Software – It’s Not Me, It’s You
I am pissed. Not in the Irish sense, meaning drunk, but in the American sense, meaning annoyed. I’ve just spent hours, hours, of my life, trying to get a piece of hardware/software to work on my Windoze machine. I won’t say what the hardware is, but… no I’ve changed my mind… it’s a D-Link DCS-950G surveillance camera, and it came, helpfully, with an installer CD which contained pretty much NONE of the software it was supposed to have! So I spent the first couple of hours convincing myself that, okay you’re just doing something wrong, read the readme again, take out the CD and reinsert, double click the installer again, restart the machine, that kind of thing. But lo and behold, a google showed that this was not an isolated incident by a berk; D-Link had helpfully duplicated thousands of coasters and distributed them with their camera! Thousands of useless silver discs.
You’d think that such a major screw-up would result in a recall, or at least a note on their website, right? Nothing, not a mention of it anywhere I could find on the D-Link site. The page explaining the problem was on an independent blog site, which I found by using the search query “DCS-950G” “rubbish”. It pays to be inventive when googling.
So I downloaded the software from their site. And I installed it. And then I realised why D-Link never made a fuss about the thousands of coasters. The CDs would have been devalued further by actually containing the software which was meant to be bundled. It is utter crap. It works intermittently. Unreliably. Unpredictably. Ultimately, ineffectively.
So, I should send it back, right? Yeah, I should, but I live in hope; that they’ll improve the software, that some other software will begin to include support for it. It’s just that I invested a lot of time in this camera. I spent ages trying to find the right camera at the right price point, and to find the right online shop to get it from. Then I spent ages trying to get the non-ware CD to work, and even more time trying to get the D-Link crapware to work. I even spent time doubting my sanity over the whole thing. I hate giving up, after I’ve put in all this effort.
Yeah, sure I have my statutory rights, but I’d be totally pissed (in the American sense again) at getting my €192 or whatever back after investing so much of my personal time in this. And I’m so expensive, I can’t even hire me!
So the lesson is, if you get a faulty good, get out early. Don’t wait around hoping the situation will improve. Move on. There’s plenty of fish in the sea. You’re too good for this. You deserve more.
Am I stretching the metaphor?