I don’t know if this is a uniquely American trait, but the sense of entitlement is just huge in the IT space. We want it all. We want it now. We want it free.

Does anyone for a moment consider that things actually cost money?

From production staff, to satellite uplinks, to broadcast staff, to bandwidth required to distribute content, to market it, to deliver and support it - oh, and a few hundred million to grease the wheels and obtain the “rights” to the certain content people want to see.

Most people don’t like to face reality that things simply cost money. Best example of this ignorance is all over this Digg discussion titled: NBC Olympics video site snubs Linux, older Macs. In a nutshell, Microsoft handed a boatload of $$$ to make sure the digital Olympiad 2008 broadcast over the Internet was powered by Silverlight. They made a business decision to invest money into the event and process that would expand the installation base of their software. It is that simple.

But it angered the entitled people. The no DRM people. The information needs to be free people. The liberty or death people. Bah. These guys wouldn’t even spend $100 on an operating system, but demand a digital broadcast from China free of charge. Here is the best argument I’ve seen so far on the topic:

itsthebrod said: Last I checked, no one is forcing you to use Linux or old Mac versions. Stop bitching for the choice YOU made. Jesus, this is one reason Linux fanboys are one of the most annoying groups of people on earth: they make a decision to be a tiny minority and use Linux as their OS and then bitch when the world around them doesn’t cater every piece of software to them…

The counter-argument follows:

magic6435: That has got to be the dumbest comment i have ever read on digg…. so mabe they wanted to save some cash and not blow another 2 grand on a new mac if their powerpc is still doing what they need it to. or maybe they wanted to use and support the open software moment. there is no reason for the content NOT to work on these systems. its a matter of companies artificially mucking things up for certain techs.

Welcome to the power of choice.

You chose poorly.

You see, the beauty of living in the free world and enjoying all the benefits of the free markets is that you have the power to choose. It’s your right. The beauty of free markets for corporate citizens is that we too have a power of choice - on how we make our investments. So in the same way that you selfishly choose one alternative over another, corporations choose one alternative over another. The right to broadcast Olympics isn’t free. The right to broadcast the college football game isn’t free. That right has to be bought, and every time there is a transaction to be made someone pays for it.

In this case, Microsoft paid for it. And they offer it under the terms they set. Take it or leave it. Nobody is forcing you. Nobody is snubbing you.

Microsoft chose the format to broadcast the Olympics with. You chose an operating system that does not have the capabilities to watch the Olympics. Thats all there is to it.

Now the delicate dance that the creators (such as the music industry) and distributors (iTunes, Best Buy) and consumers (us) do in order to determine just what the right amount of money, DRM and restriction is acceptable so that everyone walks away from the deal happy and content…. that’s a much longer blog post. But in the end it comes to the exact same conclusion - it is all about the choice.

Geek Squad Dave first gained notoriety in the newsgroups for his very public lack of ability to grasp the basic concepts of vendor and client management and dealing with cost structure changes. After being condemned in public by most of his peers Geek Squad Dave became only the second person OWN will not do business with, which has apparently motivated him to become an unofficial spokesperson for one of our customer-direct competitors where he hopes to lead the drones of retail consulting IT failures like him - and god do I wish he succeeds. He also appears to be preoccupied with me for some reason even though I don’t remember ever meeting the guy. Here is his latest bit of “brilliance”:

I’ve been in this industry since Vlad was in diapers and I can assure
you the WAN bandwidth is always going to be behind LAN bandwidth. And that as bandwidth increases, the apps and data will too.

This is a part of the Geek Squad Dave’s argument on why most applications will just never make it to the cloud. Now, for this to work I am going to need you to ignore a few things. The last time I was in diapers was about 28 years ago or so.. so please ignore for a moment that this genius comes from a man who has been virtually unemployed for that period of time and failed to even accidentally be successful enough to hire another person. Please also ignore the flawed logic of “this has failed before, so it will surely fail again.” Also ignore the billions of dollars being pumped into the transformation of IT infrastructure by every major vendor. Let’s also ignore the wisdom of people who work with network engineers, developers, major IT powerhouses all of which are indicating that this is the direction they are strongly focusing on. That’s just how much ignorance you’ll need to think that we are not on a cusp of the most significant change in computing during most of our lifetime. Pampers stage included.

