I have a boring job. I do technical support for an ISP. Since most of the people I talk to have the IQ of a retarded rock, the calls can be tedious and boring. These are some fun things I do to pass the time:
Take the call, but don’t say anything. It’s fun to just hear the person say “Hello? … HELLO?! …” etc. Sometimes they’ll just hang up right away, sometimes they’ll stay on for several minutes. This is even more satisfying when the queue hold time (before they even get to me) is very high.
Conference the call with the queue. When I get another tech, initiate the conference call, but don’t say anything. This way I get to listen to a tech talk to a customer, I get credit for a call, it looks like I’m working, and I don’t actually have to do anything. Yay!
I love getting pissed of customers. It’s fun to listen to them give me empty threats, and get worked up over something they can’t do anything about. I try to be as unhelpful as possible, and eventually hang up on their ass.
Take the call, but immediately transfer the call to MovieFone or a phone sex line. Fun.
Clear the queue. This is satisfying when the queue just WON’T go away. Basically you just take a call, immediately hang up, take the next call, hang up, repeatedly as fast as possible. Ahh … breaktime!
Take the call but immediately place caller on hold, withou saying anything. That way, the caller thinks he is still in the queue, and I look like I’m working!
Take the call, don’t say anything, and play some weird music loud enough for customer to hear. This has the same effect as #1, but at least they get to hear new music.
It is people like this who give the rest a bad name.
I work for a bank, so we can’t screw around. And besides, we are monitored every week to see what we are actually doing on the phones, what we are saying and stuff.
I work on a corporate helpdesk on a very large account. You give people like me a bad name. I hold no grudges, but be warned:
I have been a supervisor in a call center like yours. Just so you know it is possible, the phone systems that most call centers like yours use do keep statistics on you and your phone habits. You will eventually be found out and lose your job. It happens. Maybe it won’t happen to you, but likely it will. I know I wrote up lots of people for playing phone games.
Here is a cool idea! You posted this from work, right? Hmmm… Your IP address that you were using is logged on this board every time you post. If the mods wanted to be funny, they could look up the IP address, determine the company you work for, then turn it over to the IT team at your location. From there, the IT team could EASILY determine what workstation was using that IP address at the time you posted. From there, it is easy to determine who was logged on to that workstation at that time. This could all happen in a matter of an hour or so… VERY easy to do. What do ya say, Eutychus55, UncleBeer, Coldfire? Any takers?
Thanks, Zenster I feel like I have to do my part to restore faith in people who do tech support. We have a bad enough reputation, to begin with. I would love to see someone go through with my plan.
Hmm, these “suggestions” weren’t even creative. Everyone who’s done tech support has seen/heard this list a million times. If you’re going to be malign an entire sector of the workforce, at least do it with some flair.
As someone who works on a Tech support line, and tries to provide a quality service, let me start by saying “Bite me”.
It’s people like you that have the rest of us universally hated. feel free to crawl back under the rock you came from
I just spent 30 mins trying to get an old dude to type his username and pw right… and then in the middle of everything he managed to get some other weird errors… delightful! The biggest problem was that he kept confusing the zero with the “o” sigh!
Nothing teaches you patience like doing customer support for computer-illiterates.
I still like my job tho… in a weird sick twisted way its kinda rewarding helping people like this… even if some of them are dumb as snot… Some customers are just too much tho… so once in a while u need your fun to get thru the day… cant see how listening to a customer going “hello” is much fun tho… but each to his own.
