I know you IT guys think us end users are idiots. . .

The BBQ Pit
81

As a helpdesk person, all I can say is “Thank God for remote access applications!”

Netmeeting, RDP, SMS, PCAnywhere…they are a gift from a merciful God. If your company doesn’t use them, they really should.

Things that frustrate helpdesk guys:

  1. The user thinks he knows what is happening, but doesn’t

  2. The user cannot communicate what the symptoms are

  3. The user cannot understand what they are being told to do

If we can connect to the user’s machine, we don’t have to deal with those issues AND we save a lot of time.

FTR, the absolute worst user I ever had to deal with, both in terms of misunderstanding the issue, communicating symptoms and understanding what was being said…was a senior level database administrator. That’s right, another IT person. :smack:

82

Not to be too nitpicky, but I rarely consider DBAs to be “IT people.” They perform their functions on computers, yes, but they almost never know anything more than how to manage databases. Sadly, few of them realize this, and when I had an IT function, they were the biggest pains in the asses.

“My database performance is slow. I think it’s the network.” :dubious:

No jackass, it’s because you’re re-indexing all your databases while 4 of your users are running complicated queries which are generating lots of data for their applications. See that CPU usage? 100% is not good. Do you see those disk queue length counters? Yeah, that means there are currently 150 tasks waiting to be written to disk.

DBAs are unique animals. They’re not “computer people.”

83

I’m delighted I’m a stunt cock instead of a corporate support monkey but either way, it’s all about the end user. Forget that and you’re fucked.

84

I’ve never been a real IT guy, but I’ve always been the IT guy to friends and in-laws and what not. My favorite (and most common) exchange…

Them: The computer won’t let me save my file.

Me: What happened when you tried?

Them: An error popped up.

Me: What did the error say?

Them: I don’t know, I just clicked okay.

Me: Okay, I want you to try saving it again.

Them: But I can’t save it just gives me an error.

Me: What did the error say?

Them: I don’t know I just clicked okay.

Me: Let’s start again…I want you to try saving it.

Them: But—

Me: Just click save.

Them: Okay, an error popped up.

Me: Good, what does the error say.

Them: I don’t know I clicked okay ( :smack: )

Me: Try saving it again, but don’t click okay on the error.

Them: Okay, the error is up.

Me: Good, what does it say.

Them: It says that I can’t save, should I click okay.

Me: No, read me every single word the error says.

Them: “No disk in drive A:\ please insert disk and click okay”

Me: Is there a disk in the disk drive.

Them: No

Me: Put one in and try again.

Them: Wow, thanks.

At which point I usually try to explain to them that if they read the error, often times it will give them a clue as to what the problem is, and sometimes windows even offers up a possible solution (put a disk in drive A).

85

The underlined part applies to all levels of support as well as to end users. If I was allowed to bitchslap everybody whose idea of an adequate course involves teaching exclusively “how to do things in a perfect world”, my hand wouldn’t cease hurting for the next ten years.
Some of the things I’ve had to explain to my colleagues and customers since I got into IT consulting (mind you, some like the “impossible” detail I also had to explain when I did chemistry research):

  • “it’s the only way I’ve ever seen it done” and “that’s how everybody does it” are not the same thing, specially if you’ve only had one job - or if your training involved a world where all princesses are blonde, all little girls have a pastel-colored pony and truckers never go on strike.
  • which brings us to: answering “oh, the usual way” to my questions about how you currently do things is not helpful. I need a detailed description. As if you were training me to do your job, mk? Oh, you suck at training? Tuff luck, I can’t help you if I have no idea how, what, when or why you do what you do.
  • “impossible” does not mean “I was expecting something else.” Scissors beat paper, paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and reality beats theory with the rock.
  • “I heard this name and it sounds real neat so I want it even though I have no idea what it means, how it works, what it’s for or what it does” doesn’t mean “we need it.”
    That’s just the peak of the iceberg, the stuff that should be real, real simple but which I keep having to re-explain.
    Biggirl, will you be my end user? Oh dang, I’m not that kind of IT person - pity!
86

Because 99% of the books out there suck goat balls through a very narrow straw, and because an enormous amount of people don’t learn well from reading.

