ADVENTURES IN DUBAI:
YOUR FAVOURITE NUMBER ONE BLOG
BRITISH DESIGNER LIVING IN DUBAI TELLS (NEARLY) ALL

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Big corporations are scared of you...

Maybe not, perhaps they're just shy. But Sony certainly are not encouraging any direct contact with their gazillions of customers. I have wasted an entire afternoon trying to connect a Sony digital Handycam to my laptop so that I can copy the contents of a tape via USB. Should be pretty easy, but no, looks like it cannot be done (see this interesting forum to read comments from a few hundred other frustrated people http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/8691/56322.html ).

So, I decide to quit wasting my time, and to seek help from the manufacturers, who, you might imagine, would be more than willing to bend over backwards to help out a customer. Egads. I go to their website, I search for the product, I search the FAQs and get no answer, I try to initiate a Live Chat session but it does not work (reason: 'daytime off', whatever that means), and finally I fill in an online form that fails to send. I fill it in again, and once more it fails to send. A complete dead end, thank you Mr Sony. You have hidden your faceless corporation pretty well behind several non-functioning 'facilities'.

I try a different tack, by looking for a local / regional support site. I find it, but once again it makes it impossible to get even an email address for a real person. The 'contact us' link just puts you back into the same loop of filling in a stupid form that will not send - their support department must think they are doing a great job, because they never get any complaining emails.

I am so frustrated because I have not even been offered the opportunity of waiting in line for a millennium or two and then speaking to some script-reading nerd at a call centre, and after wasting 2 hours scouring the web for information on this product I am absolutely none the wiser. Gaaaaargh!