'Dell can go to hell' — Zapdos

There should be a post on The Sky Temple of Lugia and Articuno in which Zapdos consoles a member who turned to Dell for his or her computer problems by saying the line 'Dell can go to hell'. The truth I knew was that Dell had done a right job of outsourcing, meaning that the majority of the technical support were operating in India, which — and I do not intend to offend any readers of Indian descent — due to many employees having to juggle two or three indigenous languages (out of more than 50 from what I've heard) with English, resulted in either faulty communication at the core or rather insufficient knowledge of the model in question. The case today in the office was the latter — Zapdos' line said it all, and now it's a post on my blog.

The day started normally but ended up revolving around one maintenance request that should have remained moderate. A nursing instructor had reported connectivity problems with a few of the laptops in the room's chest (no doubt attributed to the reconfiguration of the switches yesterday). We went down there and ensured that all other networks were not being accepted and that the computers were responding optimally to the new network configuration. They all did as we had hoped.

Then there were beeps.

One of the laptops emitted a long sequence of beeps before booting Windows XP — for those of you who may be able to figure it out, it was 24 followed by 10 followed by 11 — or thereabout, as Tim, the person working with me, doubted whether I had counted correctly as my tally changed often as he heard the sequence over and over. Regarding this as a fatal error, we returned all the other laptops and took this one upstairs.

The first idea was to ensure that it wasn't a connectivity error. When it was resolved that it wasn't, we did what may have depleted our stock by one: try Dell's support chat. The representative that spoke with us started by telling us to go to the 'PC Card' icon in the Classic Control Panel (there is none) and then told us to make sure the memory was in place. The memory was in place, and nothing abnormal occurred once Windows booted, besides run slowly even with 50 processes. By the time the clock told me to go to lunch, the representative had told us to dismantle the laptop and then turn it back on.

When I returned from lunch, the hard drive, NIC, memory, battery, and keyboard were out. From what Tim told me, the representative had actually closed the chat due to inactivity whilst he was unscrewing the desktop. In defeat, we just decided to place it on the desk for Mike, the IT head. He did glance at it when he returned, but not before turning to Tim, the other employee Nick, and me with a sceptical countenance and saying, 'What happened here?'

Does Hewlett-Packard have good education deals?