There’s people who learn by reading something a thousand times - many self-training courses are based on this. For those of us who don’t learn like this, it’s just terribly frustrating.

There’s people who learn by hearing. To these, someone explaining things once and well over the phone is more useful than a thousand books.

There’s people (myself and most of the engineers and shop floor people I work with) who learn by doing. A class with a bit of “theory” and a lot of “exercises which actually relate to your work” are useful - a book with a ton of theory and, after each 20-page chapter, a five minute exercise which doesn’t relate to our work… meh.

One of the things I do is write courses and in-factory handbooks, adapting them to the kind of learner I see people are; there’s been factories where I even gave them several versions of the same “book” (the lab boss was read-many-times, the lab techs were hands-on).

87

Hear hear!

I’m not involved with IT support at all, but since I programmed a system that receives data from several financial institutions, I took the calls anyway. Anyhow, the system was stable yet I continued receiving “stupid” calls from this one user who simply could not understand how things should work.

After a while we released a new version and held a couple of “show and tell” sessions to help the users with the new system. One of the users who signed in to these sessions was my “favorite” user.

I dreaded that session. I could imagine her asking stupid questions, time and again and not understanding a single thing.

I was wrong.

Turns out that this particular woman was a “visual” learner. She simply needed to see how things are done, not be told.

And it’s my guess that that is one of the bigger problems many users (and help support for that matter) face. Not all people learn optimally the same way. Most people aren’t even aware of their optimal learning path. And when you try to explain aurally something to someone who learns optically… you’re in for a world of pain.

88

Oh good Lord it’s you.

’toon, I know how you feel, but great googly moogly I can’t stand it when people utterly refuse to go through any support I say. The first way to get me off your side is to say “Yeah, I want to talk to the next tier up, I’m completely certain you can’t help me.”

Please, please, please. I know this doesn’t always work, but just humor me. Since most first-tier call center people DO have a script they’ve memorized and a certain number of things they can do, open the call with “Here is my problem; please, hear me out. I have done this, this, and this to troubleshoot it. I considered that, but since the other thing happened, it seemed irrelevant. Do you have any suggestions that don’t necessitate me bringing this thing in?”

If you start out with the confrontational-in-any-tone “Send me up to tier 2,” do not expect me to be any more helpful, kind, or friendly than I am required to be. You’ve started the conversation out by insulting me. I really am here to help you. Like as not, I can actually fix your problem. If you are calling me for help, do not treat me like an idiot. I will generally answer that request with a smile: “I understand you’d like to get this taken care of as quickly as possible, Mr. Toon. Humor me just a moment: let me know what’s going on and what troubleshooting you’ve already done so I can pass that information on. Maybe I can even help you, who knows!”

That said, I’ve definitely noticed that there is not a constant intersection in people skills and tech skills. Obviously there are logical explanations for this, but one of the sadder and more honest ones is that many tech people learned quickly they didn’t NEED people skills, especially if they were really technically savvy. I feel for you, Biggirl. Nobody should be treated like that. As a reason but not an excuse, consider that the job of your average IT guy is to be treated like that all the time by executives, assistants, and their own managers. Enough time doing that and they stop caring, having no more reason to care anymore. No, they shouldn’t be in customer support. I quite agree.

Everyone on every side needs to remember that the voice on the other line belongs to a person. The tech needs to remember that this person is frustrated, rushed, way too busy to be having problems right now, and likely not very tech-savvy. The customer needs to remember that the tech is very, very used to talking to defensive, frustrated people who don’t want to admit they could have caused their own problem. It’s like having a doctor who sees 99 cases of chicken pox and 1 case of the measles in one day.

89

We have the same problem where I work. Try as they might, the HD folks cannot draw the info out of the end user. The smart ones will note that in the ticket, but more often than not, the ticket will read something along the lines of “EU said there’s an odd sound coming from their desk area”. Too bad the HD can’t refuse to ticket stuff like that.