You see, for the longest time we’ve had this shift of computing and processing power from mainframe to PC, from PC to server, from server to workstation and the trend always flowed to the device with the most computational power because that is what transformed data into something useful. But over the last few years we have seen the relevance of a local area network diminish. Change in paradigm? Change in trust? Change in cost and affordability? It doesn’t really matter why, it matters that the computing experience is no longer dependant on you being a part of some segmented network that needed to be managed, monitored, tuned and audited around the clock. Your phone accesses the same Internet. It sends around the same email. It provides similar services, often better and more reliable if at times even cheaper. Ever tried to print a picture across the Internet and pick it up at a local CVS? Or have a picture book shipped to your doorstep?

The large data set argument is the last one in the defense of the local area network and is by far the most flawed of them all. If the data set grows, the processing power needed to manipulate it grows. Major movie studios do not render their movies on expensive standalone SGI’s anymore - they render them on server render farms. Major database and transaction systems no longer sit on monolithic clusters fighting a storage medium bottleneck - you’ve guessed it, data farms. Large files, voice, video - all within the reach of your cell phone powered by a tiny battery.

Welcome to the future. (PDC ‘08 Sessions)

As the cloud computing becomes more prevalent medium for long term storage, processing, scalability and affordability, what unique feature will bring computing back to the confines of the LAN? That my friends is what is crushing guys like Geek Squad Dave right out of their almost-business, the inability to deal with change combined with lack of expertise to seize the opportunity. It is what separates IT solution providers from independent Geek Squad guys running out and “trust recommending” the solutions. One provides solutions, the other picks out laptop bags and offers input on which version of Quickbooks or Office you should buy. The successful IT solution providers of today and tomorrow are the ones who stay informed and can demonstrate the ability to help a business be successful in the modern times.

The opportunity is incredible. And the only requirement is shedding the ignorance.

This is the most exciting time to be in the IT space, bar none. And if you think you’ve seen this before… your mind is starting to go, a good indication that you’re closer to diapers than I am.

It means confused, just in case you’re wondering.

Why do companies that have been built on going direct suddenly decide to care about the reseller channel?

Why do companies that have been built on the reseller channel partnerships decide to go direct to the customer?

Mo money. The grass is always greener on the other side.

That is all there is to it. Or as my buddy Robbie would put it: It’s that simple.

Really? Really.

With every change of guard and seasons, the occupying management force will do a business assessment and identify key areas of improvement, the opportunity matrix, the differentiating factor… and the rest is basically what the Dilbert comic is based on.

These change strategies are all ultimately based on a flawed concept that while everything else stays the same and we change only this one thing, we will be able to make $X more money. People making this kind of a call probably never heard of causality.

You see, the problem is that when you change one little thing, even with the best of intentions, you end up pissing off a large contingent of the base that got you to your current stature. So it makes sense to do it when you are at the bottom and the feds just raided your office. But what happens when you are at the top and your change for an incremental % of market share results upsetting 100% of the constituency that got you to your current leader role in the market? There goes your sand castle.

Now sure you can draw parallels to Dell and Microsoft, but I do the same for my OWN company. As the reseller base erodes and folks flunk out of business there is mounting pressure for us to go direct.

Whenever there is a high demand of unquantifiable revenue opportunity I like to find out who is suddenly making this need apparent. How did the world change overnight that we could be making all this money and how did all these customers figure out to call us? Dig a little below the shiny cover sheet of the presentation and you find out that it’s Bob, the failed VAR, callling from the $25,000 job he got with his largest client and he needs us to go direct because he is tired of returning support phone calls during summer from his car during the lunch hour.

So let me get this straight. We’re going to throw our biggest partners under the bus in order to be friendly to the very customers that couldn’t even keep the ol’ Bob in business? We need to go direct for that? Answer on the first ring for that needy client base? Reeeeeeeally?

Let me think about that one… Bzzzt. No.

I wonder if Dell, Microsoft and others are looking past their presentation cover sheets or blindly salivating over the large dream numbers?

It wasn’t too long ago that I felt it was my obligation to get into the public brawls with my peers over what was right and wrong, all while my friends tried to pull me back and tell me it’s not worth it. Nowadays, I feel like I’m the one doing most of the pulling because it is hard to get passionate people to pull back from what they perceive as a direct attack or just pure moral and ethical blasphemy.

Truth is, most people in this business put their all into their effort to change the world and burn out half way through it. Or they burn at 500 degrees, cool off, virtually disappear and then come back in a volcanic explosion. Nobody likes handling a live grenade.

