I have had a Support.com subscrition for 4 months so far and finally I had a support issue where I needed technical help. I called them yesterday and after getting a quasi-apologetic voice telling me they were busier than expected I waited on hold for a support engineer for well over an hour. Tried again this morning. Same result. I actually tried calling on my cell phone while on hold and this time I actually got a person to answer. She, too, apologized, saying that they are trying to hire some support engineers--or did she say "more support engineers? She gave me a ticket number and placed me on hold. And 10 minutes later my cell phone call was dropped. I tried their "Chat" with pretty much the same result: not exactly on hold but absolutely no response! I then started searching and found lots of complaints by support.com customers with similar complaints that were quite recent. So it became clear that I wasn't about to get any tech support from them in any realistic time frame. I also noticed some people trying to cancel their subscriptions but running into a catch-22: You can cancel only by calling them at the same number where they don't answer!

I found the company's address in Redwood City CA and checked their corporate registration. I sent them a fax noting that collecting money for services that you are not able to deliver is a species of consumer fraud, but inviting them to have a support engineer call me--if they really meant to provide technical support. Here's the strange part: My fax machine reported transmission errors each time I tried to fax my letter. Yet within the hour I got a series of e-mails from support.com "confirming" my subscription cancellation and refunding the monthly payments I had made. So I guess I'm not out anything, except my time and expectations. Of course my computer problem hasn't been solved either.

But I am astonished that an outfit of this sort could possibly be this derelict. Their website seems to show that they have resolved a lot of problems--in the past. Did all their support engineers quit? Are they on strike? Is there some huge demand for tech support that I am unaware of but which is nevertheless swamping them and everybody else in the business? And if youk are having a temporary problem and are such brilliant computer people, can you figure a way to let people know? Having them wait on hold for hours wondering what the %^& is happening until they get fed up is not a model for an effective hi-tech problem solving business. If you can't solve your problems--or give us some useful information about why you are temporarily (I hope) offline--how are you going to fix my problems?

Trust me, telling me that you are experiencing longer-than-usual wait times is no answer.