A short time ago (beginning of October) I decided to treat myself to a new keyboard, and settled on the Black Widow V4 Pro. This was after having a Razer keyboard previously, which developed a key fault (multiple inputs despite a single press) after a few years, which, I reasoned, can happen as I use the keyboard a lot.
Would that I had taken notice of the adage “once bitten, twice shy”!
After just a few weeks, the “X” key decided to only respond whenever it could drag its backside out of bed and come to work, and then either won the lottery or was committed to the big keyboard cemetery in the sky, and stopped working altogether. While I can sympathise with “X”’s bout of laziness and lassitude toward a working life, I did not spend in excess of £200 on a keyboard, only to have its mechanical parts decide to cash in its pension and go sailing off around the Mediterranean looking for cheap thrills and sleeping until after noon while living on a diet of Ouzo and tangy cheese Doritos.
Of course, these days it is far too much to expect an international company raking in millions each year to have any kind of quick and simple customer service, so I girded my loins and dove into the murky waters of AI chat bots. Of course, Razer should jump at the opportunity to market the first ever DI (Devoid of Intelligence) module, since its chatbot is about as much use as sticking google eyes on a potato.
Honestly, that chat bot could hold a high-ranking position in government, since it meets all necessary criteria. It’s devoid of personality, thoroughly incompetent, and couldn’t answer a question if someone was holding a blowtorch to its rectum.
Seriously, the other morning I attended a meeting in work and felt that familiar bubbling sensation in my nether regions, and discreetly leaned to one side in order to release my wind. The pitch and depth of that rather elongated expression of that exclamation from my rear end could have been fed into voice recognition software and probably have answered 99% of customers’ questions more succinctly and accurately than the AI chat bot.
Finally, after being called upon to send a video demonstration of my “x” key not working - I dejectedly pressed the X key and then panned my camera to the screen to show that no “x” had appeared - I was considered to be telling the truth and was sent an RMA to complete in order for me to have a new keyboard sent out (but only once I Have sent the defective one back, because of course, I am a customer, and therefore never, EVER to be trusted).
Sadly, the shenanigans did not end there. Despite giving my country of residence/purchase, the automated RMA form would not accept my address as being a valid one from the UK. Of course, this residence may be but a mere modest bungalow (one storey house for anyone outside the UK) but it has been in existence for some 70 or so years, so I can say with a certain level of confidence that not only will it have made it onto the UK address database by now, but also that it is definitely in the United Kingdom, despite the fact some of the local residents might have unsuspecting visitors believe that the area houses only aliens and demented chickens.
I have once more emailed customer support and have such low expectations that a pregnant snake wearing an unusually large sombrero could still crawl underneath them without setting off the proximity alarm, but we shall see what happens.
I hope no other member of this forum has had to endure such terrible misfortune, however, upon reading some of the threads, it would appear that I am not alone.
The final irony is that, in order to be able to type the letter “x” to explain to Razer that my keyboard was unable to type the letter “x” (since I don’t presume the chat bot would understand if I said “the key that, when I depress it, produces onscreen an electronic replica of the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet” would be sufficiently understood) I have used a cheap keyboard purchased from a famous online retailer, for less than a tenth of the price of the Black Widow V4 Pro, and it has worked perfectly without decided that producing letters on a screen for its purchaser is a task way below its pay grade, and therefore not worthy of its time.