I’m glad it never got to that point with me and the great deal of that goes to my friends Dave Sobel, Susan Bradley and Karl Palachuk. At their suggestion I started charting my day, charting my reach, charting the net benefits/losses both materially to OWN and mentally to me. How much time did I spend developing? How much marketing? How much helping others? How much pro-bono? And then in the other column, I noted how much difference it made to me, my family, my company and my community.

I encourage everyone to do the same.

The problem with passionate people is that they feed off the energy and response of others. The trick to being successful, in either commercial or community initiative, is knowing where your passion benefits the most people. With only 24 hours in a day you can only make a difference for so many people in so many places.

So crunch some numbers. Even if you make no money out of it at all. Especially if you don’t make any money out of it at all. Find out what you do that makes the world a better place for others, find out where you have a chance to impact the most people and offer your message.

If you do that, and if you only do that, we’re all a lot better off because nobody burns out. It worked for me

Update: Woops, one correction before I get beheaded. Most of the credit goes to my wife and to my son for grounding me, giving me a time out, chance to focus and giving me a chance to look at what I’m doing from outside in. I used to spend all this time at conferences, in groups, meetings, feedback groups, etc and use Vladville to vent my frustrations. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the difference but I’ve started using Vladville as more of a personal reflection on what I’m involved in and how I’m dealing/struggling/winning/failing - and judging by the feedback and emails and audience growth, it seems to be the most inspirational and valuable thing I’ve ever done for the complete strangers. So thanks to everyone above, and thank you for reading Vladville.

One of the nicest things about the MVP Summit, and one of the reasons I pay so much and urge so many of you to go to the big industry events, is that you can surround yourself with people who are far (far, far) wiser and more experienced than you. In a surrounding where you are not being weighted down by the idiots you have to deal with for a paycheck you can’t help but elevate your game and start seeing things in a whole new light.

One of the things I have been thinking about over the past few days has been the balancing of the equation that contains trust, influence, reputation, authority and credibility. Number of techmeme headlines had been swirling around my head for weeks as bloggers start to realize that they are not the center of the world.

But this is not about bloggers, it is an important lesson for everyone that brings themselves online, whether willingly through social networks or unwillingly through the better search engine indexing of public records.

You can’t hide. But you can try to understand how the information is consumed online.

The fundamental lie to the Web 2.0 world is that it is not based on knowledge and credentials, it is based on the size of your personal network. It’s not what you know, it’s how many people it appears know you. It’s all about the size, baby. Those with the size and apparent large roster of buddies use it to talk about those connections and project the appearance of equality with their subjects. And the pile grows. They refer back to how so-and-so did-something-something because of them. It infers influence. Jump on the bandwagon as often as possible, love everything everyone else loves. It will grow your network of people interested in the seemingly everything you are interested in. Talk about yourself and how you’ve previously talked about it. To the casual observer, it seems like you have some authority over the subject. Traffic begets traffic, pretty pictures illustrate credibility, authority, makes you feel like you can trust them because the herd does too.

Then you meet them and realize… my god, this person is complete and total charlatan that is obviously out of place.

The bottom line is, knowledge and credentials still matter. Not in the makebelief world of Web 2.0, but in the real world where you make your money, feed your family, grow as a human being and hopefully cause change that improves you and things around you.

My whole point is that you should not get discouraged from what you do just because you’re an apparent peon and you don’t have a billion contacts on Facebook. You should not abandon hope just because your events are packed with hundreds of people lined up to take your picture. The big picture is far larger than that.

Trust is something earned, not something percieved.
Everyone fact-checks, nobody will take things on blind faith. (Web 2.0 religion opportunity?
You have no influence over anyone. Don’t lie to yourself.

What makes you reputable, notable, perhaps even influential is NOT an internal quality that you posses. It is an external, subjective opinion of people who choose to follow you, who believe that you make sense and can be honest and human.

Web 2.0 is not so unlike the Real World 1.0, though it is easier to lie in, reality is all that actually matters/counts. Don’t get lost in the clouds. (sorry, sorry, I know, bad pun)

This is called taking one for the team as far as the community is concerned. She either asks for the password to start Twittering or drives up to Seattle for the Summit for the sole purpose of killing me. Either way, everyone stands to benefit:

https://twitter.com/susanbradley

Name susanbradley

Location Fesno, CA

Bio Fake Susan Bradley’s take on SBS and adult entertainment industry

Oh, Chris is twittering too.. Or is it tweeting?

We’ve got your green right here.

