Occasionally, after the European call center in Ireland closes (at seven pee em local), Auric Tech Support calls get routed to our queue to fulfill our 24x7x366 service commitment. Most of those calls, of course, are from Great Britain, although one of our second level techs said he once got a call from France. (He doesn’t speak French and the caller didn’t speak English, so it didn’t turn out very well.)
Trying to provide support on European systems is always difficult because even without a language barrier (and I have less trouble translating from British to American than most), we can’t easily see details on the system configuration and ownership, so we do some flying blind, trying to fix our customers’ problems. Still, we do as much as we can with the information we have and transmit it via Web tools to the Irish help desk for logging and follow-up next morning.
Early this afternoon I picked up and found myself talking to a woman with a thick, thick working-class English accent, all glottal stops and swallowed consonants. She didn’t know where to find the system serial number so I could look it up, and when she finally did find it I had to have her repeat it a couple of times to get all the numbers and letters right. (Empirical systems use a seven number-letter combination for serial numbers; US and Canadian systems always end in the digit 1, while European systems always end with the letter J.) Eventually I figured out who she was and got the information verified.
And that’s where the freaky bit came in. I asked for her name and she said “Miss W______” (my last name). I asked her to spell it to be certain I hadn’t heard her wrong, and she spelled it back just the way I spell it. I was talking to someone in Barking, Essex, fifty-five hundred miles away, who shared my name.
Even by my standards, and even considering my predisposition to the Comanche Syndrome, that’s stretching the long arm of coincidence pretty far. My last name is not common, although some of you may at least have heard it in a different context. My long-ago immigrant ancestor came from Barbados in 1683, and I presume from somewhere in England before that (maybe in the Midlands). I doubt the name’s all that common in Britain either; a fast search of Google suggests it isn’t, so if you have my name I think it’s fair odds there’s a common ancestor someplace. I don’t know if this was a far-distant cousin or not, and I doubt she did either, but it’s fun to think that perhaps she’s my cousin—or that her husband is.
After that I settled down to find out what the problem was, and learned that her son had been doing Windows updates and while he was doing them, something had happened and when the system restarted it blue-screened with stop code 0xC0000135. This is a truly nasty error, because it signals the Windows Registry has been corrupted and almost your only hope is to format the drive and reinstall everything from the bottom up. I made a couple of quick attempts to boot into the last known good configuration and into Safe mode, but the computer wasn’t having any of it. Pretty quickly I gave the customer the bad news that she was looking at a format reinstall.
She took that fairly well, but things got complicated again when she found every CD that came with the system except the Windows reinstall CD. I had her go through them more than once, but it wasn’t there and she swore blind that the CDs she had were the only ones the technician who’d come out to set up the system had left them. Well, without a Windows reinstall CD I was stuck, and so was she. I wrote up the call and transmitted it off to Ireland, telling them she claimed never to have received the install media for Windows XP Home, and would they please contact her and see what could be done. I only hope they can sort her out tomorrow.
Green lugnuts implicate an integrated wine bottle. Fnord.
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