I hate this! I got passed a call from an Indian fellow stating that my computer was running slow. Now as I know a thing or two about computers, I thought it would be good to toy with this person!
Firstly, he said we have Microsoft Certified Technicians to help me get my PC running faster again. Oh right? “I am one, what do I need you for?”. I’m not an MS Certified techie, but if I was I think it would have been courteous for the gentleman to say “have a nice day” and leave me alone! He now tells me to turn on my PC and he will show me why its running slow. Well, if he knows my PC is slow, why doesn’t he know its already running!
After a little bit of arguing about why I need to listen, he asked what my OS was and then he must have got out the sheet for Vista to guide me through the process. “Press the windows key, located on the bottom left of the keyboard.” Oh rly?? To him I’m a MCT, so surely I should know where the frecking windows key is! Next he gets me to load the run dialogue box. Then he said “type e.v.e.n.t.v.w.r” Getting that out of him took about a minute, as he said every word with its phonetic, which were wrong but I couldn’t be bothered to correct him!
Once I’d done this, the UAC box opened (yes I still have it enabled, it doesn’t annoy me). Now the idea of the User Account Control baffles the man, he doesn’t understand that a normal user would get stuck by this because its asking for permission to run a program, some old people might be a bit baffled by this! If he had Microsoft techs writing this script then they should know some users will have this enabled by default.
Once we got past that bit, oh yeah your going to show me some log entries that show that something closed unexpectedly. Which he then did! He said keep scrolling, there will be something wrong. There was, according to him. Some warnings about things that didn’t run properly, this is what he wanted to hear!! Then I said that these warnings don’t affect a PC’s speed and to go away I know what I’m doing.
Then I pressed the nice red button and hung up.
Thinking back I really wish I had kept going with the call, to see what the person was selling. He must have been selling me something to ‘fix’ my issues, because there has to be some money in it somewhere! My worry is that a lot of people will get baffled by this, because a lot of PC’s do run slow over time, so its a safe bet that the fellow on the phone will find someone who is not tech savvy and will fall into the trap. The gullible and the elderly is who I’m worried about with this.
Also, I think its a little bit misleading, because someone lies to gain entry into your home via your phone and trying to tell you that your PC isn’t working in order to sell you something you don’t need. If only these people understood English…
