a frustrating afternoon

today I spent over two hours on the phone with the Sprint PCS people trying to troubleshoot a stupid broadband wireless card. First I was talking to one lady, who after about an hour of talking about her granddaughter who is living with her and is carving a pumpkin for halloween which looks like it needs braces, stated that she really didn't know what was going on and that the error codes I was giving her were not on her "list" of questions she could answer, she transferred me to tech support (shouldn't I have been talking with tech support all along, not this random lady who was pretending like she could fix things??). then during tech support all the help I basically got was demeaning questions like "what kind of computer do you have? is it old?" (it happens to be brand new), encouraging statements like "you just need to be patient," and totally weird questions like "did you live in st. louis during the flood of '93?" After that didn't work, I got transferred to "advanced" tech support. I am not really sure what that means except that probably this guy was tired of talking to me so he passed me on the next lucky guy. somewhere during that transferring process to advance tech support with nice elevator music, my computer froze, someone came in to talk to me about where I wanted my shelves that were being installed 12 or 16 inches apart, I got so frustrated with the fact that I had just wasted two hours of my life, that I just said I had to go and hung up the phone. the sad thing is tomorrow I will probably have to start over at square one since, as Nelson so gently informed me, I didn't get any sort of service reference number or phone number to call the advanced tech support man back. I think it will be a great day tomorrow. good thing it's friday.