Shut up. Be professional.
That's what I've learned from
So You Think You Can Dance. I'm not a dancer, but the meltdowns of the dancers with potentials have lent some insight into my daily life. I'm a software architect and manager (albeit without authority, but that's for another post) and have opinions about a whole lot of things. I'm pretty confident about what I know and about what I don't know and where I can improve. And I have opinions about other people, processes, and systems as well. All that's well and good, but in the thick of it, I have definite opinions on what needs to be done and will express that. Sometimes, though, it's best to keep quiet and let other people have their say and let ideas have some space to air. Humility and silence can be your friends.
Here's Lizz Plott's audition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOZNsaXnLc8&feature=relatedOnce someone puts up her mouthing off and subsequent denial in the top 20, I'll put that up here.
This is a sordid tale of my first bad technical experience with Dell.
I bought a refurbed XPS 420 Quad core for a VM server. It arrived on Thursday, heavy, packed with stuff I didn't expect (earphones, chamois, lcd status-y deal, media card reader); then again, it's an XPS, as Jack pointed out (who got one, too). We were Dell buddies, except I got shat upon. Here's how it went:
Jack opens his, plays around with it, has some trepidations about Vista x32. With the box able to handle 8gb of RAM and the general instability that I've had with Vista x32, he wanted x64.
I wait a day to open mine because So You Think You Can Dance becomes more important and pay the price. It only reboots itself on first turn on. I speak with Elizabeth (tech support, incident 19636455) who asks for my phone number then tells me to reseat the memory and then promptly gets cut off. The XPS's indicators are nice - apart from the LCD (which seems to be useless at this stage) there are 4 blue leds placed vertically next to the LCD and they light up as the boot process occurs, doing a diagnostic check. When I mentioned to Elizabeth that 1, 2, and 4 came on she knew it was a memory issue. That seems handy.
That gets the machine to boot, but then it shuts down during Vista install. She gets disconnected.
I speak with Davidson (tech support, incident 19636455) who asks for my phone number tells me to remove the memory and reseat it. It boots, but only into Windows Error Recovery. Trying to restore to factory Dell settings bombs and the computer doesn't even power on after a reboot. I mention this. Then he gets disconnected.
I speak with Amith (tech support, incident 19637936) who tells me to take out all the memory and the power cord hold the power button down for 10 seconds then restart. That apparently resets the motherboard or discharges any held charges on it, who knows. Promptly after asking how it's going, he gets disconnected.
I speak with Kiran (tech support, incident 19638312) who tells me that the diagnostics LEDs (1 2 3 ) indicate Hard cables not properly connected to System board. He thinks the motherboard is fine and wants to disconnect the drives, the cpu, and various other items to determine what's bad about it. By this time I'm really hating the whole process since my whole objective for buying a Dell was that I'd receive a machine that was well put together and quiet - having to reseat things, although trivial, is beyond my tolerances. No.
I'm on hold with customer support to return the thing. Luckily, Dell allows a return within 21 days of invoice.