“Not My Problem. Call Microsoft.”

This week a client called me with a strange problem. She had to call because her email was not working. All her email was getting bounced with an announcement that her mailbox was full. This was a puzzle to her because she did not have any active letters in her mailbox. Like many people in our area, her Internet connection was once Adelphia, but she now has a Roadrunner address through Time-Warner.

To find our why her mail was not working, she called Time-Warner and spent a very long, frustrating time on the phone. The only result was that the tech on the other end interrogated her connection and essentially said, “Not my problem — call Microsoft.” She called Microsoft and discovered that it wanted $57 per event to talk to her with no real assurances that it could fix the problem. She was reluctant to spend the money, but Time-Warner assured her that nothing was wrong at its end, therefore, her computer was broken. She called me for help.

She was a beginning student, whom I had tutored, so I knew her computer. So when I arrived at her house, it was with the belief that the problem was elsewhere. I started by looking at her mailbox. I couldn’t get into it from Outlook Express because of the problem. We do not give up easily. I logged onto the Time-Warner Web site and entered the webmail section (she knew her ID and password. Do you remember yours?). Once there, I saw that she had defined several user folders and stored many family and vacation photographs in them. She had used 200% of her allotted space without knowing it. Moving them to the inbox and downloading to her computer was a simple matter. That fixed the problem by emptying her mailbox completely. Of course now she has the task of moving things from her local inbox to My Pictures or an appropriate sub-folder. That was prompted another tutoring session of efficient moving and filing.

We also discussed the several sites that allow online storage as an alternative for her albums. Since she had also tried to send oversized email letters with images, I told her online storage is an alternate way to send files too big for email. Of course there are several alternatives devoted strictly to sharing photos online, but they tend to be commercial, and she was not interested in them.

The main reason this incident seems to be worth writing about is that my client behaved in a rational way. I saw the instructions for her email service and they are confusing. A naive user can easily think that email stored in a separate folder (not the inbox) does not count against the size limit. That misunderstanding caused the problem. But she still behaved rationally by seeking help from the right place. That failed. Tech support at Time-Warner did not recognize an obvious issue immediately. They should have told my client her problems would disappear if she removed her pictures from their site. Technical issues can be confusing, but this was a simple one to attack. I stick with my initial assessment of Time-Warner. It is okay, but barely.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]tech support, bad customer service[/tags]