Annals of Bad Customer Service
Excuse me while I vent.
I'm in the process of using TurboTax to file my 2007 Federal and State income taxes. I'd be finished by now, awaiting at least one tasty refund check, but for some glitchiness in the automatic-updating part of the software; in essence, the program refuses to advance beyond a certain point without making sure it's got the latest updates, but whenever it tries to retrieve said updates, it encounters an error.
No problem. Surely I'm not the only one having this problem, which even identified itself to me as Error 9111. I'll just surf on over to their site and wrangle up some technical support.
"Ah," says the site. "Error 9111? Sounds like something wrong at your end."
Firewall blocking the update? No, I've disabled the firewall software for just this reason. Anti-Virus program? Snoozed . . . not active during the update. (Never mind that the update is clearly downloading just fine, thank you very much, and failing to install.)
"Perhaps you could perform the update manually?" the site offers.
"Okay," I say to myself, "Download a big ol' file and run it . . . I do this sort of thing all the time." So I follow the link, and instructions, and several minutes later I have downloaded and applied the update. Time to fire up TurboTax again and finish this thing . . .
Error 9111
Fuck. I appear to have run the gamut of technical expertise on the support site, and I still can't do my taxes.
A little more poking around, and I've found the link to appeal to the support team. So, I craft a version of what you've just read: The problem I'm having, the steps I've taken to attempt to resolve it, how to contact me with a solution.
Good news: I got a response from Intuit within two hours. Bad news: Apparently, Intuit thinks robots should answer the mail. What I got was a slightly-stripped down version of the parts of their site that I'd already been poring over. In addition to not offering a single constructive option, the note went on to expect some sort of survey about the quality of support I'd gotten.
The note was signed 03_Tristan Romeo. What kind of world have we become? Am I to assume that the boys parents actually included both numbers and punctuation in their son's name? (I'm pronouncing it "Zero-Three-Underscore-Tristan-Romeo", like some kind of radio call-sign. Can't believe they didn't get a "niner" in there somehow.) Or is it more likely that the "names" attached to these support emails are assigned from some pool, and they didn't bother to prettify this one enough to knock the number off the front.
Reminded me of this classic from xkcd:
