mcbeen.com

It’s hard to believe I was once a Dell fan. I recommended their hardware to many people over the years. They built their machines out of off the shelf components, and made sure that when things sometime went wrong, they were put back the way they should be quickly.
But things changed. Soon, Dell decided to scrap it’s three year lockdown for corporate machines. They began using proprietary designs and hardware. They raised their prices. They moved their support departments overseas.
When I started work where I am today, we were in the process of moving the entire company to Dell desktops. Things were going ok, until we started to have motherbaord failures in our GX150s. The machines would randomly reset for no reason, even when booted to DOS from a floppy. We spent over a year off and on trying to get the machine diagnosed to no avail. we were never ever to get any kind of error code, and we could never narrow it down to any one component. No matter what we did, the problem kept on coming. We eventually just retired the machine. It was still under warentee, but we could not get it repaired. They insisted on getting an error code of some kind before authorizing any kind of repair. They also didn’t want to spend time swapping out components that might not have been bad.
a few months later, we found the problem in THREE more GX150s. Luckily, these units were under Dell’s “gold” support program. “Gold” means that Dell will “waste” money trying to fix your machine. We got a hold of a tech who had actually SEEN the problem before, and knew exactly what it was. Turns out that quite a few Dell computers have trouble with the cpu socket and static generated by the CPU fan. It is a known defect internally. He sent us out a tech with new motherboards, and fixed the three machines. Gleefully, I called normal support back and referenced my gold support incident hopeful that Iwould finally get the machine repaired. Nope. No error, no tech. We called our sales rep, and he told us there was nothing he could do. I called tech support multiple times trying to get some one who would listen, but they all said the same thing. There was nothing they could do. The final guy I talked to told me to call Gold support and lie about my service tag, and use a tag off another machine. The machines still sits in my junk bin.

Last september, one of our Dell laptops decided not to charge it’s batteries any more. We narrowed it down to the logic board, and scheduled a repair. The expected repair date was DECEMBER 25. Three months. That’s right. I called them every couple weeks to make sure everything was still on schedule. In December, the 25th came and went, no tech. I called them back on th 27th to be informed my warentee had now expired. We called our sales rep, who once again told us there was nothing he could do. Fun fun fun.

We have since switched to whitebox and hp/compaq machines. So far no trouble. We call for support, repair tech comes out.

The world we live in is a strange place these days. Cave dwelling fanatics elude capture of the worlds largest power while americans drool over apologies from politicians.
But the most curious of all has been the invasion of religion into mainstream politics. I’m not just talking about presidential policy decisions, and prayer in the classroom. I’m talking about a woman I work with, and she is not alone by any sense of the word. I brought in a video last week of one of Bush’s many hilarious speeches. After showing a FULL 3 minute session of bush out in front of his heli last week, half the group was rolling on the floor with laughter. The rest were showing various expressions of pain and anger.
The one woman said what the half would not. “You should not say bad things about the president.” I just simply smiled and said, “I have not said anything.”
I really wanted to ask her if she tried to keep her friends silent during the Clinton “scandal”. But I knew how pointless that would be, and I already knew the answer. I have spent much time going over situations like this and trying to figure out where the blind faith comes from. It comes from the bible. Bush’s unwavering support comes from religious people who somehow feel that because Bush is a “religious” man, he is a good man and a good leader. I can think of a lot of things he is, but a leader is not one of them. They ignore his faults, and believe that somehow it will all work out if they pray hard enough and have faith in their God. They ignore fact. They ignore reason. They have to. By admitting fault in their “religious leader” they vicariously admit fault within themselves. But the vail is finally lifting. The REAL scandal of what has been done to iraq, and now it’s people is opening the eyes of the temporarily blind. You can only deny so long.
I find it astounding how much work the nightly news puts in to NOT making this guy sound like a complete fool. He can’t talk in public. He trips over words like they are foreign objects he does not understand. He stutters. He repeats himself. He twitches painfully. He mumbles.
Now I don’t want anyone to think that I am calling “republicans blind faith followers”. But I will say that if the party wants to survive, this subgroup needs to be purged. I used to be republican, before the party started to deny fact and lost their way in Texas and the bible belt. Religion does not belong in politics. Not because of the dangers that the church hold towards government, but the dangers that people in power wield by leveraging peoples faith to do their will without question. It becomes a form of mind control.