The real kicker is that every single one of our support tickets exists because Microsoft broke something. Not user error. Not bad configuration. Just Microsoft shipping something that suddenly fails or silently stops working with no warning or documentation. All we’re doing is trying to get their attention “hey, you broke this, maybe fix it?” and somehow that’s an uphill battle, but its certainly not something I am going to pay for the privilege of doing.

To elaborate from my previous post on how unbelievably shit this experience is it tends to go like this...

A user comes to us and says "X has stopped working." My team then spends time investigating, confirming everything is configured correctly, checking documentation, ensuring we haven’t missed something. We exhaust every possibility before raising a ticket. That ticket usually includes exact reproduction steps, logs, screenshots, sometimes even videos. The kind of detail that should let someone go straight to triage.

Every single time, we ask for email. Every single time, it's ignored. We ask for email because it's faster, clearer, and doesn't waste everyone's time. It gives us a written record. We can pass it around, reply when we’re not buried in other work, and actually think before responding. You know, efficiency.

Every time we are immediately hit with “When’s a good time for a call?” Or worse, some engineer just rings out of nowhere. No warning. No context. No explanation for why a call is even necessary. No agenda. Not even the slightest acknowledgment that they’ve ignored the simple instruction for contact preference.

Miss the call? They’ll gleefully fire off an email pointing out you “weren’t available” but don’t worry, they’re more than happy to try again at your convenience. You know what would’ve been convenient? Not calling me in the first place. Decline the call? Suddenly it’s like you've insulted their entire lineage and the ticket goes cold, you’re effectively put in timeout.

Once you get past the performative phone call you didn’t want, you enter the next phase. An agent who’s clearly out of their depth, fumbling through unrelated suggestions and generic links while valuable time slips away. This will usually chew up another week or two, during which you’ll be lucky to get anything more useful than “have you tried turning it off and on again”

If you finally convince them to escalate to the product group, things might begin to move. But by then, the user is still stuck. The business function is down. And our team has wasted potentially weeks chasing responses from someone who has no authority to progress anything.

Then comes the truly maddening part. The product group responds, but won’t speak to us directly. Instead, everything is filtered through the same engineer who doesn’t understand the issue and is asking for yet another pointless call. Push back, and they’ll grudgingly share the reply, usually stripped of any context or anything remotely useful but they’ll always close with “I hope this was helpful. May I archive the ticket now?”

Helpful? No. But sure, go ahead and archive the disaster. That’s what this whole thing is about now appearances over competence.