Vista rant dead ahead. If reading about how Microsoft Vista causes pain and suffering to end users is offensive to you, you may not want to read this blog entry. You have been warned.
I ordered Microsoft Vista licensing and media CDs on February 8th. About 4 days later, I received some official looking documents from our authorized Microsoft vendor. I set those aside knowing that I would have to call Microsoft for my volume license keys once the CDs arrived.
The CDs arrived approximately 9 days after the initial order. Is this acceptable? If I'm planning on deploying software into an enterprise environment, is waiting 9 days for the software to arrive really acceptable? I digress. (oh yea...because we were going to use Vista in a virtual machine, we had to pay top dollar for the enterprise version)
Once the CDs arrived, I called our MS authorized vendor back and asked for the volume license keys (this process started at 3:40 PM). I checked my email 5 minutes later and was surprised to find keys that I was sure didn't belong to me. I figured this because the name of who the keys were assigned to did not match our school name. : )
At the bottom of this email was a phone number to call for help. I dialed the number and a nice man (who was difficult to understand) answered the phone cheerfully with, "How may I help you?" I explained my situation to him and he said that he had to go look something up in the computer. He came back 5 minutes later apologizing that it took so long to get the information. (I'm guessing that he was really probably just answering another call to maximize his productivity, but I'm pretty jaded at this point).
He asked me again what I needed and after I told him that I needed volume license keys, he politely informed me that I dialed the wrong number (even though this was the helpline listed in the email that contained the incorrect volume license keys). He gave me the correct number and I hung up with him. It was now 3:55 PM.
I dialed the new number and went into the usual phone menu routine pressing the appropriate numbers. The last menu was, "For Volume License Keys press 2." I pressed the button and waited. And waited. After 2 minutes of waiting a voice came on and said, "We're sorry. We could not connect your call. Please hang up and dial again." DIALTONE
Soooooo...once again I dialed the phone number and finally got connected to another nice gentlemen that was hard to understand. He asked me for my agreement number. I took out the envelope that I received from my Microsoft authorized reseller and looked through those official looking documents for an agreement number. Nada....nope....zip. So I told him that I could give him a PO number, or a manufacturers part number, or an invoice number. Nope...that wouldn't do. We parted ways at around 4:05.
Now I'm frustrated. I went over to the box that the CDs came in and start looking on the media for the agreement number. Nope...not there either. I start pulling the packing material out of the box. WAIT! What's this? At the bottom of the box there is what appears to be an invoice. Lo and behold it contains an agreement number.
I called Microsoft back and after giving him my email address he read it back to me:
Charlie, Hotel, Alpha, Mary, Alpha, Delta, Yoshi (ok...I made that last one up). What gives? Is there some sort of war going on that requires this codespeak? I guess Microsoft REALLY doesn't want to accidentally send someone license codes that shouldn't be receiving them. Oh, wait a second. That's how this whole mess started about THIRTY MINUTES AGO!
Is this acceptable? Seriously? What IT administrator truly believes that this is better than installing a copy of Mac OS X that DOESN'T REQUIRE ANY CODES FOR INSTALLATIONS....EVER!
I'm done. I had to blog this as soon as it happened. Where's the Tylenol? My eye is killing me.
CH