90

Yes, dear. It’s me. :slight_smile:

I didn’t mean to say that I say that on cold calls. I did mean to say ( but did not say it ! ) that when I’m into the 3rd or 4th call about the same problem in the last 6 hours and everysinglegoddamnedtime I call I must listen to the same series of carefully scripted questions and responses delivered by Bangladesh’s most sincere yet inarticulate phone service person, then yeah, I ask for tier 2. Because the issue- especially the Cell Phone Nightmare Month- is not an issue that is addressed by the script. Why in the world do I need to invest my time over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again so I can hear the same scripted dialogue?

Hey- guess what? I don’t. It’s a service industry and I’m the Customer ! Imagine? This means that after enough repetitions with Tier 1 with a negative outcome, I am allowed to request Tier 2 and not feel as though I’m demeaning the brilliance of the Tier 1 scriptreader.

You give me a Tier 1 Tech Support person who is A) Capable of listening instead of interrupting the second a Key Word or Phrase is uttered by myself that permits then to jump to a specific paragraph The Script, or B) Capable of thinking outside of the box, or C) Totally aware of what they do and do not know and quickly willing to assess the situation and suggest Tier 2 Support based upon their limited knowledge, or D) Extremely deep in their knowledge base concerning the product and how it functions. You give me that, I’m a very grateful customer.

You give me an automaton and you get rudeness. Simple, really. :rolleyes:

91

Oh, I hear ya, all of ya.

I had a job where they hit the tech support superfecta:

(1) Tier 1 staff primarily of the “shell-script-on-a-chair” (thanks, Spiny Norman!) variety, all of whom were off-site, and none of whom had ever met a member of the end-user community;

(2) End users who were often well-meaning but who uniformly suffered from an inability to recall important details of software problems, such as the name of the database, application, or web site they were using;

(3) Tier 3 staff consisting of a single DBA (very good, but missing a customer-service chromosome) and a single telecom expert (more customer-service skills, but still primarily a back-office support type) to support a wide variety of ERP applications, dozens of databases, a roomful of servers and communications hardware, and whatever other goodies the user community decided they needed;

(4) A support manager who honestly believed that it would be a good idea if the Tier 1 folks handed cases straight to the Tier 3 folks, who would then handle all communications, because end-user follow-up was a waste of Tier 1’s time.

Not a happy place.

92

This sounds suspiciously like the Bellsouth/EDS unholy service alliance when I was there… am I close? I was once on a Tier 3 there. Since tier 1’s performance was rated only on how quickly they handed off to tier 3, of course the tickets were total garbage, i.e.: “Cust call he say internet down since yesterday”. Hmm, you don’t say, the internet was down? I missed that on the evening news somehow…

93

Is there a secret password or something that we can do to skip to the “User is Not a Fucking Idiot” page on the script? I regularly take screenshots and try to describe my problem most accurately, including describing what I see and not what I think is happening - which is a tip for end-users that I didn’t see posted. For example: “I click on the MS Word icon and MS Word is giving me error 0x0069 (Database unavailable)” rather than “The database for MS Word is broken”.

At any rate, I still end up on page 1 of the script … yes, I’ve plugged in my computer :frowning: … yes, I’ve turned it on :frowning: … yes, I have MS Word installed :frowning: … yes, I’ll hold while you transfer me :frowning: … yes, I have Windows installed :frowning: … yes, I have MS Word installed :frowning: … yes, I have the serial number :frowning: … yes, I’ll hold while you transfer me … :smack:

Any way to skip ahead to “I’m not a dumbass and I already sent you screenshots of the error message”?

94

Get a job with a company that has competent Help Desk support? :slight_smile:

Really, the best way to get past the script is to anticipate the questions and have them answered before they are asked. For instance, indicate any troubleshooting steps you’ve already taken when you open the call: “I’ve checked all the cable connections and rebooted the machine and still get the error. I’ve tried logging on to a different machine and can (or can’t) reproduce the problem.” If you indicate that you’ve taken reasonable troubleshooting steps (and the HD worker has half a clue), that should get you past the script pretty quickly.