As some of you have figured out already, OWN has committed to scaling out our other product lines to EU and Australia. This commitment came out of the loyalty we have received from our partners in UK and Australia and we are bringing Shockey Monkey, LiveArchive, Exchange 2007, Offsite Backups and Sharepoint over the Atlantic and Pacific, starting May 1st, 2008.

It’s not easy, being green

ExchangeDefender was our first and only global infrastructure project. We learned a lot in the process and with the desire to scale out the US-based services we wanted to do something that was wildly different from our strategy in United States. We are based in Texas, where everything is bigger, including the power. <sarcasm>If there was a global capital for tolerance, it would be Texas.</sarcasm> When we sat down to draw up the new global infrastructure, we wanted to change our 80lb, 3 AMP server habit and we started testing the green stuff. Surprisingly enough, there is quite a bit in the way of components that are green and still performance conscious.

Performance was our key concern. SuperMicro, Dell and other manufacturers provide greenish, power-effective, systems but they seriously lack on the horse power or space. But if you look a little harder, there are devices that are both sizeable and capable of performing well under the load.

For example, Western Digital manufactures a SATA2 3 GB/s drive, 1 Tb in size, that consumes 40% less power. Because it draws less power, it heats the chasis less (less cooling needed in the HD slots) and is overall more cost efficient. It spins at 5,400 RPM which is your average laptop drive, but under load speeds up to 7,200 RPM which is average for the desktop. For low intensity storage, low priority inserts, etc, we were able to adjust some of our own (read: poorly written) code to work on it quite well.

For their part, Dell also has a low power high performance solution in PowerEdge R200 for smaller nodes. It also has the PowerEdge 2900 III Energy Smart, about 2x the price of the regular model. For their part, SuperMicro brings forward a 1U server with a 260W power supply drawing less than 0.4 AMP at full blast. (if you don’t know me, this would be a great place to stop reading this post)

Texan by the grace of god..

So there you go, Own Web Now Corp has gone green. We felt that as guests in these nations we should start to be more respectful.

As for our beautiful home, crank that Dell: “Malaysian by birth, Texan by the grace of god”; We will continue to rack servers that weight more and consumer more power than a teenage girl because nobody wants to see that buffering text while waiting on pr0n to load. As vulgar as that may seem, it’s the truth, people pay for performance and convenience - and the market isn’t ready for the green.

I knew there would come a day when I would have to categorically disagree with Karl on virtually every piece of advice he has offered. Take a look at this post on Hiring the Best Employee.

The basic flaw in Karl’s process, and process of hiring in virtually every corporate institution, is that the focus is on finding the right fit for the role, not the right individual for the company. Have you ever heard the following words:

You are just not a good fit.

Yeah, you’re just a fantastic person, very talented, exactly what we are looking for except you didn’t fit the role of the imaginary employee we came up with while circling the lines of the resume of the last two people that didn’t leave this company in a quadruple-fatality shootout.

Criteria hiring works OK in very large companies both because HR department has limited time/money and the employees are not really meant to be very fluid in their capacities. They post a list of qualifications, people with time to rearrange their resume send in their applications, the most apt liars that can repeat them back to HR meet the hiring manager who is really looking for someone that can read and think at the same time. This is an awesome way to hire a burger assembler at McDonalds or a data entry person in a hospitality industry.

It is a horrible way to hire in SMB, and the reason why most one man shops that do hire someone end up firing them on a very short schedule. How is it that someone that fit every one of your criteria, that you really liked, that could do everything that was expected turned out so horribly - as a matter of fact, most turn out so horribly bad that many one man shops never want to hire another person again or be someone’s manager?

Flexible Prospect, Desperate Candidate, Fired Employee

The traditional hiring process falls apart at the mere premise that there are people out there so unfulfilled with their jobs that they have the time to spend on full-day interviews, three lunches and two application appointments. Unless you are offering a LOT of money, or seeking an executive with commensurate pay, you are statistically less likely to find a good candidate and more likely to just find someone that is unemployed for a number of very good reasons.

Think about the desperation for a second. If you are finding a candidate that is willing to put up with such a huge hassle not to work for a brand name company with global visibility (IBM, Google, Microsoft) after which they can go to another big company and claim global experience, how desperate are they for employment now?

Desperation brings out the worst in people. They will lie. They will tailor the right resume. They will subject to every test, interview, assessment and application you give them.

Then as soon as something better, something they really wanted, becomes available they will leave you.

