Yesterday, I tried to log on to my email at work, but we have to change passwords every 9 weeks. The prompt came up to change password and I followed all directions to do so, but the password would not change, nor would it let me in using my old password.
I went to my supervisor (a man I repeatedly say is so stupid he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the bottom of the heel, and I still stand by that statement!). I was told to see Rick, the guy in charge of our mail server. Rick wasn’t around, so I went to my supervisor again. He told me Rick sometimes works from home and I should send him an email. Again, the problem is, I CAN’T ACCESS MY EMAIL!!
So I decide I can live without email for a day. This morning, I go to see Rick and explain my problem. He says to me, “This is happening a lot lately. Didn’t you get my email?” I just gave him a disbelieving look. After a couple seconds, he realizes what he said and simply says, “Oh, right,” and gave me an intranet address where I could fix the problem.
I once met a guy who thought it was sad that I had so lost faith in humanity that I found “Dilbert” to be depressing non-fiction. I could immediately guess what level of engineering management he was at. I was right, too.
I get home one day and have no dial tone. I go outside to a payphone to call the telephone company.
“I have no dial tone.” I say.
“Are you calling from home?” I’m asked.
“I have no dial tone.” I repeat.
“How do you know this?” I was asked.
“Because I picked up my phone to make a call and there was no dial tone.”
“We are not showing a service interruption. Hang up your phone and try again.”
“I HAVE NO DIAL TONE. Hanging up this phone is not going help the phone in my house.”
“Oh, your not calling from home?”
“I HAVE NO DIAL TONE!!!”
I think this may have more to do with the sort of people who call than the customer service people.
I feel your pain. The maintenance crew in my building is hopeless.
When I moved in I was missing a drawer in my bathroom. They said it would be 3-4 days because they had to build me a new one. Since then, a pipe in my bathroom wall broke, flooding my closet. This took several weeks to fix because the mad doing it kept leaving these “I was here” notes that said he would ned an hour or so to fix it (instead of just doing it).
While fixing the pipe he managed to light the inside of the wall on fire while welding. He then threw water into the wall to put out the fire, ruining the plaster, smashed the smoke detector, & left sooty hand prints through out my apartment.
3 weeks for a new smoke detector. Bubbled plaster in the bathroo.
New leak in the living room ceiling that started in an apartment 2 floors above me. They patched the ceiling and painted it (while wet) with spraypaint.
Broken glass pane on entrance door? Throw the glass into the lawn, cover it with dirt & plant new grass over it.
My dining room flooded last week. It appears there is a leak from the outside wall. I called, no one came.
Oh … I’m still waiting for my bathroom drawer & my lease is up in 3 months.
You may not know this, but I work for the phone company, and a dial tone is actually nothing - it is not necessary to establish a connection. The phone company manufactures the sound and sends it out to your phone just so people know that the phone works when you pick up the handset. Loss of a dial tone does not necessarily mean you have no service, it could just be a glitch at the phone company and the tone is not being sent to your home while service is still in tact.
This explains that fustrating conversation. I didn’t have any service and it took 2 days to find out why.
Hey phone guy, can you explain the years of wierd service I’ve been getting? Like the conversations I can hear very clearly and sometimes even participate in on my phone? And the occasional charges to Amsterdam and Moracco that show up on my bill? No one here at Bell Atlantic seems to have a clue.
our tech dept. one-size-fix-all solution is to reboot…that is it. reboot. It could be on fire with a horrible grinding noise coming out it and the first thing they would ask is “did you reboot”…none of the keys, power bottons or mouse respond and I can’t reach the power supply “did you reboot?” applications failing, worm chewing through hard drive…“did you reboot”
The phone company is evil and out to milk you for every cent. Bell Atlantic has a clue, they just have to play dumb. They are secretly hoping you pay the bill without reading the itemized list, resulting in more $$ for them.
Of course, that’s just my embittered opinion cuz I work for the phone company (not Bell Atlantic though) and I like to think of the higher ups as evil heartless bastards. It’s easier for me to hate people I don’t really know that way.
