A friend of mine who works in tech support sent me this e-mail. I am posting it because I think y’all will get a big kick out of it.
TECH SUPPORT RULES
When a tech says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. It’s nothing to
us to remember 2700 screen saver passwords.
When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried
under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried
flowers, bowling trophies and Popsicle art. We don’t have a life, and we
find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
When tech support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it at
once. We’re just testing out the public groups.
When a tech is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your
guts out. We exist only to serve.
When a tech is having a smoke outside, ask him a computer question. The
only reason why we smoke at all is to ferret out those clients who don’t
have e-mail or a telephone line.
Send urgent e-mail ALL IN UPPERCASE. The mail server picks it up and
flags it as a rush delivery.
When you call a tech’s direct line, press 5 to skip the bilingual
greeting that says he’s out of town for a week, record your message, and
wait exactly 24 hours before you send an e-mail straight to the director
because no one ever returned your call. You’re entitled to common courtesy.
When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s
electronics in it.
When you’re getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer
support. We can fix your line from here.
When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on a tech’s chair with
no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a
puzzle.
When you have a tech on the phone walking you through changing a
setting; read the paper. We don’t actually mean for you to DO anything; we
just love to hear ourselves talk.
When we offer training on the upcoming OS upgrade, don’t bother. We’ll
be there to hold your hand after it is done.
When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print
jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.
When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all
68 printers in the office. One of them is bound to work.
Don’t use online help. Online help is for wimps.
If you’re taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go
around and update the network drivers for you and all you co-workers. We’re
grateful for the overtime money.
When you have a tech fixing your computer at a quarter past two, eat
your lunch in his face. We function better when slightly dizzy.
Don’t ever thank us. We’re getting paid for this.
When a tech asks you whether you’ve installed any new software on this
computer, lie. It’s nobody’s business what you’ve got on your computer.
If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog,
lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed
to have 45 lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.
If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on the mail
upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin
crumbs and nail clippings in them.
When you get the message saying “Are you sure?”, click on that Yes
button as fast as you can. Heck, if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing
it, would you?
Feel perfectly free to say things like “I don’t know nothing about that
computer junk”. We don’t mind at all hearing our area of professional
expertise referred to as crap.
When you need to change the toner cartridge, call tech support. Changing
a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard
recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a
Master’s degree in nuclear physics.
When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to
call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third
party who knows nothing about the problem.
When you receive a 30-meg movie file, send it to everyone as a mail
attachment. We got lots of disk space on that mail server.
Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks.
Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a queue.
When you bump into a tech in the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a
computer question. We love to work on weekends.
If your son is a student in computer science, have him come in on the
weekends and do his projects on your office computer. We’ll be there for you
when his illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your Access database flip
out.
When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave
the documentation at home. We’ll find the jumper settings on the Internet.
Having worked a help desk and done time in tech support, I know this is truer than it should be. But while we have a thread with tech support types in it i want to communicate something to them.
It is innappropriate to address a user as Dear unless you are intimate with them. Do not address women as Miss. Ma’am is correct but a lot of silly women object to it. If you cannot catch the user’s name (which you should have written down or typed in at least), then do not call them by any name. Also ask a user to repeat their name or the spelling of their name, but DO NOT TELL THEM that THEY HAVE SPELLED THEIR OWN NAME WRONG.
very good dave.
i believe the BOFH/Simon Travaglia brought that to my attention via his new front TheRegister. Still got a load of laughs out of it though. Amazing how true it is.
You forgot, If you have a guy named Dan, and he doesn’t know much about computers, yet is in the IT department, you should hold your breath when he is nearby due to BO.
Just wanted to add - It is also inappropriate to refer to your tech support person as any of the following: dear, sweetheart, cutie - anything other than my name, thank you very much. It is also inappropriate to gape staring at the Network Engineer (yup, that’s me) and say “YOU’RE the computer person?” with that ‘but-you-are-female’ look on your face.
