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Please don’t ask me “Is THE server down?”. Especially don’t make that the first thing you say to me when I answer the phone. We have more than 40 servers and the only way they’ll all be down is in the total lack of power (in which case, the phones wouldn’t work either.) Asking me if THE server is down is only going to prompt me to ask you what your problem is. Even if we’re having a problem with A server, I can’t assume that that’s the reason you’re calling.
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If THE server is indeed down, don’t ask me when it will be back up. If I had an ETR, I would have mentioned it when you told me the problem that you had matched the outage we’re experiencing. (example: Yes, we’ve had several calls on that, we’re rebooting now and it should be back in 15 minutes.) If I tell you anything different than that, that means that the people who are working on that ARE WORKING on that. Either they haven’t discovered the error, or they haven’t had time to brief me on the solution.
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Please tell me the exact error you’re getting. Saying “The system won’t let me in” doesn’t mean ANYTHING to me. Which system? Is it a login error? Or a complete lack of power? Also, please understand that “Unable to login to Windows workstation” is different from “Unable to login to network” which is different from “Unable to locate tree or server” Each of those errors has a separate path to resolution.
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When you give me the error message, please don’t give just the error number. I haven’t memorized all the different error codes for everything. There is almost always some text message with the error that will point me in the right direction. I’ve given up the expectation that you can tell me which application is giving the error.
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If I ask you if you’ve rebooted the PC, it’s because that’s the first step to try and clear the problem (and something you can try on your own before calling the helpdesk). If you’ve already done that, you don’t need to do it again while I’m on the phone with you.
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Understand the difference between “logging off” and “restarting.” If I ask you to log off (often with detailed instructions such as “Go to Start > Log Off > Log Off”), it’s because that’s all that’s needed. Doing it your way just adds 3 or more minutes to the call.
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Calling the head of my department doesn’t get your problem resolved any faster, nor does it increase it’s priority. You can call me directly. I don’t yell, swear, or purposely try to belittle you or your lack of knowledge. I’ll give you a plain English explanation of what’s happening and do my best to resolve your problem over the phone. If I can’t, I’ll create a Trouble Ticket and assign a tech to it.
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Call me WHEN you’re having the problem. Don’t wait three months and then complain that “xyz” hasn’t worked for that period of time. I don’t sit around monitoring your activity. The only way I know you’re having a problem is when you tell me.
Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
People don’t seem to realize that if they haven’t fully diagnosed the problem yet, there is no way on God’s green earth for them to how long it will take to fix. If the cause of the problem is unknown, then the solution is also unkown.
And calling my boss or her boss is not going to change that. Yes, I know how important you are (which is not quite as important as you seem to think you are). That, also, will not affect how fast the problem gets resolved. You see, if it did, that would suggest that those working on the problem are fooling around or lollygagging. I can assure you that they are not. They are going to do the best they can as quickly as they can. And it will go faster if they are not being interupted because you are requesting an update.
I work at a small college, our entire IT staff is a Network administrator, a programmer, an analyst and two microcomputer specialists. I am one of the latter. Two of us support 900 computers. We are are on a three year rotation plan, so every year we replace around 300 computers. My favorite was a call from a lady who said she could not print. Normally I just remote in (We use Altiris). But her machine is off line. I go to her cube, she is not there, but her laptop is. I try to fire it up, but no charge on the battery. I find the AC adapter and plug it in. Turns out it was our screw up, we forgot to install the correct printer drivers. While installing them, the lady shows up, sees the power cord to the wall, grabs it and yanks it out of the socket while exclaiming "You don’t need this, Dave (The network administrator) told me this new laptop is wireless! " Of couse the laptop with no charge on the battery dropped like a rock. I almost died trying to hold back from telling her that she was possibly the stupidest person on the face of the planet.
Just got this in my email. It applies more to this thread than mine, so enjoy a lesson in the history of tech support.
Excellent.
[QUOTE=Ferd Burfel]
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Please don’t ask me “Is THE server down?”. Especially don’t make that the first thing you say to me when I answer the phone. We have more than 40 servers and the only way they’ll all be down is in the total lack of power (in which case, the phones wouldn’t work either.) Asking me if THE server is down is only going to prompt me to ask you what your problem is. Even if we’re having a problem with A server, I can’t assume that that’s the reason you’re calling.
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If THE server is indeed down, don’t ask me when it will be back up. If I had an ETR, I would have mentioned it when you told me the problem that you had matched the outage we’re experiencing. (example: Yes, we’ve had several calls on that, we’re rebooting now and it should be back in 15 minutes.) If I tell you anything different than that, that means that the people who are working on that ARE WORKING on that. Either they haven’t discovered the error, or they haven’t had time to brief me on the solution.
