[QUOTE=Biggirl]
When someone called the help desk when you were there did you tell them that they were imagining the problems they were having? That’s the part that pissed me off.
“No, that’s impossible.”-- screw you, you surly bastard!
[/QUOTE]
While I don’t agree with the tech that you had, unfortunately you can’t just treat what people say as gospel. I know some people are personally offended when I question what happened (though I try to do so more politely and sensitively), but people sometimes just don’t tell you what happened – often not honestly, but even more commonly, not completely.
“No, it just stopped working on its own, I’ve made no changes to my system at all”… except upgrading Windows and reinstalling nearly all the software on your computer, and changing your hardware configuration significantly.
“The error message really does say (some ridiculous thing no error code in Windows or our software could or would). Yes, that’s the exact text. No, I don’t want to check, I remember it! Why can’t you just believe me and fix it!” (Let’s go through it once more since a screenshot would really help me identify the problem, and possibly document a bug, since I’ve never seen that error before.) “[before checking anything] Okay, maybe it didn’t say that exactly. But my computer isn’t working and I know your software is causing it.”
“Your software doesn’t work! It won’t do X!”. (It doesn’t do X, it never did X, it does Y, could you be confusing our software with something else). “I am absolutely 100% certain that it did X. It just doesn’t work anymore. Why won’t you help me?” (Because unless aliens added a bunch of stuff to our software, what you’re describing just isn’t in the code. For serious. I’m pretty sure we’d be aware pretty quick if our software had massively useful features that it doesn’t have, and menus that we didn’t add.)
Some people will argue with me even if I demonstrate that they are wrong. I really hate to make people feel dumb, and I really don’t ever want to say to someone that they made a mistake, but when people say “I’m going to sue you because your site doesn’t say you don’t work with X” or “How can you mistreat your customers by not warning them that they’ll lose data if they Y”, you can’t really answer without calling them wrong. And even if you demonstrate by replicating the problem that they were warned or that the messages were there, they will insist, “this wasn’t here before” – even when I know that a particular website change, for example, was done months ago because I helped write it and was in the room when it was published to the site. Hell, we even have a legacy product that has the names of the only supported operating systems in the name of the actual product – as in, “Product X for Windows 95 and 98 Only” – and people will still claim that the site says it works in Vista.
The less savvy the user, the more they seem to lie. I really, really try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but some people seem to get through life by covering over lack of intelligence or information with bluster and lies. I don’t really understand why someone digs in their heels and refuses to let me help them, but it happens.
Again, I don’t think he handled the situation very well, but I have had to say to people “I won’t say what you’ve described can’t happen, but I can tell you that I’ve never once encountered a case out of thousands of cases where it did happen, and conceptually it doesn’t even make sense that it could happen” (and I’ll try to explain why in as simple of terms as I can). Of course, you should still follow up to see what is happening, but unfortunately, some people have mentally confused “tech support” with “clairvoyant”.
