HP’s Filipino support team

This morning my printer is finally working in unison with my computer thanks to a simple cable that unites the two. Just a simple USB 2.0 cable; what a concept! At least something similar to what I used back in 1983 with my first computer. Yeah, return to basics 40 years later, forgetting about wireless, Ethernet cable and the rest. 

The HP Filipino support team that whispered that solution to me wasn’t really supposed to share it, because without a WiFi connection, HP loses control upon what I do and in particularly ceases to know about my ink consumption, the company’s real gold mine. Now, as a result, they don’t even ship their new printers with a USB cable! 

Finally, after spending these many hours with their support team, I’ve learned a lot about them. HP uses girls mostly, they are obsequiously polite, but don’t show a common and consistent approach in handling customers problems and attempting to solving them.

 Their approach is notoriously piece-meal, for the exact same problem, as each call is treated differently, a bit by improvising. Their skill levels differ immensely between the various persons as well as their ability to speak an understandable English.

Then, as they try to help, they constantly interact with what seems to me supervisors with more knowledge, but since these folks aren’t directly invested into the process, they don’t really care. These IT service individuals are paid less than $300 a month, so HP is giving its customer what they paid for their (cheap) printers in terms of support. 

Had they been a bit better trained, they would have told me not to bother with their notoriously unstable WiFi to connect my printer to a USB cable and saved me one week and more than 24 hours of my precious time, but that’s something that was conveniently omitted from their script...