 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group The Perfectionist Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
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Computers have taken over from crossword puzzles as the mental gymnastics to exercise the mind and while away the hours. But sometimes you come across a problem that no amount of wrestling will beat and you finally have to check the answer in the back of the book.
This happened to me the other day when nothing I tried would make my WordPerfect for Windows recognise the Adobe Fonts for my Hewlett-Packard DeskJet printer. I spent many nights stabbing at this problem, reading the manuals and instructions over and over but getting nowhere. Instead of the sack of lovely scalable fonts that were promised, all I got was a dozen fixed-size and boring Courier and Swiss.
Trouble was, this being my home computer, I never got to tackle the problem except after WordPerfect Pacific's help line closed up for the night.
Finally one Wednesday midnight I couldn't take it any more. "Hang the expense," I cried, and rang the Big Daddy help line in Utah.
When the very charming receptionist answered I told her I was calling from Australia. (This always gets a rapid response from American operators as they think you're calling from the dark side of the moon.) Sure enough within a minute I was talking to a clean-cut young adviser called James who stepped me through my problem.
It turned out that the fault was with the Windows MRS printer driver, which lives in the \WPC subdirectory, which he got me to delete. Then when I selected the Hewlett-Packard again, the program rebuilt the MRS driver and bingo! the page I was working on flowered with all these exotic fonts I had been struggling to summon.
David was most impressed to discover that he had solved my problem in the early hours of tomorrow morning, while over there they were still on their first cup of morning coffee (or whatever it is they drink on the shores of the great Salt Lake).
As I thanked him profusely I reflected on why WordPerfect has become the world's biggest-selling word processor: your problems are tackled politely, efficiently, and diligently. You don't pay special fees to belong to any club or to buy limited amounts of support for limited amounts of time. They don't even check whether you have an official copy of the program-I suppose they figure that if you start using WordPerfect seriously, before long you'll want your own latest version anyway. No, their support is just there, and it's the best you'll find at any price.
Mind you, if I had to phone Utah every time I had a problem I'd soon push Telecom into record profits in spite of the Optus attack so I'll save those occasions for something very special. I only wish Hewlett-Packard would emulate the software house -I've only had the printer for a few weeks and I've already learnt they're like most other computer companies: just shrug their shoulders and say that whatever problem I've got is someone else's fault. I wonder if they swap notes with some of the car mechanics I use...?
Reprinted from the September 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
