-
Don’t tell me what’s wrong. If you knew what the fuck was wrong, you’d not be calling me.
-
Don’t tell me your theories about what’s wrong unless you’re going to test them and fix the thing yourself. Your half-assed, uninformed theory (or worse, basket of theories) colors your description of events to the point that I don’t understand the problem and can’t easily help you. Simple description is concise and hard to misunderstand.
-
Giving me your interpretation of events doesn’t make you look smart.
-
If you think you have a theory and you want to test it, see (1).
-
Check the goddamn power.
-
Just because I ask you to check the power or the switch or whatever doesn’t mean I think you’re an idiot. It’s an honest fucking mistake. We all do it.
-
But you are an idiot.
While #7 still applies, it is difficult for many of us to surrender so many Man-Points™ without a struggle. That’s why we #2. Silly, I know. But millions of years of conditioning will do that to a guy. We can’t appear weak in front of our mates, lest they leave us for the hominid down the hall who understands electrons and programming.
Corollary to # 6.
If informed that hard resets have already been attempted twice to no avail, do not annoy me with going through that tedious process unless you are going to do something different. I don’t care if you DO, just let me feel like I’m doing this for some reason other than you have to read your screen verbatim. Tell me you’re sending a pulse to ping the outlet or something…sheesh.
I’d be a happier man if no service drone ever again told me to unplug an Ethernet cable or phone wire and plug it back in the other way around. I know they’re end-insensitive. You (may very well) know they’re end-insensitive. If you want me to check both ends to make sure they’re in firmly, say so.
(In the instance that sparked this rant, the DSL modem/router was simply dead. It responded to my pings and it looked alive but it couldn’t see the DSL signal the field circus tech verified to be strong with his own gear. The new modem is working just fine.)
On the other fucking hand, if you’ve issued a “this is how you handle this situation” memo, and I tell you that I’ve done exactly what the memo said, don’t cop an attitude w/me when you come and do all the steps finding out, gee, she was right, she did do all the fucking steps and it’s still screwed up.
As the spouse of a repair person, however, I also would take exception to your #1 - he does in fact want to hear what the end user is finding wrong.
I think you misunderstand my #1. The person calls me because they don’t know what to do. I do not then want them to tell me what’s wrong. If they know what’s wrong, fix it. What they have are faults they don’t know how to fix or what’s causing it (what is actually wrong). Describing these without their emotional baggage (#2) is what I need to help them as fast as possible.
Derleth, that’s funny, because when I have communication faults one of my suggestions is “swap COM1 and COM2.” Not because there’s a difference, but because it does sometimes resolve the issue because their connection is loose. But you can’t tell them the connection is loose for the same reason people get all huffy when you mention the power.
This is why I don’t want to know how smart someone is. People make honest mistakes all the time. A coworker moved the instrument and the cable is loose. Some retarded engineer created four power switches for all these components and one of them got out of cycle. Etc. I’m on the other end of a phone or email, not there with you to confirm what you said you did in the past when you tried fifty random things in an order you can’t quite recall correctly (which, of course, is why #4 redirects to #1).
Yeah, but here’s the thing. To quote Dr. House, everybody lies. I can’t tell you how many times someone has called me with a technical problem and sworn up and down that they’ve done everything I’m asking them to do, only to find that running through it again with me on the phone fixes it. This leaves me with one of two options:
1.) I have magical powers and the database is scared of me but not you, so it works when I’m on the phone.
2.) The user lied.
I realize I don’t have the community college degree and 18 months of call center experience of your typical Level 1 customer service operator, but what should I do if I do happen to have the intelligence to check the power and cables, plug/unplug the router or make sure there is actually paper in the printer before I call? I mean can I “press 1 to indicate half a brain” instead of “mash keypad to indicate full retard”?
I don’t know, I can’t speak for them. My field is a touch more technical. But I expect they would consider your education level completely irrelevant to whether or not you can make a mistake. Perhaps you are so wise you have managed to avoid that and truly ascended to a higher plane of existence. If so, I’d expect you probably wouldn’t need call center support.
