Johnny Pebs. Do you suppose your caller just had his CAPS LOCK key activated? You’d be surprised how often this causes password problems (it happens to me a lot and it usually takes two or three tries before I realize this is why my password isn’t working).
That is always the first assumption, but in this case, he was saying the letters as he was typing them out. I knew he was missing the M because he didn’t say it. When the original caller came back on the line, I told him the password was champion and he logged in on the first try. Additionally, to avoid the whole “is the caps lock on?” issue, I always tell the user that the password is ‘such-and-such’ “all lower case”.
Don’t get me started on the lady who said “lower case? what do you mean?” :eek:
Pebs
Having done help desk work in the past I made a concious effort for quite some time to gauge my caller’s abilities. I’ve had people who profess to be computer savy and at it for years have no clue on basic functions and people who say that they’re lost have no problem with some midlevel stuff; it was getting a feel for how cooperative
However, the most condecending thing that I did and never varied from was any time I gave a command I spelled the whole thing out in full mentioning spaces and where to press enter. I didn’t care if they were the VP of Information Technology for their company of Granma Smith with her new computer, they got the exact same treatment on that. The reason is that just saying these commands can be confusiong; I may have wanted them to use ftp instead of http protocol, or that line might have had some numbers run together with the words and that one did not. Precision is a virtue in support and that was one area where it was needed.
I think I get work e-mails from her all the time. I have to run them through Word and the Sentence Case fix before they are legible.