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Heh. That sounds like the idiot woman in my very first job who used to call us and complain that we didn’t send out notices before the computer went down. Duh, lady, if we knew the computer was going to go down, we would have. But…
YES!!! I’m SO glad somebody else gets Luser the Clueless. I just got done with her brother, Luser the Hapless, who is “a self-taught tech.” Good, me too, but I still read books on the subject. New Computer uses SATA. Old one uses IDE drives. Hap calls me and tells me the computer has no HDD. “They’re sata.” “I don’t see Saturn written anywhere here.”
You fucking chimp. Go fling your poo elsewhere. Had you not badmouthed me L33T skillz to my own family, I might have helped you. Now, I have to go and plug in the damn thing myself. It’s a 30 minute drive to get there, and I do it for them for free because they’re family. Way to screw up my Sunday night.
Gonna have to call you out on this one, A decent tech/shop WILL have at least OEM copies for running repair installs and such unless you are one of those assholes who likes to sell windows licences to people who lost a disk.
OK, here’s the other side of the coin. I’ve had to call tech support a few times to get this product to work. They have sounded a little impatient. But check out what this whole adventure looks like from my end:
I bought the downloadable version of your product, but your web site broke because the purchasing agent doesn’t have the same name that I, the user, have. You’re selling a $1300 statistics library. Are your typical customers hobbyists using personal credit cards, or what?
So your tech support said they fixed it and emailed me a new username and password. But your site still won’t let me in. Yes, I’m pretty sure I’m entering my username and password right. I’m copying and pasting from a 1 minute old email. This one, tech support gives up on.
So you send me a CD instead, in a little box with several pages of instructions. One of the pages is titled “HANG ON TO YOUR LICENSE NUMBER!” and has a business graphic of a guy in a suit hanging from a tree branch by one hand. The text says “In order to process any technical support questions we MUST have your license number. Our Support Engineers cannot help you without it! Please find your license number on the packing slip in this package, write it below RIGHT NOW!” Apparently you think this is what it takes so your idiot users don’t lose the license number. Look, I’m in one of my company’s 45 plants in 5 continents. The packing slip came off the package several steps ago, removed by somebody I’ve never met, and sent off to some other plant to be entered in a database. You’re not supposed to put the thing I paid for ON THE PACKING SLIP. The packing slip is a PACKING SLIP. That’s why it says PACKING SLIP at the top. It’s for DOCUMENTING the thing I paid for. It’s supposed to travel WITH the thing I paid for. The moment the little box got put in my mail bin, the packing slip went wherever candle flames go when you blow the candle out. Let’s not even explore, shall we, the minor project that ensues when I, the idiot user, don’t have the only thing I’m absolutely supposed to write down RIGHT NOW in the big space next to the brachiating suit guy with the dumb sad face.
But eventually I get this squared away and try the install. The first thing it asks is whether the license I bought is an “uncounted” one or not. I know I bought a “node locked” as opposed to a “floating” license, which were the 2 choices you offered. What do you mean, “uncounted”? This term doesn’t appear on the paper instructions. It doesn’t turn up in a text search of your web site. I guess sometimes you sell products and throw in a handful of licenses, at $1300 mind you, without counting them? I guess until the install doesn’t shrivel up.
Next I’m supposed to edit the license file you sent me, putting it into my license folder. It’s supposed to go into /usr/bin/license.lic and I’m supposed to edit it using Notepad or WordPad. Now, do you think I am using a Windows PC that has forward slash path delimiters and a “usr” directory in its filesystem? Or do you think I’m using a UNIX system that shipped with Notepad and WordPad? Not to worry, I can figure this out too.
I’m supposed to add several lines of text to this license file. The lines are a full page wide and contain lots of cryptic zeros and uppercase letter “O”'s and ones and lowercase letter "L"s and pipe characters in a not-very-explicit font, and varying lengths of whitespace. The instructions say to “cut and paste” these lines into the file. The instructions, and the lines of text, are however printed on a sheet of paper. I’m pointing and clicking my finger on the paper, but it only slides around on the desk. I’m even trying my middle finger. But eventually I get them in there and work out all the ambiguities.
The license file, by the way, is named license.txt, or license.lic, depending on which instruction sheet I look at. The install system, on the other hand, refers to “the license file” you sent me. You did send me a license.doc, but that’s a MS Word formatted document that congratulates me on my wise purchasing decision. It doesn’t have any license numbers in it at all.