Neither of which gets you a pass for the condescending attitude while you do exactly what I just told you I did and didn’t work. I understand that he deals w/lots of idiots. But at some point, you should be able to recognize that not everyone is in that category, and begin to remember the ones who aren’t. I’ve called on him maybe 3 times in 8 years. That alone should tell ya, I’m not one of the idiots who don’t recognize what to do when you accidently leave a disc in the a drive when you turn on the computer.
gigi email:
Are you using your full name Jennifer A. Lastname with spacing and punctuation as typed?
Jennifer email:
Yes, I’ve tried Jennifer.Lastname
Jennifer.A.Lastname
Jennifer.A.Lastname-Lastname2
Jennifer.Lastname-Lastname2
Jennifer.Lastname.Lastname2
OK, so the answer is clearly no, but how do I say it without sounding snotty?
gigi: Try Jennifer A. Lastname.
Jennifer: It worked! I’ll make a note.
:smack:
I’m not making any excuses for anyone being condescending about it. However, we are only human, and after taking 50 calls in a row from morons who think their disc drive is a cup holder, a little frustration may slip out from time to time.
They ALWAYS lie. I ask if they have rebooted, and they always tell me they have. When I connect to their machine, I show them that I know they haven’t!!I resist the urge to yell “LIAR!!!”
I guess it depends what sort of tech support you offer.
Because if you’re an online tech support person for my cable or DSL internet, you can be damn sure that i’ve rebooted at least twice before i call you.
The reason for this is that i know a phone call to tech support will involve:
[ol]
[li] punching my ID numbers into my phone’s keypad[/li][li] waiting in a hold queue for at least 15 minutes[/li][li] giving the service rep the same ID numbers i just punched into my keypad[/li][li] unplugging and rebooting everything[/li][li] a long tedious investigation of network settings that have worked flawlessly for the last two years[/li][li] being told that customer service doesn’t offer any support for troubleshooting connections with the plain vanilla Linksys router that i use[/li][li] and finally, after all that, waiting for another ten minutes while the CSR checks on network availability, only to find that service is out in my area[/li][/ol]
I kid you not. That’s exactly how one of my calls to Verizon went, back when i had their DSL. Why #7 is the last possible thing they check is beyond me.
Anyway, the amount of aggravation this type of call causes me is sufficient to ensure that, before making the call, i will reboot everything at least twice.
My phone, internet, and TV all went out recently. I scheduled a technician to come to my house. He called me when he was on the way to my house to tell me he would be there soon, and I told him what I thought the problem was and why I thought that. He consequently altered his route, did not come to my house first, but went straight to the box instead. When he eventually got to my house he thanked me for telling him my theory and told me that I had saved him an hour of work.
Time Warner? Charter?
“If you are smarter than a turtle please push the first 8 digits of pi.”
When I was first level support, I would say “Please enter the following code and only those numbers, and let me know when you are done. The code is 54321.” I would then hear beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The customer would swear that he had only entered the 5 numbers, despite having clearly pushed 7 keys. I would then have to find a way to tactfully redo that step and hope that they’d follow the instructions this time.
When I was second level support, taking calls from first level, I had this conversation about twice a day, every day.
Me: “So the problem is that the customer can’t make or receive calls?”
Rep: “Yes.”
Me: “Did you go through the inbound/outbound troubleshooting checklists?”
Rep: “Yes.”
Me: “What happens when they dial 611?”
Rep: “I don’t know.”
Me: “That’s the second item on the checklist. Please actually do the troubleshooting and call back when you have the results.”
They lie.
I have also, on one memorable occasion, called in for internet connection issues, and upon being asked which lights on the modem were lit realized that it had been turned off.
As a result of these incidents, I am quite happy to quickly and efficiently turn it off and turn it back on again, unplug and replug the cables, and any of the other stuff that I have of course done before I called because that way the person on the other end knows that the information they’re getting is, in fact, correct and thus potentially useful.
My service company was also my remote hands. Made the have you checked that the server is properly cabled conversation ever so entertaining, as I suspected that the tech had indeed knocked out a cable while working on an unrelated issue.
I’ve also called support before because I knew I was tired and being an idiot, so having some schlub go through the support company’s checklist with me go me the answer I needed, but wasn’t seeing. So there is a use for the damn checklist, even for those of us who usually know what we’re doing.
They’re not lying. The problem is your troubleshooting steps. Clearly, step 3 needs to be, “Remember what happened when you tried step 2.”