inphiltrate nonfiction v.7.5

In my long, hard years of life, I think my infinite wisdom has finally come up with the recipe for a successful joke:

1) Steal a line from a T-Pain song
2) Success!

I went camping this weekend with Becca, Joseph, Joseph’s brother Kenneth, and Sam (boy). It was pretty awesome, and if I were to hold true to everything I said on Sunday and Monday, I’d owe them each about twenty “dranks.”

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here:

The lyrics are hilarious if you, like me, appreciate good lyrics. Sometimes while listening to this song, I just burst out laughing at the sheer prospect of buying someone a “drank.”

In other news, I found out if I get to River Road from work by about 4:35, I will see a red 2010 Camaro, and if I get to Brightside fast enough from there, I will see a black 2010 Camaro with gunmetal racing stripes.

Yes, I am obsessed with this car. I absolutely cannot wait to own one. Srsly.

My iPhone battery got down to 3% on Monday. That’s the lowest it’s ever gotten and that’s the only time I ever had to stop using my phone for nonsense stuff (playing “I’m on a Boat” with the iPod, playing “Don’t Trust Me” on Tap Tap Revolution, Tweeting pictures of destroyed hamburgers…) for fear of not being able to have enough battery life to make calls with it should I need to. The point of this is that I’m pretty happy with the iPhone’s battery life, since this is the first time it almost died on me. It suits my lifestyle pretty well.

On a completely opposite note, I had a pretty awesome experience with Microsoft tech support today (can you taste the sarcasm?). Not just any Microsoft tech support, no. This was Microsoft professional tech support.

I submitted a help request on Thursday via their web form for an email response. This is supposed to take one day. The support engineer that gets the request emails me back and pretty much says, “I’m not coming to work tomorrow, if you want this resolved before Tuesday, call into the queue tomorrow.”

Okay, so why did you even take my help request? Whatever. I called the queue on Friday at about 10 A.M. My problem is diagnosed as Severity C and I’m supposed to get a call back within 8 hours. I explain that we close at 4:30, and this is noted in the ticket.

I didn’t get a call on Friday at any point during the day, even after I left. Fine, whatever, thanks Microsoft.

I called back today. Same crap. “We’ll call you back within 8 hours.” Wonderful. I called the guy from Thursday back twice, no dice. I called back a few hours later and explain that I need to get this taken care of today. The lady tells me she can put me in the call queue, but she has no idea how long it will be until someone will be able to answer. My boss is getting pissed at this point that Microsoft is giving us the runaround, so he called, got our problem escalated to Severity A (it was definitely not Severity A, but apparently that’s the only way to get service when you pay Microsoft millions of dollars for enterprise support), and finally, after about 30-40 minutes of being on hold, a very helpful man answered and helped me. The support quality at that point was top notch, but everything before that was completely ridiculous.

I got faster support for having a Joe Blow 3-year warranty with Dell and for paying a couple hundred bucks for Apple Care with Apple (also, Genius Bar is FTW). In fact, I can probably name half-a-dozen companies I’ve gotten faster support from. I really expected better from Microsoft’s *Professional* Support line.

Now, I wasn’t calling about a broken computer or anything – it was a real enterprise level support request dealing with updating Active Directory schema and deleting an old container in a production environment (scary crap if you can’t test it, for those not in the know). This, of course, isn’t an excuse for them not calling me back in two days when they said it would be less than 8 hours; rather, it’s just to let you know that I wasn’t calling to ask how to uninstall w32.backdoor.trojan or anything like that.

I would also like to thank the awesome cashier at Express, who let me use a $20 off of $60 coupon on a $59.50 purchase without making me buy something else to fill in the 0.50 I technically had to buy since tax doesn’t count. I love that kind of service.

-Philip