Spolvy: I can understand your frustration there. I worked at a computer help desk for a couple of years and there were a few guys who wouldn’t even try to help some one until they had rebooted. Now a reboot WILL fix a large percentage of problems, but it’s time consuming and it drove our attorney’s cRaZy! (DOJ no less)
Having said that, I do feel the need to suggest that of anyone wants to talk to some TRULY non-thinking people should get a job on a computer support desk. Some of the calls I got were absolutely incredible. I had one guy who told me he had rebooted (yes, sometimes it IS necessary) several times when all he was doing was turning his monitor on and off, and another who could not find the floppy disk drive on her pc. HELLO! It the gaping slot on the front of your pc! People like this used to make me feel smart, but there are so many of them now that I just want to weep…
Not all people are pc literate. I worked as IT support recently, and, while there were several mind-boggling conversations, the best I’ve heard so far was my very own mother sitting in front of a pc for the first time. I almost feel bad sharing the story, almost.
My sister had told my mother that in order to view a webpage or whatever, she needed to move the mouse. My sister then steps away for a second and returns to find my mother holding the mouse by the wire in the air waving it around like a pendulum or a magic wand.
You sure you don’t live in my apartment building? When we moved in, the dryer was broken, the floors were covered with…god only knows what, the walls hadn’t been repainted, and the dishwasher spewed the wastewater into the sink. (Yuck.) Maintenance SWORE everything was fixed. My mom went back to move more stuff in and checked. No dice. Left work with my soon-to-be roomie to go in and yell at the leasing office for a half hour. Finally got it in WRITING on what they had to do and when. (This was after I threatened to call the Housing Authority, and move somewhere else.)
Flash forward. We’ve had our water heater break twice, our AC short out and catch the water heater insulation on fire (emergency maintenance never came for that one. Had to call 911.). And my idiot roomie still voted to sign another year’s lease. (I voted to move.)
Flash forward ANOTHER year. Our front door has been broken for 6 months. They SWEAR a new door is coming in “soon.” (I’m tempted to go down to the Home Depot a block away and just buy them a new door…) The panelling around the door broke off, and they nailed it back up. Looks like hell. The apartment below us got termites. There was a recall on our dishwasher, and it took them 5 months to fix it. I hate this place. Luckily, our lease is up in November, and I am moving to a place of my own. If I get a better job, that is…
…when you actually have a service rep thank you for being polite. Yep, happened to me last week. Cable company updates and adds some new channels–that’s a good thing, right?–and so our cable is acting all screwy. Kids are freaking out, so I call the cable folks. Busy. Busy for twenty minutes. That tells me it’s them and not me. So I turn off the set and wait it out. That night it’s still screwy so I give them another call. I get a nice woman with a tired, but polite tone. I ask her if the updating will change my service, as we lost some stations we usually get. She answers my question very clearly and follows it with, “And I have to thank you for being so understanding. It’s very refreshing.”
Now, I’m shocked. I tell her I didn’t figure that the cable company would screw around with my cable if they didn’t need to–that doesn’t make sense. Well, she tells me that most people figure the cable company DOES mess with your service on purpose. That, further, most people blame her specifically for it. She sounded exhausted.
So I guess being clueless runs both ends of the phone line. Heaven knows I’ve felt like I had more answers than the people who were supposed to have them. Don’t even get me started on the joke of a photo department at one of the larger chains. Never make that mistake again…
I live in the mountains of VA right next to the WV line. You can see the Appalachian Trial from my backyard and walk to West Virginia in about 10 minutes.
On the subject of customer reps thanking you for being nice abotu a year ago I noticed that there was a LARGE phone company truck in my driveway (it’s big and long plenty of space btw no worries there). I went out and asked what the heck they were doing there and they told me it was just some routine maintenance on the local switch. I thanked them and apologized for bothering them. The actually told me they didn’t mind as they’d become used to being greeted with guns! Yowza!
Stupid people. Publishers take the cake. I’m a circulation guy. Mostly for magazines and newsletters. Several years ago I was working for a trade magazine that survived on the advertising it sold. They database they were using hadn’t been properly updated in two or three years. Most of the fax numbers were no longer good. By God my publisher stood up in the staff meeting and told me that I should immediately fax those people with bad fax numbers so we could get good ones.
I just kinda agreed and moved on with my life. What else could I do?
