Canon tech support
Just wanted to relay a positive story about tech support -- something of a rarity these days.
Bonnie has used a Canon LIDE 50 scanner on her iMac for some time now. It gets rather heavy use, as she uses it to copy documents we receive from the school about our kids' education, interesting passages from reference guides and manuals she borrows that are special education-related, and more. I even use it occasionally, when I need to fax someone a release form or something similar.
The other night it stopped working, and it was my fault. I noticed in a moment of boredom that the version of the driver and scan software she had installed was earlier than the current version on the Web site, so I downloaded and installed it -- partly because the Web site indicated that it was safe for Tiger, which we'll be migrating that iMac to soon (it hasn't been yet, because it only has 256MB RAM).
Anyway, long story short, I installed the driver and scan software and discovered that the scanner didn't work. The software would quit each time -- even Photoshop Elements, which works with a plug-in, wouldn't work.
I uninstalled the software. Reinstalled it. Nothing would work. I hit Canon's Web site, and discovered that they offer toll-free tech support by phone until 12 AM (Midnight) Eastern on the weekdays.
It was about 11:15PM.
I got through to a live person in only a couple of minutes, who then spent another minute or two tracking down a Mac technician. They spoke English (natively), were actually located on the East Coast, and the tech I spoke to was polite, courteous, knowledgable, and had my problem fixed in about five minutes.
As it turns out, Canon's installer software is really cruddy, and I suppose one could criticize them for that -- it really does need work. So we had to manually pull some old files from the root directory's Library folder before the installer would work. Once we did, it worked just fine.
Anyway, the LIDE 50 is working again, with the new software.