Microsoft takes 10 years to return support call

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 15 Jan 2008 at 10:06

We've all sat by the phone waiting for technical support desks to return our call, but a US blogger claims it took Microsoft a staggering 10 years to follow-up on a call he made in 1998.

The blogger, known only as Bic, says his parents were startled when they received a call at 11pm on 8 January. As it was so late at night, they decided to leave the call to voicemail. The message was from Microsoft support, checking to see if their son's PC problem had been solved.

There was just one problem: Bic had moved out of his parent's years before. The dutiful parents informed their son of the call, who first assumed it must be a hoax.

But having given the matter some thought, he realised it might indeed be genuine. "I recalled that I had called Microsoft not once, but twice (possibly as many as three different times)," he writes on his blog.

"I remember in the past year or so when I called Microsoft and the problem was not resolved (BSOD after Microsoft patch) that Microsoft did call me back the next day to see if I made any progress in my little computer crisis (which I thought was super cool of them. I was really impressed). But wait a second, or wait 315,569,260 seconds, Microsoft hadn't done this the first time I called, and I called many years ago. But that must have been when I was living at home with my parents, which is why they called me at my parent's phone number."

Bic even has his own theory on how this calamitous cock-up occurred. "On 7 January, 1998 a tech support person typed into their database to call me back the next day... but instead of typing 1/8/98 they typed 1/8/08.

"Instead of typing the '9' right next to it they typed '0'. Microsoft had called me back 10 years later!"

Support for Windows 98 officially ended in July 2006, and whether Microsoft actually solved the decade-old problem remains a mystery.