Ever since they “upgraded” my work computer with the new Microsoft Work Suite I’ve been having this little problem. At random times and for no reason I can discern, my computer would go over to DOS mode, blink it’s tiny cursor at me and then initialize ScriptLogic. This would take a minute or 3 and then it would bring me back to Windows. It does this 4 or 5 times a day.
I worked like this for a week or so because it only lasted a minute or so and I could hear the Helpdesk person sucking their teeth before I dialed. Today it finally got too annoying to ignore.
I call the Helpdesk and describe the problem.
“No. That’s impossible,” says the tech guy.
“It can’t be impossible because that’s what’s been happening for the past week and a half.”
“That’s not what ScriptLogic does.”
“I have absolutely no idea what ScriptLogic does except to initialize itself on my computer 5 times a day.”
“That’s impossible.”
Couldn’t help myself. I answered, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Apparently quoting The Princess Bride is the secret code because IT guy uninstalled and re-installed ScriptLogic.
But why, oh WHY would he think I’d call him up and make up stories about what my computer is doing? Do IT guys hear made-up tech problems all day long? Do users tell tales on their laptops? Accuse their PDAs of adultery? Sheesh!
But why, oh WHY would he think I’d call him up and make up stories about what my computer is doing? Because people do all the time. Both on purpose and inadvertently (because they don’t know how to adequately describe what the computer is doing).
Do users tell tales on their laptops? Yes.
Accuse their PDAs of adultery? Does saying, “This fucking thing!!” count?
That’s what you say, you’re probably one of them. I think you guys enjoy being surly bastards that way no one will call you and you can play WoW all day long.
That’s how it works at my job, anyway. People are afraid to call the help desk and will wait for their bosses to do it. The IT guys are not surly with the managing partners no matter how unsavvy the partners are.
Sadly, yes, you’d be amazed how many lying users I’ve dealt with when I was on Helpdesk. When they insist they haven’t installed any software on their machine and you find AOL installed under their user ID? Or they “don’t know what happened–didn’t touch anything” and you find important files have been deleted? Some people, I think, are either embarrassed to admit they did something stupid, or afraid they’ll get in trouble for having done something–anything–to cause their own problems. Technically, in the case of having installed software, they could, as it’s against company policy, but seldom do.
I used to be the principal engineer on a help desk (at US Courts actually), and I saw first hand what the help desk weenies have to go through wrt end users. After the 50th call where the use is either making stuff up, wrong, irate, irritable, irrational, etc etc…or all of these things at once…the help desk guys (we called them Bubble Boys, not that it matters) are in rolley eyed mode whenever someone calls with a problem. That’s one of the reasons they have such high turn over…they get burned out. The other reason is that tier one support people are usually poorly trained, poorly paid and poorly motivated.
Your best bet is to kick it up the chain as soon as possible. If the tier one guy is an idiot (or you THINK s/he is) then ask him/her to escalate the call to someone better. They may grouse (or they may be the highest level weenie working there…if so, gods help you)…but it will save you on frustration if you can talk to someone who doesn’t have to deal with customers all day long. Usually the tier 2 and 3 guys don’t deal with nearly as many customers a day…and that helps quite a bit.
But that wasn’t the case here. He didn’t ask me if I installed anything, he intimated that the problem I was calling about didn’t exist. Like I was making shit up just to hear the sound of his voice.
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!
We’re a small company-- 310 employees, 7 of which are IT guys. Usually I deal with Kevin, the in-house guy for this site. He’s nice and patient if you’re dumb, only he’s on vacation. There are no tiers here. There’s the IT guys and the IT boss.
I believe they have all gotten a stern talking to because of the surliness. And that was because the managing partners are sick and tired of having to call the help desk whenever someone has a problem with their computer.
Ya know, for many, many (many, many, many) years I worked on the phones, first with Empire Blue Cross and Shield and later with medical billers. You cannot imagine how irate people get when you are talking about their money AND their health. Never were we so belittling. Oh sure, we laughed at them once we hung up the phone but we didn’t make them feel like asses while we were talking to them.
I’d say it was my company but no-- smug know-it-allness is endemic with help desk help.