As a matter of fact, you’d be my favorite user and I’d likely give you my direct line extension so you could by-pass the HD! :slight_smile:

95

A lot of the people who do call IT do not tell the truth for various reasons. I had a very sweet older guy who told me that when he put the new program CD into his machine the program started up and then closed. There was no CD in the drive. On investigation we found that he was sticking the CD between two drive bay covers. There was a small stack of CDs in his machine. There is no way the program on them could have started up, yet he insisted it did. He was not in my experience stupid, unobservant, or generally untruthful, but when it came to computers it could seem that way.

Then there are the users with generally weird issues. Like the guy who couldn’t get into his email. He did not use his computer much, but it worked for everything he needed it to do, but getting into email. Other people could open their email from his machine, and he could open his email from other machines. It turned out that the keyboard was set to French and his email password had a letter that was changed in that layout, but other programs he used a different password. Since he did not type much, he never saw the wrong letters.

And as many, many people can tell you there are users that just lie. Some tell stories on their computer in hopes of getting an upgrade. Some want something to blame for them being behind in their schedule. Some just don’t want to admit doing something stupid or against the rules, rules they might think are too stupid for words.

Like not saving their passwords. One user saved her password on her laptop for some applications. She felt this was not a security issue as whenever the laptop was not with her, she locked the screen and had it physically chained down, so she saved her password for convenience. And she kept getting locked out of various applications and the network. She did not realize that windows would offer saved passwords repeatedly for any program with the same username, even if it had a different domain associated and it would do that five times each time the program was launched and never tell her. It took quite a long time to root out all the places that password was saved, yet she said that she never saved her password repeatedly, right up to the point I found the first place it was saved.

And tech people lie to their own tech support. I know many a tech that pretended to follow Dell’s script so that they could convince Dell to send them the part that was needed.

96

I’ve tried doing that with support people “I’ve done ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C,’ do you have any other suggestions” The vast majority of the time, this is followed by the tier 1 support person walking me through “A,” because that’s what’s on their script. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

If I’m calling, I’m already frustrated. Being forced to deal with someone who isn’t going to be able to fix the problem doesn’t help my attitude (or their call rate for that matter). And while “get me tier 2 or get me your manager” isn’t the nicest thing that I can say, it is efficient. And the tier 1 person doesn’t have to deal with an increasingly annoyed me (and instead can talk to someoene who accidentally turned their monitor off) and I can get my problem solved.

97

And speaking in defense of all of us idiot end users…you know what’s worse than one of us?

An IT Manager that used to own his own business.

98

I cannot tell you how many times I have spoken with someone with that attitude…and had the following conversation:

*Them: I can’t do X!!

Me: Here’s what I want you do. (blah, blah, blah)

Them. I already did that.

Me: Let’s go through it once more.

Them: I don’t want to do it again. Can you just send someone?

Me: I would love to, but they are just gonna ask me to have you do this.

Them: Just send them.

Me: Humor me. Lets go this one time, and I’ll send someone.

Them Okay… Hey, it worked!*

We don’t have scripts where I work, but we all have standard things we try with every problem type. Many of the questions we ask may seem stupid to you, but more often than not we get the answer we need from them.

And make no mistake…2nd and 3rd tier support will ream us if we have sent a call to them and not gone over the basics.

99

See, in my conversations, the last line is:
Them: still broken.
Does that never happen to you?
When it does, is the person needing second level support happy at having spent time getting to know you better and connecting on a personal level?

100

If we don’t document in our ticket that we’ve done the standard troubleshooting (exiting the program and going back in, rebooting, whatever), 2nd level WILL get pissed and yes, you will be asked to do the same damn things by that 2nd level tech if we don’t do them.

Yes, if you get a less than stellar help desk tech, it can suck since you know you’ve done the basic troubleshooting. But hasn’t this thread shown you that yes, there are many people who do not know how to troubleshoot their way out of a paperbag but often will insist that YES THEY HAVE DONE THAT ALREADY even though they haven’t?