Norton-Symantec hates me...

First, I'd like to thank Mycos for his most astute comments on two posts on this site:

1) Friday, September 08, 2006
No oversight on Intell...Mark everything SECRET!!!

2) Thursday, September 07, 2006
Watch listener reactions at Bush/Ahmadinejad duel.

I very much appreciated his thinking on both matters.

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As for Norton-Symantec, in my humble opinion, their customer service is horrendous! There is no way to email them, no way to contact them, that does the least bit of good...and in fact makes what was bad already, a thousand times worse.

Back in April, my year's subscription ran out, so I renewed....or tried to. Apparently N-S believed the renewal had worked because my credit card was charged...and the charge was paid in full in May.

However, from that moment to this, there has been no time that I've turned on this machine that two balloon warnings haven't popped up informing me that I have no virus protection even though that was part of the renewal ordered. This is not a good thing.

So, in an attempt to get the virus protection downloaded, I found it necessary to get back on their site...and then found that the only way to get to a place where it might be possible to inform them of the problem, I had to go through the renewal process again! Which I did. Which means, of course, that even though renewal #1 was ordered and paid for, I would now be charged for a 2nd renewal as though the first didn't exist.

Thought I'd best try to straighten that out. All I'd need was to speak to a human. Hah. How to speak to a human? On my favorites list I have a sight devoted to that problem. What I ended up with were instructions to phone their world headquarters at 1-800-441-7234, and choose Option 1 twice. So I did. And ended up with a male human whom I could barely understand. His native language was not mine.

His instruction was this: "Here is your case number...I need to do research. Call back in one hour."

Okay. I called back in one hour. A new voice instructed, "Call back in five hours." I didn't. It would have been an exercise in futility due to our different languages. Frustrating for both of us.

Just fumed for a few days. Knew I'd have to do something to try and get the virus protection already paid for and not pay twice for the same service. So I find this site address:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ and on that page there is a place to get a refund.

I'm thinking this is a good thing. Will go there and cancel the 2nd renewal since I'd downloaded only the 1st renewal. Still no virus protection. However, one has to sign what they call an LOD if a refund is agreed to. They agreed to a refund (which means I pay for renewal #2 one month and then they refund that payment the next month). The LOD requires that one agree to uninstall the renewal that's going to be refunded. They load a cookie and if that renewal is not uninstalled, one is liable for $100,000 fine!

I thought about that, but signed the LOD because I had not even downloaded renewal #2 in the first place. Meanwhile...I HAVE NO VIRUS PROTECTION FROM NORTON-SYMANTEC yet, and the balloons pop up faithfully every day telling me so. Thank heavens for Windows firewall.

It's as I said: Norton-Symantec hates me and their customer service is horrendous.

Wrap...