Having a hard time getting tech support help?

80 percent of India's Internet service went down Wednesday night. Turns out two cables snapped and poof, Internet doesn't exist of much of the Middle East. As I type, Egypt is still almost completely down. Yep, the article below says they're getting sporadic service at best.

As I'm sure most know, India is now handling a large portion of our tech support and other type calls. I recently had a HUGE problem with Amazon and could only talk to people who definitely weren't located on this hemisphere. Snotty attitudes, horrible follow-up, such poor service that I cancelled my account with Amazon. I'll pay a bit more for good service any old day and I'll do without if it means dealing with attitudes.

If I had known that India was down yesterday, I might have spent a portion of the day calling tech support, Amazon and a few others just to have the refreshing opportunity to talk with someone without an accent.

I have yet to talk to someone from India who talked to me like I was not a bug they wanted to flick off their shoulder. I KNOW there are some great people in India, I have a good friend who originally hails from there. Love her, she's great people. Had a couple of doctors from India some years back, no problems.

I think these companies just hire snippy people. Could be a factor of how much they're being paid, too. Somehow it's cheaper for Amazon and other companies to pay long distance phone bills and pay the people than it is to hire folks here in the good ol' USA.

Wonder how the outage is affecting the financial markets here, and in the Middle East and Asia?

Here's an irreverent thought that will probably have folks yelling at me... Cows are sacred in India. I bet you won't find McDonald's, Burger King or any other meat selling company outsourcing to India .

India works to resume Internet services
NEW DELHI - Bandwidth providers said they expected India's Internet service to be back to about 80 percent of its usual speed by the end of Friday, a day after Internet service across a swath of Asia and the Middle East was disrupted.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080201/ap_on_hi_te/internet_outages

Amazon.com Update

Well, been "communicating" with Amazon.com. They send an email saying their sorry, will I give them another chance. I send one back saying nope. They send one saying will I give them another chance.

So far I've had an email from Prakash, Monica, Subhrajit, and Vipin Sai. I will say that the first paragraph shows they kinda-sorta read part of my email. Kinda-sorta. The rest is canned.

I finally told 'em I didn't want anymore canned emails, not to bother to respond. I received a response saying (again) that they were truly sorry, they hoped I'd give them a second chance, but if I wanted to write anything else it needed to go to their general questions complaint site.

Hmmm... do ya think they're tired of me answering their canned responses?

There's a perverse part of my nature that thinks I could keep this going until they got tired of hearing from me.... How long would it be before they blocked my email? Closed my account?

I'm heading over to the site now to see if there's some way to cancel it myself. I'm tired of playing and they're obviously not very interested in one little peon customer. Oh, I guess I shouldn't say that, they want me to give them one more chance, give them one more chance, give them one more chance, give them one more chance...

Hard lesson learned re: Amazon

My husband has surgery earlier this month and was still unable to be left alone for long periods of time. I have shopped on-line before, love having packages just show up on my front porch. When Greg's daughter-in-law sent a list for the grandkids with the suggestion that I shop on Amazon I thought it was a GREAT idea!

I popped over, found the things we wanted and ordered. Voila, done without any hassle. They guaranteed arrival before Christmas, we had 8 full days so there was a fudge factor allowance in case there was a glitch.

One of the books arrived on the 20th. Checked email and found a note saying that they'd split the shipment, the rest would arrive by the 24th. Cutting it close as that's Christmas Eve and that's when the grandkids were coming, but they promised.

On the 22nd I called as it hadn't arrived. On-line tracker showed only that the carrier had been notified to pick up. I was starting to do a mini-panic.

The person I talked to (from India I believe based on accent), was rather abrupt. He said they were getting a lot of calls and that my shipment was like everyone else's and it would arrive by Christmas. The carriers were very busy and they were not all scanning the items thus it was not showing on their tracker that it been picked up but it would arrive. Basically he said I was wasting his time calling. Frustrating as it seemed he didn't even bother to check anything, just spouted his standard lines.

Christmas eve day... no packages. But the mail was running behind, we saw trucks zipping up and down the road delivering packages and knew they worked late to make sure the packages arrived.

The kids came. The kids left. No Christmas presents from Amazon. The grandkids were so good about it (probably because the parents had warned them on the way over that their Christmas presents might not have made it to our doorstep). Disappointed but good. I was so frustrated. We must have sneaked outside 20 times to see if maybe the packages had been delivered.

What a rip. That is the last time I will order presents on-line from Amazon. I know that only allowing a week for delivery at Christmas is a risky proposition. However, I think if when I called their so-called help line someone should have done some cursory checking. It they had followed up, the presents would have been found and delivered. I used to manage an area where we dealt with similar situations. I am well aware of what COULD have been done.

I'm not giving up on ordering on-line. I just won't be shopping Amazon anymore. If it hadn't been for my recovering husband, I wouldn't have allowed Christmas to sneak up so quickly. I'll know in the future to shop earlier...

I sent Amazon an email, not yelling, not nasty, but definitely to the point, regarding the shipment. It's been 12 hours. I haven't heard back from them yet. They're going further and further in the dog house with me.