ALL SonyStyle Customer Care staff in the US are primarily clueless. (SonyStyle is
the place where Sony purchasers in the USA are required to call for everything connected with Sony products.)
I asked
one question. Just one. I used "Live Help" online, in addition to nearly 1-1/2 hours of frustration on their phone line being connected to no less than 5 clueless Sony techs.
My QUESTION: Does the Sony HVL-F1000 Flash have TTL metering with the Sony DSC-F717 Camera?
I pointed out to each person I spoke with that the SonyStyle website lists "TTL metering" as a feature of F1000 flash.
Note:
BOTH ARE SONY PRODUCTS.
Well, nobody knew the answer. Finally, after answering many, many of their irrelevant questions, I began to ask if the person I was speaking with actually knew what "TTL" meant.
NOBODY knew what "TTL" meant, even as far up the employee ranking as a self-proclaimed "Level 7 Technician - the highest rank here." :dunno:
One tech actually hazarded a guess that "TTL" as Sony's abbreviation for "TOTAL." She said that it meant "total metering." I told her "NO!!" that it meant "thru the lens" and pleaded with her, begged her, to be transferred to SOMEBODY/ANYBODY who could respond to my question.
My position from then on was that if they did not know what TTL meant, then they could never be competent to comment on the TTL capability of the F1000/F717 combo. So, I kept asking to be transferred, with the fervent hope that somebody in Sony knew something about Sony cameras, and the features that Sony listed as available on that Sony product.
All of them refused to connect me to a supervisor. He was busy. I asked them to have the supervisor call me back. I was told nobody there could make outgoing calls. Like, never.
So, I asked why they asked for my house phone and my cell phone numbers whenever I called and whenever I got transferred to another person. If they cannot call me, then whatever my phone numbers are would be irrelevant, right?
BUT I did get a "Sony event number" to reference in future contacts on the same question. So far, no answer to my one sentence question. I called again to see if anybody could answer the question (and refused to answer that person's irrelevant questions). Well, it seems that my "event number" had not been answered. However, since I had called again, it would now take 24 to 48 hours to get a response to my question of that day, which was "Why have I not received an answer yet?"
My friends, I'm not making any of this up!
What do you think? Who's dumber? The store salesperson, the SonyStyle Techs, or me for thinking that somebody at SonyStyle actually knew something about Sony products???
(Oh, one more, before I close this rant, there were two techs who asked if I had connected the flash to the camera and if the batteries in the flash were recharged and at full power. I told them that I was inquiring about the flash prior to purchasing one. I owned the F717 camera, but I did not
own the F1000 flash. However, I did inform them that the F1000 flash operated on alkaline AA-batteries. The F1000 Flash did not have rechargable batteries, nor did it come with a recharger. One of the techs apologized. The other tech asked me his original question once again, a second time.) :think:
Really! I am
not making this up!
)
