Customer Support

I've just spent almost two hours chatting either online or on the phone with various reps from HP.

I suppose that I need to backtrack. I contacted HP support on behalf of someone named Chris. Chris began showing up Tuesday nights a few months ago. He's disabled and confined to a motorized wheelchair due to his being afflicted with palsy. His speech is difficult to understand at times. The problem is that the people who raised him equated his inability to speak clearly with a lack of intelligence and apparently Chris was never given a chance to learn how to read, I discovered this one night after dinner when Chris approached me and asked me for a favor. He told me that he wanted to be able to start reading the bible he'd received recently. I've spent the last few weeks contacting various literacy programs and not gotten a response from any of them. So I'm going to take a crack at getting him able to reach a functioning level of literacy. But i digress.

Chris can read numbers and tell time, stuff like that. Last night he showed me some bank transactions off his phone app and apparently he was charged 3 times for the same item that he ordered online from HP.

The bank entry had an 800 number as a reference so I called it. I provided a laptop model number and the serial number and the rep was able to find the transaction and from that asked me to confirm Chris' full name and the amount, which I did. Apparently the transaction was associated with tech support so I got transferred there, only to be told that their phone lines were available only during certain business hours. I went home and tried their online chat, only to be kept waiting for a rep for 15 minutes before giving up until I tried again this afternoon.

No one on the tech support side could identify the transaction just by model number and serial number and three different reps kept asking me for an order number despite my repeatedly telling them that all I had was the model number and serial number. After almost an hour and a half with tech support, I tried online chat on the sales side where someone helpfully suggested that I call the 800 number again but this time specify that I wanted to speak with a case manager which I did. The end result - HP maintains that they only charged Chris once, but it's possible multiple authorization attempts were made. and to check with the bank.

It took me two hours to get to this point, and I can read, write and talk (sort of).

I try to imagine what it's like for Chris on a daily basis. And I realize how much about life I still take for granted.