My deep and heartfelt thanks to David Smalley, an advanced course student at the University of Leeds, who has run an IT department with employees in three countries. David had two suggestion for the tech anomaly headaches I was facing yesterday.
You may recall that my new X40 keyboard was skipping letters and that my Dell utility disk would not let me load my print drivers onto a non-Dell computer. David sent two tips and both worked. The driver one s a bit complicated, but he devised a way to work around the problem. To solve my mystifying keyboard problems, he advised me to go to the Accessibility section of my Windows Control panel and turn all option on then off.
Both of these suggestions have worked. I'm amazed and am thankful.
I am also very impressed with what happened after I posted yesterday regarding IBM/Lenovo. Within minutes, Todd Watson, who got me this Thinkpad, saw my posting and called from his mother's house where he is on Christmas Holiday. he voiced a very high level of concern and said he would get some tech people on the case. Two hours later another IBM representative called, getting my voicemail and leaving a message that e would put a tech support person on the case. Still later in the day Christne Freel, who handles executive relations for the president of Lenova in the US (I may have the titles botched a bit), called to talk with me about the problem. We ended up chatting for a half hour and it became very human discussing the banana slug mascot at her alma mater college--UC Santa Cruz and what it's like to culturally transition from IBM to Lenova.
My month-long tech problems appear to be solved, but that's personal. The bigger issue is just look at the role blogging has had in all this. I asked the blogosphere to solve two really odd problems, and within 24 hours David Smalley located in a school 5000 miles from where I sit gave me the answers. We don't know each other in real life and until he reached out, I had never heard of David, and didn't know he visited my blog.
As for the Thinkpad people at IBM & Lenova Three people called me within six hours, all f them in management level positions. That is just dazzling if you ask me. Compare that with what experiences I--and so many other people--have had with Dell and other companies, who block communications with unhappy customers, by websites, voice processing and now blogs. I know where my loyalties lie and will remain for a very long time.
A few days ago Andrew Denny, very sincerely challenged whether it was appropriate for me to keep writing about this tech saga, particularly ranting about Dell, on this site. It made me think twice about what have been doing. But my conclusion is that this sage has been entirely on spot.
Naked Conversations is about companies and customers getting closer together. It's about companies listening to unhappy customers and responding. It's also about the wisdom of crowds and David Smalley just showed how the combined wisdom of the blogosphere solves problems and finds answers with extreme efficiency.
Now, I have nothing more to say about tech problems. I just want to see the tools without hardly thinking about them, just like most people.
