Now, I used to do that sort of thing for a living, and, let me tell ya, it's no picnic. I try, therefore, to be as pleasant and understanding as I can, because I know those guys work their asses off. You will note that it is now a quarter to midnight, Pacific Time, so I would doubt that the queue would be all that bad. Yeah, sure, Frank, has it been that long since you did this job? 30 minutes later, I'm connected to some guy in India that I can barely understand, and who can barely understand me.
I've been majorly fed up with this whole trend towards outsourcing customer service call centers to India and neighboring environs. I got to deal with it quasi-firsthand when Earthlink shut down its call center in Seattle. I was long gone, but I had a lot of friends who were suddenly jobless, in a time when our economy was in the fuckin' toilet. Hell, some of them are still struggling, almost two years later...and meanwhile, that 'award-winning service' has gone down the tubes. Yes, it may be cheaper for the company, but it's something akin to pulling teeth trying to get anything done, Hell, I had to spell my NAME three times to this guy. On and on we went, just trying to get basic customer information in the record (which, frankly, he ought to have, since he got my serial number and system number, and that is all on my record with HP from the day i bought the machine from them).
He finally gets to my problem. Well, at least THAT was an easy fix. As it turns out, I never really realized that DVD-R and DVD+R are not only different formats, but that they are mutually exclusive, and that your hardware wil generally only read one of them. Too bad they neglected to tell me this, and neglected to tell me which one I can use...which, as it turns out, is the one I DON'T have. So, trying to make the best of a bad situation, I ask him to give me some information on the difference between the two.
Yep, you guessed it. He don't know shit. He finally put me on hold to go and try and get the info, and after another 5 minutes, i got tired of waiting, opened a broswer windoow, and Googled the answer. Apparently, they don't have internet access in Bangladesh. I hung up on his useless ass.
So,
polarbear, what kind of blank DVDs does your machine use? I've got 5 blank DVD-Rs, sitting here, completely useless to me, and I'd hate to see them completely go to waste.