10-year-old Microsoft Ticket Resurfaces?

Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft is apparently taking seriously a blogger's claim that a Microsoft tech support employee called back to check on a 10-year-old BSOD trouble ticket. The anonymous blogger suspects someone at Microsoft typed "1/8/08" into their tracking system for the date of a follow-up call, instead of "1/8/98." Microsoft told Computerworld support cases "are reviewed regularly so that we can ensure we're resolving customer issues in a timely fashion — regardless of the callback commitment set by the agent. Nonetheless, no system can ensure complete accuracy."" To be fair, this is all unverified, so choose to believe at your own risk.

Re:I don't believe it

[EricWright]

My father, who worked in two-way communication systems (think CB radios/base stations, 911 comms systems, etc) before retirement, has had the same mobile phone number since the late 1980s when it was attached to an $1100 in car system, the old kind with a base station mounted under the driver's seat and a handset cradle bolted onto the floorboard. He actually kept the same number with the same system (through NUMEROUS buyouts/takeovers) until cell number portability was finally mandated in the US.

Makes my 9 years with the same mobile number seem paltry in comparison.

Doubtful

[foetusinc]

I call BS. I worked Windows 95 support around that time ('98), and while we did often call people back to check on problems, it didn't work the way this guy imagines. Calls logged in workbench that we wanted to follow up on were just left open. Each morning you checked your open tickets, and called the ones that needed calling. No automated dialer either, as some have suggested. If something was left open to long your supervisor would check on it with you, and it would get closed or escalated posthaste.

If this guy really did get a call, my guess is he got a wrong number when a tech was following up on somebody else's problem. Maybe his customer record got mistakenly linked to somebody else's ticket. Maybe he's making the whole story up.

Re:I don't believe it

[Splab]

Oh the joys of those good old times. My dad had one of those cell phones installed when it was very new in Denmark (this was early 90'ties), it was very impressive back then - even had hands free installed which pretty much required most of the car to be taken apart.

Re:heh, interesting disclaimer

[ckaminski]

I disagree. Microsoft's second level tech support, or the MSDN support guys, are absolutely wonderful. It's the first level support that's farmed out to call centers like Stream that sucks rocks.

Re:I don't believe it

[ckaminski]

I had a coworker, 99, 2000 maybe who had the entire Microsoft internal knowledgebase from Stream on a collection of a dozen CDs. As a developer, those CDs were like gold-plated gold. I'm sorry I don't have them anymore...

Re:Based on my experience...

[Smauler]

As I recently found out when installing Vista 64. Nice brand new system, built myself, the problem was (and still is) that I've got 4gb of RAM on an nVIDIA chipset motherboard. Vista, from what I can tell, will not install at all with that configuration. Fortunately, I already installed Win2k and got it working properly, so could google it, and figured it out - the solution apparently is to take some of your memory out before installation, install, then go get microsoft's hotfix. Well, I took 2gb out, and it installed fine. Unfortunately, it didn't recognise my wireless card. No problem, I thought... I'll just reboot into 2k, download the hotfix, and plug the RAM back in. BZZZZT - that download is only available to validated users of Vista. So I'm sitting here currently with 2gb in my system and a non-working wireless card on Vista. At least Windows 2000 is working fine.... though it can't see my 2 new striped hard drives, I didn't expect it to really.

Yes, that's right... as far as I understand it, Vista just will not install and BSOD reboot with 4gb or more on one of the major motherboard chipsets. Anyone who says "windows just works" got someone else to set up their system for them, or got lucky.

ps. I know I'm part of the problem for buying their crap, but I got it OEM, cheap, and for games only. You will pry my games from my cold, dead hands.