Symantec has officially lost my business. After talking with five different customer support guys over eight days, I’m completely wiped out. I feel like George Foreman after going fifteen brutal rounds with Muhammed Ali, only to hear him whisper, “Is that all you got, George?”

It wouldn’t have come to this if Symantec had just owned up to its responsibility, but apparently that wasn’t in the “Customer Care” handbook. It was a simple enough problem to fix.

Sweetie’s laptop came pre-installed with Symantec Norton AntiVirus. The very day she bought it in September, I went online, paid for a year’s subscription to Norton, and felt proud to be living in the digital age. But eight weeks later, the LiveUpdate feature suddenly stopped working. It would start fine; it just wouldn’t finish the job. The message said “the file NAVWNT.EXE could not be updated.” That sounded suspiciously like there was a re-install in my future, but I thought I’d let Symantec take a stab at it first. Besides, Sweetie’s laptop didn’t come with a Norton CD, so if a re-install was necessary, Symantec would have to send me a disk. “Certainly, Mr. Cercerio,” they would say. “We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you, but since you are a paid subscriber, we’ll be happy to send you an installation CD so you can get LiveUpdate back up and running. Would you prefer that we send it to your home or work address?”

Ah, expectations.

In reality, I called the support number and, over the next eight days, John, Alex, James, Saradhi, and Saravanan all said pretty much the same thing:

1) ”This department doesn’t handle those issues, so we’re not going to help you.”
2) ”It’s not our fault that you don’t have a CD, so we’re not going to help you.”
3) ”We think you’re trying to get something for nothing, so we’re not going to help you.”
4) ”In case we haven’t mentioned it already, we’re not going to help you.”

I tried to reason with them. I cajoled them. I even made up a few McAfee jokes. All for naught.

I tried the “savvy home user” approach: “You know, Saradhi, as soon as I saw that error message, I figured I had a corrupt executable on my hands. Any way I can replace the app without touching the DLLs?”

Saradhi wasn’t impressed.

I worked the “dumb user” angle (not such a great leap): “I don’t know what happened, Alex. This yellow box just appeared out of nowhere and said click ‘Ok’ to end the program. Is that right? That doesn’t sound right. Then I accidentally pressed the Page Down key. Do you think that did anything?”

No help at all. No solution. Not even a word of sympathy. I would have settled for “Gee, Mr. Creccero, that must have been frustrating for you.” But no. In fact, during one call, I was in the middle of explaining my problem when it was apparent that James was not only uninterested, but had stopped listening altogether. Only when I started singing the theme from “Shaft” did he finally respond with, “I’m here! I’m here!” You can’t make this stuff up, folks.

One thing I’ll say for John, Alex, James, Saradhi, and Saravanan: they’re loyal to Symantec. I only wish they were half as loyal to their customers. It took awhile to sink in, but sometime during my final conversation with Saravanan, I realized that I was hosed. Symantec had kiped me out of a year’s subscription fee and there was nothing I could do about it. Like that girlfriend who keeps you around but lets you know in no uncertain terms that you have no chance of ever reaching first base with her ever again.

I’ve been around long enough to know that most companies have both competent and incompetent people, and that it would be a mistake to impugn all 5,300 Symantec employees just because of five bad eggs (whose names, if you didn’t catch them, are John, Alex, James, Saradhi, and Saravanan). As Benjamin Franklin once said, “You can’t judge a software manufacturer by a few lousy customer service representatives.”

But this was my experience and I had to act on it.

I calmly thanked Saravanan for his time, hung up the phone, and chalked up the experience (and subscription fee) as a loss. The next morning, I called Symantec’s main competitor, McAfee, and faked a problem just to see how they’d treat me. I got someone named Julie on the line and asked her if she’d ever had a bad experience calling a customer support line. “Definitely,” she said. “That’s what made me want to take this job. No customer should have to go through that.”

Julie may have been reading that cheesy line from her own handbook, but it was good enough for me. That afternoon, I stopped at Staples and bought a copy of McAfee VirusScan. If it ever breaks, something tells me I’ll have better luck with Julie than with the five guys I spent the last eight days with.