JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

Hi Folks,

Okay.. so day 3 of my likely boring recent blogs about last weeks computer disaster has come. And through sheer relentless pursuit and stubborness with Sony, I finally got high enough up the ladder (and finally, for the first time in 6 hours of phone calls, talked to someone actually from the US who bothered to listen to me) that they've relented and agreed to send me restore discs for this desktop computer. It doesn't recover my lost files, but at least we'll have a working computer hopefully next week. (They said it would take 4-5 days to get the discs to me). I think I lucked out and got a fairly high up the food chain guy on the phone after I refused to accept their final statement that I was simply out of luck. The woman in the Phillipines was SOOOO angry with me that I was willing to literally sit on the phone for over 90 minutes waiting for the "supervisor" to finally come out of his "meeting." I wasn't buying that tactic. But she finally blinked and let me talk to a real life supervisor with both the interest and ability to help me. I learned a long time ago that if you want just about anything simply find a way to climb the food chain. Eventually you get to a point where people's bonuses can be damaged if you go one step higher and that's when you get help.

I am still hosed for another week and then will still have to reload software and deal with that nightmare... but at least I made some progress to having a working computer next week without spending 1000's of dollars. (It was a $2800 dollar computer 18 months ago). Amazingly, there's almost no computers on the market (aside from the Apples) that are even as powerful as this computer is from 2006. It's almost like no one is making computers anymore. (HP and Dell is about it on the windows side as far as desktops go).

Now I can mull over getting a mac laptop to do video production on and continue to use the desktop to run JPF. Yay!

Brian