It is perfectly believable that people can do things on their computers without knowing exactly what’s going on. Everyday you get these annoying boxes and you click them just so they’ll go away. Or you’re trying to get something to work, and it says “Do you want to?” and you just say yes because unlike IT support people, whose job it is to deal with computer issues, the rest of us don’t actually have the time or the interest to deal with this crap.
And it’s also perfectly believable that people can do things on their computers and just not remember it. It’s pretty insignificant to a non-IT person and anyway it’s hard to remember things one doesn’t really understand in the first place.
So, lying? Maybe. But it’s more likely a more innocent explanation.
And when there is lying, it’s pretty understandable, when you’ve got some snotty IT support guy asking you accusative questions and you don’t really care about all this crap, you just want your damn computer to stop doing what it’s doing and just work so you can get on with your life.
When the DOS prompt for Scriptlogic pops up, hit the Print Screen (PRTSCN) key on your keyboard.
Open a picture program, Word, or an e-mail in HTML format. On your keyboard, press Control-V to paste the picture into the program you opened. Send that picture to your helpdesk person to show them what is happening.
My beef with the IT guys is:
A. Not letting me finish my sentence before telling me what to do. If you’d let me finish, I was going to tell you that I tried re-starting, I made sure I had it plugged in and turned on, and your suggestion to do both these things is going to result in a suggestion from me to you for what you can do.
B. Not listening to me tell you exactly what is happening. No, it isn’t the normal, usual SNAFU with this programme; I know that SNAFU, know how to deal with it, and this isn’t it. Shut up and listen, would you? Not all end-users are completely stupid liars; some of us are Dopers.
It is. What, you never heard of a secret handshake? Monty Python also works.
And. Yes. They do. Constantly.
Note: I pride myself on my attitude with people I am assisting. However “I didn’t do anything” will raise all sorts of happy red flags with me. And possibly make me whimper.
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”.
I used to work in tech support and, yep, people lie, and, yep, a lot of tech guys are so far up their own arses they can probably smell that morning’s Frosties. Both sides just have to stay calm and polite (or lobby to make childish name calling acceptable office etiquette).
Best call I ever had was for a “flickering monitor”. I went through the usual checking the cables with the user and then ambled down expecting to simply swap it out. On arrival the conversation went as follows…
Me: “Yep, I can see your problem… IT’S ON FIRE!!!”
Him: “Oh”
Pop quiz everyone. Your monitor is on fire, complete with smoke and blue flames coming from the back. Do you…
a) Unplug it.
b) Call the firebrigade.
c) Call tech support.
I am an IT guy. There is a reason IT people ask the questions that they do. The quickest way to ensure that your problem will take a REALLY REALLY long time to fix is to either a) lie about the problem or b) make shit up.
I get it all the time. For some reason some users think that if they lie or don’t tell the whole truth that we will somehow fix the problem faster. It doesn’t work that way. The more info the tech guy has on the problem the faster the problem will be resolved.
I’ve been doing this for years. I know when someone is lying to me. I also know that the lies and omissions make my job harder. I can also tell when the person I am talking to doesn’t have a clue.
I personnally love it when somethin like the following happens:
User: I am using <insert software here> and it just stoppped working
Me; Did anything change? Was anything installed?
User: No
Me: <Connect to their PC and find that they have been jacking around in the system by looking at the event viewer and various other things> I see that you did X.
User: Well, that can’t be part of the problem.
Me: <pounds head against desk>
I get this more than you would believe. Yesterday I had a client call because the printers stopped working. Of course the fact that they installed new printers (and didn’t tell me about it) could have *nothing * to do with the fact that the printers suddenly don’t work. Telling me that they installed new printers would be silly. So instead of telling me new printers were installed I had to go figure that out for myself and then had to configure the new printers. Wasted my time AND it wasted their time.
The other problem users don’t seem to grasp is that the details of the problem are very important. I get calls all the time that go like this:
User: I got an error
Me: Ok, what is the error?
User: I don’t know something about an illegal somthing or other.
Me: Ok, what exactly were you doing when it occured?
User: Using your software.
At which point there is nothing really to troubleshoot. I can pull the error but the error log usually does not have enough info to find out what the user was doing when the error occured.
