Does the moon go up or down?

Today’s frontpage showed a nice picture of the lunar eclipse.

Pity about the title though. Here in Singapore, at the time of the eclipse, the moon would have been setting, not rising.

Tech support, Singapore-style

Or, why R&D in Singapore isn’t going to take off anytime soon.

Back in the good ol’ days, when Linux wasn’t yet mainstream, computer tech support was always an interesting, if frustrating, experience. Particularly if the problem wasn’t at your end, but on the other side. Conversations would inevitably go like this:

Me: I’ve got a connection problem, and it looks like your DHCP server’s down. Could you check?
Helpdesk: Okay…(flipping of pages in the background)…click on the Start button…
Me: I don’t have a Start button. I’m running Linux.
Helpdesk: Uhhhh…okay, click on Control Panel…
Me: I’m not running Windows, I’m running Linux, I don’t have a Control Panel.
Helpdesk: Uhhhh…are you sure you don’t have a Start button? It should be at the bottom left corner of your screen…
Me: I told you, it’s not Windows, it doesn’t use Start buttons.
Helpdesk: Click on the Explorer icon…

And so on and so forth. There never was a happy ending.

Down here, in this little red dot of an island, research tech support is, sad to say, pretty much the same thing. If you were lucky, the equipment’s manufacturer would have a local office, with local support. Most times though, that’s not the case, and you’d have to go through third party distributors – with assurances that their own tech engineers would be able to handle support issues. Yeah, right.

Here’s how one incident went recently (names and technical jargon changed to protect the innocent):

Me: So I got your gizmo, and I ran the preliminary checkout but it failed. Step one tells me to flip the green lever and watch the orange light, that works correctly. Step two tells me to flip the blue lever and watch the purple light, that works correctly too. Step three tells me to twiddle the red doohickey and watch the needle go up, I did that but the needle’s always stuck in one position, twiddling the red doohickey doesn’t change the needle position as it should.
Vendor: Okay, let me check with the (overseas) manufacturer.
(days pass)
Me: Hello…about that nonfunctional gizmo…?
Vendor: You just told me what you did, but you never told me what your problem was.
(gnashing of teeth, before I repeat everything, making tres certain I highlight the problem in bold, all caps and in red)
Vendor: Okay, let me check with the manufacturer.
(days pass…you have to factor in time zone differences. I didn’t know certain countries were THAT far behind us.)
Vendor: Okay, twiddle the red doohickey, the needle should go up.
(Hair tearing and much swearing once I was off the phone.)

So anyway, getting them to realise I had a problem takes a week. That was about a month ago, and to date, my gizmo’s still not working. Contacting the manufacturer directly doesn’t help either, as the request just gets rerouted to the same hapless vendor.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that it’s not just me, and it’s not just one vendor either. It’s pretty much conventional wisdom that here in Singapore, if you want to get things fixed, you’re either going to have to do it yourself (and risk voiding the warranty), or wait a long time – which could mean six to eight weeks, again if you’re lucky. Now, given how fast the pace of research is today, a two-month downtime can be a killer for that Nature paper you were aiming for. Speed counts, and long interruptions like this can break the pace and momentum of research – more than enough for your rivals to catch up.

The old hands in this business have learnt, of course, to factor this into their project budgets and buy at least two of everything, be it cheap light bulbs, or expensive digital oscilloscopes. There you go – your tax dollars at work!