Today I thought I was entering a chat room with Skype’s technical support and customer service team. It looked like a chat room, but it was actually a journey into the heart of the Twilight  Zone.
While at the Los Angeles Airport, I was about to use the free wireless service provided here when suddenly Skype opened a window offering to connect with Skype Connect, a service I never want to use Skype Connect because I consider it way too expensive. The dialog box only had a connect button and no button that I could see to cancel or refuse the connection. While looking for a way to get out of the offered service, the dialog box disappeared and was replaced with a message saying that I was now connected. This is what I consider to be malware behavior. I immediately quit Skype, but then was wondering if this malware-like system had accrued unwanted charges. I looked for billing information in my Skype account but couldn’t find anything to answer my question. I was ticked off enough to want to know and not just let them bill me for unwanted services using a malware approach, so I went to Skype’s technical support page and launched a chat session with their support service. To do this, one must enter one’s Skype user name and password. In theory, you might think that the Skype customer service representative who you chat with should know who you are. In theory, one would also think that they should be able to answer a simple question: was I billed or not? That all sounds nice in theory, but theory isn’t always what we find in the Twilight Zone.
In my chat session, I would be asked again to provide my user name. Then I would be asked for my name. Then later I would be asked for my user name again. And then for my name again. And then, after a series of equally informative and entertaining inquiries of this nature, I would be told that it would take just a few minutes to find an answer to my question, and then when I checked to see if they even knew what question they were actually answering, I found out that they “don’t answer this king of questions.” Wow, I guess I really did it this time. I thought I was asking something simple, like was I billed or not, but this is actually the “King of Questions”–at least in the Twilight Zone of Skype Customer Service.
By the time my free internet access died, I would find out nothing about whether I was billed. I did learn a few things about Skype, but encountered some giant mysteries, like how a their reps can lose track of so much info so quickly, and why they won’t tell you at first when you’ve asked an unanswerable King of Questions. I am left with gaping mysteries, but I still learned enough to make me want to switch to some other service. The Chinese QQ system is said to be superior in many ways, and that may be my next stop. Other recommendations?
