Support Hell...

I'm stuck at home listening to awful classical music waiting for a Netgear support person to pick up. My wireless router/print server stopped printing a couple of days before my wedding (just as I desperately needed to print, of course). After we got back from the honeymoon I tried to trouble shoot. I figured it was a hardware problem in the router since both my Mac and XP laptop stopped working at the same time yet I can print to the printer over different means (AppleTalk and direct parallel). Still I reinstalled the drivers and upgraded to the latest firm ware. No luck.

I emailed support detailing my problem and the steps I took to fix it. They replied to try to reinstall drivers and get latest firmware (?!?) and if that didn't help to call their toll free number. I called several times (weekend, evening, after work) and each time the call queue was over 30 minutes long.

This morning I finally got to talk to someone. They walked me through reinstalling the drivers three times, restarting the printer, laptop and router as many times and eventually resetting the router (I'll now get to reconfigure my wireless security - thanks a lot).

Still, no success. It got escalated to a higher tech and I spent another fifteen minutes on the phone listening to musing and being occasionally reminded that my call is important to them and that it may be monitored for quality purposes. Then the call was dropped.