Message-ID: <1eb22p9.11f75uzxb5v3aN%jwgh@earthlink.net>
Newsgroups: alt.tech-support.recovery
Subject: Re: Beta testers are evil.
From: Jacob Haller <jwgh at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 23:16:50 -0400

Greetings fellow bobs

I feel used and not that sleazey way i like good i have been talked at by beta testers. Up untill this point beta testers i asumed that they were clued and were willing to try stuff out because it was free and cool and stuff. I was very wrong there normal lusers bar one cunning diffrence you cant fix what they have! If i ever see a beta tester i they can test there skull against a speeding truck or a rusty drill going though there eyeball.
I know this rant does not make much sence but more will follow but now i have to carm down.

My favorite was back in the day when I did internal tech support at an Internet startup. Someone posted to an internal mailing list (not a tech support mailing list) that they were having problems reading news using the newsreader function in the latest beta of Netscape, and did anyone know what was wrong?

To this someone else responded (again to the mailing list) that the news server was broken and had been for some time, which he knew because he wasn't able to read news using the Internet Explorer pre-alpha he was using. He further said that since apparently tech support wasn't going to do anything about it the proper thing to do was go to the CEO of the company and complain about it since that was the only way to get anything done.

Had either of these twits previously tried to contact tech support about the problems they were having? You have one guess. (Hint: The answer starts with "N".)

I responded suggesting that wasting the CEOs time with a newsreading problem was not appropriate, and that I suggested at least reporting the problem to tech support before bugging other people about it. Further I gave a list of newsreaders for the Macintosh and Win32 that I had downloaded and verified worked with our newsfeed. I suggested that they file bug reports on the beta/pre-alpha software they were using.

Just to show willing I also tried calling Netscape and Microsoft support to see if they had any solutions, but of course they don't support beta or pre-alpha software. Also their phone trees sucked. (See pressone.html for more on that topic.)

A third idiot later gave some reason why the fact that he had installed a bunch of beta software couldn't have anything to do with the fact that his system was completely unstable, but I forget what it was.

Great. Now you've triggered a flashback back to when the beta of MSIE's Active Desktop was unveiled. <shudder>

-jwgh

-- 
"A fool and his money can be incinerated and then separated by
distillation."
         - Jim Benton

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