Tech support

I spent today getting my friend Father Graham Francis' new laptop purchase up and running. Wednesday last we met up at John Lewis', where he is store chaplain. Their summer clearance sale was about to start, and up in the top floor technology department, there were some bargains to be had. As Graham is none to sure how he will get on with a laptop after eight years of using a desktop machine now running at a snail's pace, partly because his ISP is AOL, and his broadband is supplied by a sluggish USB ADSL modem. So, he bought a decent enough entry level Compaq machine at a rock bottom price, enough for his modest office needs, and dozens of times fasted than his existing kit.

Next day, I went down to get it working for him. This turned into a nightmare because the laptop would not recognise the USB modem, and the installation disk, failed. It was probably designed for Windows 95. There was no way of getting on-line to start the process. A call to the AOL help line was helpful  in understanding the problems, and enabled us to acquire the correct user access details to hook up. I went to the office and brought back a couple of spare wireless broadband routers to try and establish a connection. Two more calls to the helpline politely concluded that the helpful staff were not trained in the technical arcana of either of these industry standard devices. In the end, Graham rang them again and expressed his dissatisfaction with not being able to get on line with his new laptop. Before he could threaten to move to another supplier, an offer was made to mail him a replacement 'proper' AOL wireless router, and award him a substantial discount on the service provided for the next year. If only we'd known that six frustrating hours earlier!

The router arrived over the weekend and today I went down a second time and succeeded in setting it up very quickly, and installing some of the programs that he could use to work on his existing data. Since he began using a computer he'd stuck with Word Perfect, and long ago lost the installation disks. There was no version he could download, but an early version of Lotus Symphony I found some time ago offers a high degree of file compatibility - albeit imperfect. Imperceivable minor changes in fonts and layout left some of his carefully crafted page files in need of tidying up to fit presentably. Once saved, the new format would not be accessible on his old machine. So much for file format interchangeability - an area in which some measure of agreement has been reached over the years between the big players.

Most users just want something that works without needing to tinker. Nobody willingly puts extra time into learning how to use a different set of software, unless it's a route to earning more. Volunteers and occasional individual users with limited skills want to put all their time into being productive, not relearning how to handle tools with which they thought they were familiar.

Thank goodness for the Free/Open Source software community, which understands this and does brilliantly in providing a means for people to get what they really need, rather than what some corporate program designer presumes they must use in the interests of profiting from built-in software redundancy.

Once I'd got Graham's laptop properly up and running, I returned to the office for a couple of hours, then rode over to St Dyfrig and St Samson's to celebrate the evening Mass, to allow Graham to go to another friend's silver jubilee Mass in Aberdare. There was a welcoming congregation of eight women, one of them an Anglican who was also a Methodist lay preacher - a pretty good turn out for a Monday evening. And I was glad to have the opportunity to remember my friend Elfed among the departed for the first time.