To be blunt, it's difficult for me to believe I'm writing this. It feels like something out of a dream. Still, I've attributed plenty of blame to Microsoft for what have all-too-often been pointless or nightmarish experiences with their technical support, so it's only fair that I sit down and give them praise when it's deserved. When my old keyboard finally died, I did some research before buying a new one. Several noted columnists, PC Magazine's John Dvorak among them most prominently, recommended the Microsoft Internet Keyboard Professional. I examined the feature list, checked out the key action at a local store—I'm a touch typist, and there is no way I'm going to buy a keyboard without examining its "feel" up close—and bought one.
For a while, it seemed like a great purchase. The Microsoft Intellitype software lets me map the large variety of keys to any functions I wish. The keyboard is nicely sized and has a very good feel to it. And the extra function keys are truly useful. I use them all the time for email, invoking the calculator, exploring my computer, and, most frequently of all, for controlling my MP3 player of choice, MusicMatch Jukebox. In short, it's a very nice keyboard in almost every respect. It sure beats the heck out of the cheaper (both in price and quality) keyboard I was using previously.
Over time, however, I began to notice a single, terribly-annoying problem with it, namely, that the control key(s) would stick. I don't mean to say that the key would stick in the physical sense, mind you, as that would be too simple to fix. No, I mean that the control key would be stuck down in the logical sense; i.e., the operating system would consider it to be depressed, regardless of its physical position. Frankly, it took me a while to figure out that the keyboard was the culprit. Windows XP has all kinds of accessibility features, which are probably quite useful to the disabled but are annoying as hell to the rest of us; i.e., the vast majority. I guess that's just one more case of the tyranny of the minority in contemporary society. At any rate, it took me a while to figure out that the keyboard was really at fault.
Worse, the problem seems to occur only in certain applications. It happens to me quite frequently in Microsoft Word and Macromedia Dreamweaver, but it happens much less often with any of my development tools (e.g., Microsoft Visual C++), and it never happens with any of my games to the limits of my knowledge. My first sign that the problem is occurring is typically that my whole document is suddenly selected, set to italics, bolded, deleted, etc. until I realize that the control key is stuck down in the logical, not physical, sense. Originally, the only work around I had discovered was to log off the machine (using the mouse, of course) and log back on. Eventually, I discovered that if I pressed and held both control keys then released them, the problem would go away.
Since I do a lot of typing, this is very annoying—particularly on those admittedly rare occasions when it causes me to lose work, save my document when I don't yet wish to save it, etc. After exhausting all my own ideas on how to fix it, I decided to avail myself of the option that virtually never works, namely, contact Microsoft technical support. Not surprisingly, the very first thing the technician asked me to do was try all the stuff I told him I had already tried. It sure seems that they don't even bother to read the details of the case as submitted, or maybe they just have form letters with which to reply, or something like that. So far, we were off to the typically useless start.
What utterly shocked me to my core, and forced me to sit down and write this article, was that after trying a couple of quick things, the support technician said simply that the keyboard must be defective, and, as such, Microsoft would replace it free of charge. He asked for my address, and after I gave it to him he replied with an order number and tracking information for the replacement keyboard on its way to me. How bizarre is that? I'm so accustomed to Microsoft support being utterly useless that this is like something out of a fairy tale by comparison.
There are two additional items that bear mentioning. First, this is especially surprising insofar as the Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro has been discontinued as a product. As such, I'm not quite sure what keyboard they're sending me, and I don't honestly know why the product was discontinued in the first place, but the fact that Microsoft is even willing to discuss a discontinued product is admirable, let alone replace it. Second, because of the general nature of my luck, I fully expect that the replacement will be flawed in exactly the same way (or worse) than the original keyboard. I doubt that my problem will be resolved at all, and I fully expect that I will eventually have to buy a new keyboard to solve the problem.
Nevertheless, Microsoft has handled this support incident very nicely. I'm entirely satisfied with the quality of support thus far, and even if the replacement keyboard doesn't work, I will still give them a great deal of credit for at least trying. Kudos to Microsoft on this one!
01/26/2003