamps turning on and off without anyone there.
If your electrical stuff seems to die or act weirdly, call the utility company to check your electrical drop (from their lines to the meter, as that’s all their responsibility.) If the line voltage is clean, then you need to get someone to check your breaker box and go from there.
Had an outside outlet that was causing faults all over the house. Replaced that, and all issues went away.
I feel your pain. Being a Latter Day Luddite I call my neighbor. Before she retired she ran the office at a bank in a smaller town and had to become the in house tech rep out of necessity. Gets it done and only costs me a lunch check at a local restaurant.
I feel your pain, working on ancient robots and controllers.
Funny you mention that. Same thing happened to a friend of mine the morning of 9/2/21. They are DTV subscribers as well.
With Cox Cable, you can only talk to Tier 1. Who will, supposedly, take down a complete transcript of what your faults, problems, issues are, after going through the whole 10 minute checklist and script.
Any deviation from said script will result in the script being restarted. And I mean any deviation. Any.
Tier 2, who can actually do something, supposedly, isn’t allowed to talk to the animals as the animals (customers) might ask real questions and get real answers.
Tier 1 is located outside the continental USA after 4pm EST and all day on weekends or holidays, and only hires the finest of George or Georgina (insert last name of some foreigner with less understanding of real English than your typical inner-city hood rat (if you watch crime shows, you’ll understand, because the good ones translate hoodratese into English))
Tier 2, though, is staffed usually 24/7/365-366 by people back here in the States. Who all speak perfect English, can work off-script, and can fix an issue if they know about it (like, oh, say, when ‘George’ doesn’t transcribe the issues with the error codes you are reading off their equipment.)
I hate ‘scripts.’
Go to a doctor’s office, and the bad ones have script-readers behind the counter.
Go to a bank, script-readers.
Go to a government building, SCRIPT-READERS.
The Script rules all, sees all, knows all. Any deviation from the Script is heresy and will be treated as such.
So, well, yeah, feel your pain. Cox Cable sucks. But in the place I live in, a noted ‘tree city,’ DTV and other satellite services are even worse.
Don’t even get me started on trying to compare the various services with what they offer and how much. That’s a scam right there.
If you could actually see the entire work space of those script readers you would find a day’s supply of bannanas.
Scripted. This.
We are bundled with ATT. Yeah, I know. I may have mentioned that my opinion counts somewhere below 50% in this household.
Am saving up my motivation to jump back in the ring with tech support. Again. Straight to Tier Two this time.
Issue is that the ATT Yahoo app on my phone will no longer connect to my email account on their server. Multiple rapid fire re-directs, then message “Something went wrong”. No caca, Sherlock.
They instituted a new policy awhile back adding another layer of security. You have to go to their site and let their system generate a sooper seekrit “secure mail key”. Fine, whatever.
Did this on my PC and it worked fine. About that time is when the issue came up on my phone. Yeah, as phones go, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the current century with the purchase of my current phone, an Iphone 5s.
My last time in the ring, the script had a new twist. Every other sentence started with “To be honest with you…”, and forget trying to explain the issue was only with my phone. I finally just gave up, hung up, and decided to try another day.
Sigh…sorry to hear that I’m NOT the only one having problems. When I managed the small TELCOM company, ‘we’ took all the initial calls. That way we could dial in remotely (if the system was up), or dispatch a tech, who had direct access to Tier 2/3 depending on the system issues. And for those that have never seen it, a lightning strike CAN melt an entire backplane on a medium sized phone switch when ‘somebody’ moved the ground strap because they wanted to be able to use the weedeater around the ‘entire’ facility… That one got ‘interesting’ before it was finally resolved!
Think it’s over? 60 or 90 days from now you’ll probably get a bill for that no-return unit.
“Crawl under desk” ” crawl back under desk” “Crawl back out” “crawl BACK under desk”
Dude, that’s worth big bucks. It’s called physical therapy. Ha!
Full disclosure: I unplugged all three of my UPSs cuz my back hurts. And I help (in a minor way) to do PT.
Robert- Yeah, that and Advil…sigh