What went wrong? You hired the wrong person. Right role, right fit,  wrong person.

The truth about SMB is that we look for flexible people, ambitious and knowledgeable, that want to work well with other people. But at the same time we want to subject them to baselining, assessments, comparative metrics and treat them as business assets that will constantly learn and evolve just not to the point that they figure out that they can make more money elsewhere for far less work. This is the underlying theory of “Human Resources” — treating people like movable objects, hiring them based on a list of credentials, bullet points, and percentage based compatibility with the set of criteria in the Kit with folders Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.

Then the business owner sits back in dismay when the employee leaves under the most unpleasant of circumstances… seriously, should you ever expect any better?

The Right Hiring Process

Hire people. Not roles.

If you hire the right person, they will find a way to fit the role you give them now. They will be able to adjust as your business adjusts. They will be capable of being promoted, of teaching, managing, nurturing and growing other employees that your company gets as it grows.

If you hire the right role, that employee will be gone with the first sudden shift in your business strategy (read Erick’s book on Managed Services) and you will be stuck at square one of looking for a fit for a hole that will change shape with a business that must change in order to grow and survive.

You can either adjust your business hiring practices to fit your changing business and the rapidly changing IT market… or you can franchise a Subway hole in a wall sandwich shop.

The process of finding, qualifying, and hiring people is NOT bullet point or KIT based. It can’t be downloaded online, it can’t be ran through a computer, it is not something you can process. If you want to see how well the process-based hiring works, go to Target. Look at all the drones there. Not an ounce of passion. Not a cent of personality. Just drones running around doing what the master told them.

But you don’t want that. You want an adaptable, flexible, skilled, creative passionate employee that is going to have your best interest at heart and do as they are told (hopefully for less than market value). Good luck with that.

The process of hiring, qualifying, nurturing, leading, empowering, enabling and growing a creative sales force that can work in a rapidly changing business is at a core of business leadership and being able to work with people and treat them like people.

We look for good people. There is always plenty of business to go around and plenty of things to get people to work on. There is not always a ready supply of people that are motivated, willing and capable of working on what we have. But we also aren’t installing a revolving door in our office.

Hire the right person. Get them to build up your company in the same way you have built it to the point of being able to allocate a salary.

Only then do you get someone who has your company on their mind, not just themselves. 

This blog is brought to you by Bud Light.

I don’t care what you sell, the last person on the Internet you want to mess with is the guy that runs one of the largest message hygiene networks around. I receive well over a thousand legitimate business messages a day, excluding monitoring, reports, newsletters, mailing lists or commercial junk. I have the non-business mailings down to a science, before I ever read anything I look if it came as a SPAM newsletter or an actual communication. I build an adequate rule. Between all our vendors, suppliers, partners and associates I receive well over a thousand junk messages a day that are automatically filtered into a Newsletters public folder.

Simply put, you have to write a heck of a memorable message for me to remember you.

God help you if you SPAM me, and I remember your company name the second time your SPAM comes in. You are never (ever, ever, ever) getting my business again.

I buy a lot of stuff online. What can I say, I’m a busy guy and I live in a tourist city so the smell of Coppertone and burned british folks who haven’t yet discovered deodorant makes going to the mall a very unpleasant experience. I recently purchased two items online, from two different vendors. Here are their messages:

Vendor A: Blah

Monday: Vladimir: Your Exclusive BLAH 10% Member Discount
Tuesay: Another Chance for Sweet Savings - 20% off any purchase
Friday: Preseason Sandal Sale - 20% off!
Friday: Spring Fashion Sale - $15 off all Fashion Shoes $50
Friday: Your recent BLAH order

I have intentionally left out the single legitimate communication on this list: my tracking number for the purchase I made on Monday, which according to UPS still has not shipped. What does this tell me about Vendor A? Well, first that they are incompetent and that they can’t fill the order in 4+ business days. Second, that they likely have financial problems if they stoop to such a pushy marketing campaign to get sales.

Vendor B: Finish Line

This order was mine, pair of Adidas shoes. Same industry as the above. Bought on Tuesday morning: Order was filled by noon and an invoice was sent to me immediately with another $15 off $75 purchase in the same email. Smart. I am going to nuke an advertisement right away, but I am not nuking the invoice - and chances are I will see it again and more likely to come back. End of day, UPS tracking number with the package already picked up from the shippers facility. Since then, no SPAM.

