Hello. Could I have your technical please?

[CompostCORNER]

We've all been there at some stage. Come on, those who claim never to have rung technical for a little advice are either fibbing, or fit nothing but the same thing day in and day out.

Friday afternoons are always a bad time to get stuck. You're thinking of the weekend and you want to get the job finished. So are the technical chaps and chapettes. Ringing technical is such a stressful task at this time of the week.

What stories of woe and frustration have you all had? Heres a couple of mine.

VCL are usually great for technical advice but my little problem cost me an unfinished job and about a fiver in mobile calls. It wasn't totally their fault so this isn't a dig at them. Take 1 VCL dome, 1 Maxcom 8, 1 VCT104 4 camera Transpac and a CSL Audio Confirmation unit then stick it all together for off site remote monitoring with dome control. Unfortunately, out of all the people at VCL, only 1 chap was in the know. unfortunately, getting a direct line to him was impossible. I must have left my number with their switchboard for this chap to ring me. So there i am, i had a 9 pin D connector (RS232) and I needed to connect it to the Maxcom's circular 9 pin mini-din. I tried soldering pin to pin and my god, those things are fiddly lol. That didn't work.

I rang technical and was firstly told the set-up was totally incompatible. Of course, I wouldn't be trying to get it going if it wasn't meant to be so I did a bit of blagging. A minute or so later, I was told it was all compatible but because it was such a new set-up, no one knew how except for this single chap who I'm going to call 'BOB'. unfortunately, BOB was talking with someone else so I left my number for him to ring me direct. So i'm sat there in my car, 30 minutes gone and I'm thinking I've been forgotten about. I rang the switchboard again and left my number. Another 20 minutes of friday afternoon passed and still no call. I rang again and got through to someone who wasn't BOB. Again, I was talking with someone not entirely familiar with my set-up so my number was taken again. By this time, I was getting board so I launched into a game of mini golf on my phone. I completed that in just under 3 minutes and found I had a missed call AND answer message. It was BOB! I'd missed him lol.

3.30pm on a Friday and I left my number one last time and cleared off to the office. From the office, I rang again and was told that BOB would definitely call back. He never did call back but did send me a nice fax on Monday morning with a schematic of the wiring configuration. So on this occasion, a company thats usually great at tech help gets a poor 3/10 lol. Poor old Bob.

Still, I've had worse. Ozline, creators of Telecam have to rate the worst. I was on the line for 7 minutes one morning asking for details of how to factory restore their 16 camera unit after it had locked up and wouldn't drop the telephone line. The chap was very informative although he was Spanish lol. That 7 minute call cost me over £11 on my mobile. I've since refused to deal with any company that incurs a £1.50 a minute charge for technical calls. outragous.

Only one thing rates lower than that and that isn't really technical. Good old Custodian don't always ask for engineer identification when I've been testing what few systems Sentry have that they don't monitor themselves. Surely I'm not that well known to them yet. Our systems monitored by Custodian are usually REDCARE due to Hull not being BT and we only install Redcare when Dualcoms and GSM units are out of range of a signal, and Sentry not wanting to stump up big money to be Redcare capable, we use custodian to monitor them. Still, you have to laugh when a dozen police burst in with battons when I've clearly put a system on test and I've just sent a PA through. Still, the police end up all happy after a nice round of tea and buscuits from the client who's dead impressed with the alarm response lol.

Tony

[Security Technician]

Or what about the instance when tech support tell you to do something and the system ends up worse than when you started, sometimes i wonder why they have this fancy title and get paid more money just to sit on thier backsides and baffle us with science, To sum it up they can be neither technical nor supportive

[breff]

Does anyone else get the classic answer from technical support..."downpower and power back up and see if that works!"

[Guest dale]

The worse ive had is when technical support of a large alarm manufacturer didnt know their own fault codes... the person I spoke to said its a fault code that is undefined in any of their tech manuals so suggested defaulting the panel - surely they design and build the things so they should know how they work and what all the codes it splutters into the log are?