Big belly laughs, it is amazing how much of this is true. Any mainframe people familiar with MVS OS and ISPF may find this TRUE story funny. This actually happend a few months ago with one of our system programmers and his boss.
Sysprog: Go look at “parmlib”.
Boss: Where?
Sysprog: You know, “PARMLIB”. Never mind, just go to EDIT.
Boss: Where?
Sysprog: You know, EDIT…option 2.
(Boss types in “2” and goes to the ISPF edit screen, then types the letters “P A R M L I B” and hits enter. The system responds with “dataset not found”)
Sysprog: No, no, I mean “sys1.parmlib”!
(Boss types in “S Y S O N E P A R M L I B”)
Sysprog: No, no! It’s “sys1 DOT parmlib”. (while holding up one finger)
(Boss types: “S Y S O N E D O T P A R M L I B”)
Sysprog: No, that’s not what I said!! You have to type “S Y S 1 period P A R M L I B”!
…call in from a remote site, printer didn’t work. Even the LEDs were out. Had her power cycle, no good. Suggested the outlet might be bad, could she put a lamp or something in it to test. She asked me what kind of a lamp…
Yes, I am often mistaken for my own secretary. The only trait we have in common is that she is also female. I am often mistaken for my bosses secretary. I have an assistant. He is often mistaken for the REAL network person and sometimes when the user or vendor doesn’t like my response they try to ask him.
What really pisses me off is that when people that know I am not a secretary treat me as such. An exec came down stairs when he did not get a response from my boss and then quizzed me on his whereabouts and asked me to give him messages. What an ass. My boss has voice mail and returns calls, leave a message on that.
Here’s an addendum to that list. I knew I had this somwhere. I think I took out all the repeats.
Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.
When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.
When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We’re collectors.
When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.
When an I.T. person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?” That motivates us.
Don’t learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “my thingy blew up”.
When you find an I.T. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don’t have any money to speak of anyway.
When you can’t find someone in the government directory, call I.T. Support.
When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call I.T. Support. We love to hack.
When an I.T. person gets on the elevator pushing $100,000 worth of computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: “Good grief, you take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?” That’s another one that cracks us up to no end.
When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company. People out in Pofadder like to keep abreast of what’s going on.
Don’t bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.
We don’t really believe that you’re a bunch of ungrateful twits. It hurts our feelings that you could even think such a thing. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of clueless losers portrayed
herein, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible.
Never Ever waste your time shutting the computer down properly. It’s just an attempt to give M$ another opportunity for advertising. And of course when you restart the computer the next day, be sure to Quit
ScanDisk too, that’s another advertising opportunity.
When you leave a message for the I.T. person be sure then to be on your phone for the next hour and if you are off your phone, be sure to leave your desk so that the return call goes to Voice Mail. Of course, be sure to call the help desk back and complain loudly that they didn’t
return your call and scream even louder if you get voice mail at the help desk!
Oh man… so many of those hit the nail right on the head that I’m still laughing. Although I am male, I can relate to the females working in IT. There is young lady on the help desk at my office who is very good at what she does. Our users, when they don’t get an answer they like, frequently ask to talk to her boss. When they get me, and I tell them the same thing she did, they go for it. That I don’t understand.
The boss thing is so true, too. Unfortunately my boss thinks he knows everything there is to know about networking. Of course, this is the same man that has 4 different copies of AOL on his laptop, along with CompuServe and a few other ISP software. Then he wonders why the laptop constantly gives him trouble on the network at work.
Gawd, I want to win the lottery and give up the whole customer service thing.
It isn’t just females that have the problem with people going over their heads for the same answer. It seems that some people have it in their heads that the front liner techs don’t know anything (yeah, okay, they’re frequently right) and that the guy above them actualy knows the answer. So they don’t even listen to the first guy and go over his head to the “real” tech.
Funny thing is, more often than not, if the first guy is competent, then the guy over him is probably just a manager, or otherwise incompetent.