The frequency of your communication is equivalent to the extent of your desperation

I have a very simple rule, direct non-business mail should come in with at least a seven day interval, unless it is an urgent notification that the previous communication was incorrect (change of venue, change of time, change of offer, corrections, etc)

Anything not directly related to a business transaction is SPAM. I do not need an invitation Monday, a reminder on Tuesday, a peer review promo on Wednesday, an incentive email on Thursday night and a last minute fire sale email on Monday morning alerting me that the earth may fall off its axis if I don’t attend.

It’s in poor taste, poor form, and it cheapens anything valuable you may have to say otherwise. It clearly communicates that last ditch of desperation, where one more email may lead to one more sale.

Today’s consumer is more like a hot girl at the club trying to avoid the perverts hitting on her. Yes, she will fake interest in the conversation. Maybe she will even smile politely. She may even give you a fake phone number. This is far too connected to the online behavior. We use aliases to get the information that requests our identity. We give out voicemail only numbers to sales people because we do not want to be interrupted. We sometimes even have polite conversations with sales people just to convey the fact that we are not interested and we hope to find those magic words that make them delete our profiles from their CRM with utter disgust.

Let go of your preconceived notions of what outbound marketing should look like and come to terms that conformity to signup/checkout forms does not extend to limitless permission to SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. Let go of the bad advice you got from some marketing reject who hasn’t had a real marketing job since the 80’s, it’s no longer about the volume of the people you reach (or the repetitiveness at which you reach the same person) it is about quality of your communications and the fit with my expectations.

Frankly, even the illegitimate pharmaceutical spammers seem have more candor and tact when compared to the so called marketing professionals. Marketing needs to be valuable to be considered, otherwise its just an unwelcome interruption. Deal with it.

It’s Friday.. joke time.

Last week, after spending some quality time mopping my office floor, I decided it was time to get some help. As hard as many of you feel I work, I am lazy in day-to-day life on the same order of magnitude. If you notice, those servers were shipped when I moved into this place a few months ago and the tree in the back still has a sales tag on it. I am afraid if I pull it the whole thing will fall apart and then I’d have to explain why my office has a dead orange tree.

So last week I got a Rumba. I fully expected this thing to simply blow all the crap around the office and make the dirt more distributed (and less noticeable) but I have to say that it has surpassed my every expectation. This little monster not only gets into everything and manages to finds its way out, it also sucks hair, dust and assorted crap right off the floors. Now, granted, its hardwood so not a big deal but I am still impressed. It has certainly eliminated many hours from the local assortment of illegal immigrants.

Which leads me to believe that we are being replaced by robots.

Which further leads me to believe that there aren’t billions of people in India, or even millions. I believe there are exactly 5,000 Indians on that subcontinent, all of whom rush into the street for the annual picture that makes it seem they live on top of each other with the collection of edible and homicidal animals.

But why? Why do that? What are they hiding?

And then it hit me.

Indians have already been replaced by robots. They are just trying to make us not go over there and see them living in their gold palaces while IVR responds to technical calls, support requests and customer service!

Here is my list of evidence:

1. Tech support Indians sound nothing like any of my Indian friends. They all speak in the same tone, with no inflection, no volume changes, no respect for any punctuation.
2. Tech support Indians do not respond to questions you ask but are answering the questions they believe you are asking.
3. Tech support Indians do not interact well with humans.
4. Tech support Indians either lack self awareness (”So, where are you at?”) or are unaware of their surroundings (”What time is it there? How’s the temperature?”)

Finally, I have developed an algorithm for checking if the Indian tech support is human or just a robot:

Step 1: Make up a word. See if they ask for a definition of the word or play along. “The computer is bizongling.” - Human will ask for a definition, robot will do a pattern match and proceed to answer a question.

Step 2: Stress test. Fire several questions in rapid succession. Human will try to respond to the most relevant question immediately. Robot will have a long pause.

Step 3: Full Duplex Check. Talk over the Indian tech support. Human will stop and get confused over why you’re such a bastard. Robot will continue to talk.

Step 4: Suicide check. Ask them to spell their name. Robot Indian Tech support names are Roger, Mike, Rod or Ted. Human Indian Tech support are either Patel or look like a Sunday newspaper put through a paper shredder and reassembled in random order. Ask them to spell their name. Third repeat into it you should hear a loud scream.

You don’t want to know how much time I have spent on tech support to become this cynical. I firmly believe that if I’m paying you and you’re not there to help me, you might as well be there to amuse me.