What Did I Do To Deserve Windows 8?

For those of you reading this who don’t know me – I’m a techno-creative who’s been working in digital even before there WAS a digital. And throughout that rather extensive time period, I’ve done something that many other creatives could not understand: I swore my allegiance to the Microsoft Operating System.

I’ve heard the whines and the complaints, I’ve endured the file format debacles (“Oh, we just assumed you’d be using a Mac for Art Direction”) and I’ve even dabbled for a couple of years on the dark side…but it always came back to two things: Windows OS (and Windows Hardware overall) were cheaper and essentially did the exact same thing. And after many, many years of troubleshooting Windows – well, I’m pretty good at it. I’ve gone from Windows 95 (uh-huh) all the way up to Windows 7 Ultimate – and considering there are about 18 systems here at the shop – I work in EVERYTHING in-between. I use Vista 64 for webcasting (nice and stable!) and Ultimate 7 for HD video editing. My HD editing box has never once crashed in over two years of daily usage.

So, I get a call from a good friend of mine who we’ll call “Skip” (because that’s his name) and he explains that he just got a Dell Laptop for his wife and he’s having issues getting it to work correctly – Skip is a Mac guy and his wife generally works in Windows. Skip bribes me with lunch and brings his laptop over to the studio: this is my first “hands on” encounter with Windows 8 outside of the shelves at Best Buy or Office Max. I figure “how much different can this be?” – I mean, I’m somewhat of a Windows expert, so I’m pretty sure I can fix whatever is ailing my friend’s laptop. Wrong, Bucko, welcome to Windows 8.

Tiles – who came up with this and why do I need them? I’d don’t use my production machines to Facebook, tweet, check the weather or view random images of life on Mars, but for some unknown reason, my normal, placid (low CPU usage) desktop is flipping and flopping out “tiles” of information like some meth-smoking, sex-monkey on a search engine overload. I’m getting sports scores, stock reports, groupon deals and all sorts of other crap thrown in my face – PLEASE, make it stop! Finally I discover that one of the tiles is marked “desktop” and I click on that. Peace, quiet and digital calm ensue…I’m not being bombarded by tile insanity anymore – now we can get busy.

Let’s see what programs are on this machine – I’ll just go to the Start menu and see what we’ve got. Wrong, no start menu.  I can, however, fling my cursor up into the left hand corner of the screen and that seems to pull up every website ever created in the last 20 years, the same action on the lower right indicates that I might soon end up back at the “tiles” screen (oh no!) upper right does something but I’m not sure what and somewhere along the right hand side a bunch of goofy icons show up that I don’t need “Search, Tab, Call for Laundry Service and Make Me A Sandwich” (as far as I can tell) – so I settle on “Search”. That takes you to a page that is a huge listing of programs (good) and a bunch of things called “apps”.  Now, I understand the need for apps on a iPhone, Droid or even a tablet – but what do I need an app on a laptop for?

Microsoft has provided us with two convoluted routes to the same thing: I can view eBay (or any other web-based service) as either a fully-functional site in a browser or as a dumbed-down, half-functional “basterd” version called an app. Say, this is progress! Not only that – but even venerable Internet Explorer has two versions: the old “program style” (with the URL bar at the top) and the “app” version (with the URL version at the bottom). So, just to get this straight – you can now view websites from within a browser app, or a regular browser or you can just use the app. Now, the problem that we’re having with this particular laptop is that it accesses the internet just fine from the IE App version, but the standard IE Program says “Page not found” no matter what we point it to. We’ve got fast and huge connectivity, so that’s not the problem – there seems to be something going on between the App version and the Program version. I’m sure a call to the friendly Dell helpline will solve this problem.

Now, I couldn’t make this stuff up – we spent four and a half hours (really) on the phone to Dell support. We started off in customer care – where we told the tech all our information (12 digit computer service number, full name, company that purchased the unit, office phone, backup phone and email address) and described the problem. In VERY broken English he apologized for the problem we were having and said he would transport us to tech support. This took 25 minutes on hold where (you guessed it) we provided all our information again (12 digit computer service number, full name, company that purchased the unit, office phone, backup phone and email address) to the “hardware tech”. He also had issues with English as he was clearly speaking to us from a call center in India (the background noise coupled with his thick accent made conversation a grinding process) – he explained that he would “take control” of our system and fix the problem. All we had to do was download a file, install it and we would be on our way. We tried this 3 times – and each time received the same error message. Why? Because our web browser was screwed up – but regardless, each of the three attempts took us across many screens that all required numbers and letters to be entered. Not an issue if our guide spoke English, but far more challenging considering this exchange: “Hoaky, to be entering  the code B then the code C then the number two”, “B as in boy?”, “No, B as in tango”, “You mean T?”, “That’s what I said – B”.

I won’t bore you with the remaining 3 hours – but suffice it to say, we went from Customer Service, to Hardware Support to Software Support to some black hole of tech support hell where they only speak in grunts and monotone whistles and throw small chips of flint through the receiver. We finally got the system so that whatever you clicked on, you got the “app” version of IE (which worked) and it just hid the non-functional program version of IE somewhere in the bowels of the operating system never to be seen or heard from again. I gave in to Tech Support overload and had to call it a day – I meekly asked Skip if it was too late to plop this piece of crap back in the box and return it to from whence it came – and he told me that “Window of opportunity” was closed – the box was his.

I took this experience to heart and began to think about my own future with Windows 8 – I began to have fantasies of stockpiling used Windows 7 laptops purchased on Craigslist that I could wear out over time without ever having to deal with tiles, apps or icons that looked like they represented changing a carburetor in a ‘53 Mercury. I’m now more careful with my hand gestures as a rule for fear that collections of past websites or programs or whatever will suddenly appear sweeping out of the corners of my peripheral vision to corrupt my normal, stable existence. I have “Fear of 8”!

Postscript: Two days later I was walking thought a local mall and there was a Dell Kiosk. I asked the gents working there if my friend could bring his Dell to them and have them take a look at his problems. They informed me that I should call tech support – I told them that there were many and varied communication barriers in that process that made speaking to tech support damn near impossible. They laughed, agreed and said “Here’s what you gotta do – when asked to pick YOUR language, pick Spanish. That way you get routed to a call center in Texas where they all speak English anyway. If you pick English, they just send you to India”. Or, I could just purchase future laptops from Microcenter, where if it doesn’t work, you put the thing back in the box and say (in whatever language you’d like) “Give me a new one!”