Microsoft Has Technical Support Too

I'm convinced that Microsoft indirectly employees thousands of help desk employees throughout the world. These are the brave soldiers troubleshooting problems with Windows and Office in most corporate offices facing angry office lemmings just trying to do their job. In a  way, I'm grateful to Microsoft; my first real job lasted so long primarily because of all the bugs in Windows and Office and the fact that most Windows applications tend to conflict with each other, not cleanly uninstall themselves and consume system resources inversely proportional to the utility they offer (I'm looking at you, Outlook).

One thing I never did though, was call up Microsoft Technical Support. We just accept that software will break and crash and hold Microsoft to zero account. Instead, the world's help desk employees can go through various troubleshooting steps which often involve either reinstalling the offending application or the entire operating system (a so-called rebuild). 

Why the reluctance? I suppose this can be expensive (I've been told that in one company, they treat the hours on the phone with Microsoft like "gold"). This assumes, of course, that the idle employee waiting for someone to troubleshoot their computer is a better alternative. Sometimes, companies can be so misguided. 

It also assumes that will actually be charged by Microsoft. From what I hear, Microsoft is fairly liberal in waiving charges for things that were its fault.

So I'm putting the challenge out there to the world's help desk workers. Next time someone brings you a problem that you can't easily solve (Outlook losing calendar invites, for example) insist on calling Microsoft before running through the ridiculous step of uninstalling the application or worse. Help desk should be for helping with the day-to-day operations of a computer, not for rectifying the arrogance of a monopolistic software vendor.