I have had a most disturbing encounter with Microsoft. At least I think it was Microsoft.
I contacted them to clear up the pinning of folders within Office 2016 and I ended up chatting on the web to some technician, who, although he said he was an Office expert, proceeded to totally not understand my query. When he eventually understood my query, he insisted on logging on to my machine and leaving red circles all over the screen.
He said he could fix my problem but he would need to fix the registry at a cost of £60 and would then need monthly fixes in future. I said I wouldn’t bother as I was upgrading to a Win 10 clean install. He then intimated that I would still need a registry fix.
What arises from this encounter is they promised to fix a problem that appears to have been “improved” out of Office 2016 and the hard sell of Microsoft services, I really was under quite hard pressure.
Shortly after I closed the web chat I got a phone call from Microsoft (so obviously an Indian call centre). He said I was talking to his technician and the technician would like to speak to me as we had not finished our web chat (oh yes we had when I said goodbye and no thanks). I said the conversation was over and I didn’t need their services. 60 minutes later (at 2:30pm – note the time) I get another call saying that it was my promised 2pm ring back. I told him to go away and thought that was the end of it. Are Microsoft THAT desparate?
This morning I turned on my machine and, very disturbingly, several programs would not work; Excel, Word, Acrobat, Lenovo Storage Manager (my NAS), Palm Desktop, etc. They all worked before my web chat with Microsoft but didn’t after.
I am now beginning to suspect that it was not Microsoft I was chatting to.
To get over my problems I had to do a system restore and reinstall Office.