Then I try to run your product. Of course it reports a failure of the license manager. Helpfully, it says it did not find a license file in C:\software\license. Not that that is where your docs say it should be. Your docs say it should be in C:\Program Files\Product\License\License.lic (at least, that’s the only reference you make that includes a path). The next message box from your refusing-to-run product says I correctly have the environment variable set to C:\Program Files\Product\License. Of course I’m curious why your program didn’t look there for it. After a call to tech support we resolve that it is looking for C:\Program Files\Product\License\License.dat (not .lic, mind you, but .dat).
I understand the mathematical and statistical functions, even the difficult things like iterative arbitrary form modeling which don’t necessarily work even if you have a good model and reasonable starting parameters. I taught a course in this a few years ago. I am quite good with the thing that’s supposed to be the challenge here. And I feel fairly literate with computers, JCL, CPM, DOS, Win3.1, Win95, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP, Win32API, .NET, SVR4, BSD, ALGOL, APL, PL1, Fortran, Assembly and a bunch of other ways of thinking about the world. Hell, even Befunge and OOK, a little bit. There are books by Charles Petzold and Martin Fowler on my bedside table, and no fewer than 8 books on the table behind me from O’Reilly publishing alone. I contributed a little to one of the programming textbooks Wikipedia points at. I even spent hours studying the license manager software you use. Do you know there are several different versions of the same software product out there, and the one you use has a different user interface with different choices that have different names than the version the license manager company documents on their website? Did you know that the plant IT guy and a very smart engineer down the hall and I spent about 8 hours last year on the phone with tech support at the license manager company’s headquarters, and still never got some other product that uses this license manager to run? Do you know how infuriating it is to have to learn about license manager software when you’re the end user, and the only thing a license manager can do for me is to prevent me from using what I just bought from you?
So your tech support did get me going, though on I think the 4th attempt. And they sounded very tired with me. Can I deduce from my experiences that you haven’t sold a copy of this product before? While at first it may look that way, you’ve actually been the industry leader for decades, so maybe not. I guess this is just what the world of software is like. Somebody in your organization knows you can’t cut from paper and paste into a computer file. Somebody knows a little vertical line isn’t quite a character all on its own, it has to be one specific ASCII code or another. Somebody knows paths look different in UNIX and Windows. Somebody knows you have to get every character in the filename correct or it just won’t read it at all.
But that Somebody didn’t write all your installation instructions. That Somebody certainly didn’t write them as one single document that reads consistently from start to finish, like Hewlett-Packard calculator manuals used to. That Somebody hasn’t tried downloading from your web site. That Somebody has not received your product and tried to do with it as they are told. That Somebody is off somewhere else in your organization, not preparing the thing I bought from you, your product.
I bet that Somebody is on the phone with one of YOUR vendors, trying to make THEIR product work…
Sure, sure no problem! I’m tech support for a 250+ private corporation. We run Windows XP SP2, site-licensed, and previously we ran Windows 2000, SP4. As one of the “unwritten” employee perks, we will gladly help out any of our employees who are having problems with their home computers. (We give them about 8-10 hours of tech service free before we start mentioning any possible charges. Our standard fee is a dozen cookies 
).
Since we don’t run Windows Home, or any of the Vista products, we don’t keep any on hand. About half of the machines we get are so borked up by viruses that the only way to fix them is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system software. Some of the machines won’t let you install an XP SP2 instance because the license on the machine is only for SP 1a, and without the Install CD from your computer, I can’t reinstall your software.
Secondly, some of the problems can’t be fixed without the various drivers CD’s that come with the computers. (The websites do awesome jobs of having a lot of the older drivers online, but sometimes they don’t have them. ) When I ask for the operating system CD’s, they will usually bring these CD’s along with the XP CD I really need.
Finally, all the legal CD’s I DO have are usually for the buisiness-only versions of the products - they really don’t like it when you try to use the home version license on the business-version license.
I can’t really make a copy of the installation CD’s people bring in from home, because it would (A) Be very illegal, and (B) the versions change from manufacturer to manufacturer. For example, I can usually get away with loading any Dell XP CD onto any Dell machine, but it absolutely refuses to load on a Toshiba system.
Now, we usually look at the machines before we do anything to them. If you, perchance, let your kid pick off bits and pieces of the Windows License sticker on your machine, and we can’t read your Windows license, we can’t guarantee that we can fix your stuff. We’re not making any money off of this - we’re doing it as a service to keep our employees happy.
Hope that helps clear up this point!