I mean helpless in two senses: they often don't help the customers and they often have no influence on the software or other products.
This summer I bought a Westinghouse solar shed light for the outhouse at our cabin. It's great when stepping into the outhouse from bright sunlight.
I think at some point I forgot to turn the light off and the batteries were drained. I bought new batteries and the light was working OK. But wait a minute. The solar panel charges the rechargeable batteries and I should be able to use the original batteries again.
That seemed to work, but if the light was turned off and then turned on again just a little bit later, the light wouldn't come on, even though it had been bright when turned on.
I emailed the address on the instructions about this problem. Instead of agreement with my analysis or another suggestion, the responder wanted date of purchase, model number (which I thought I had provided), my name and address, an emailed copy of the receipt, my name and address, and I forget what else.
I replied forget it, I'll try the new batteries again.
I was right! The light works much better with the new batteries.
Why didn't Westinghouse International Development Corporation train its people to have a set of helpful answers?
We replaced the landline at our cabin with an AT&T Home Base provided by Consumer Cellular, cutting our phone bill to one-third what it was with Frontier. It works fine, but the time on our answering machine always seemed to be an hour later than the actual time. It was EDT rather than CDT. When we turned on the power and I reset the time, the "spoken" time was given to me as the CDT I set.
I tried resetting the answering machine to have the incorrect minutes. Later on the minutes would be correct but the hour would be one hour off!!
I emailed the friendly folks at Consumer Cellular. They suggested that it was the answering machine and I should reach out to the manufacturer. One person also called me; she was sure that the network didn't set the time. I thanked her and said I would make some tests the next time I was at the cabin.
Today I was at the cabin. When I turned on the power, I did not reset the answering machine clock as I normally do. When the handset had recharged enough to read the screen, the time was a few minutes after midnight; that is, it was the number of minutes since I had turned the power on.
I called the cabin phone with a cell phone. I don't remember if I answered the cabin phone or not. However, when I looked at the time on the handset it was the correct time plus one hour!!! In other words, the network is setting the time, albeit incorrectly.
Since the cell phone is a smart phone, I assume it's time is being set by the Internet. It's time is CDT.
As most people do not turn their answering machines and Home Bases off very often, I'm not too surprised that Consumer Cellular has not heard much about this problem. I wonder if any of the owners have checked what the time stamp is on left messages.
I am considering sending these companies an invoice for my consulting fees. I probably won't find a round tuit to do so, but thinking about it does give me a chuckle. Oh, yeah! I also fixed a problem with my Mac that The Geek Squad couldn't find. See "Computer withdrawal symptoms".
