[ul]
[li]From time to time, there is a customer that asks a very simple yes/no question. Something like “can the program do X?” As much as I might wish otherwise, sometimes the answer is no. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t just say no and leave it at that. I am smooth; I try to let them down easy. But nooooo! They try to pull this Dale Carnegie “How to win contempt and influence people to hate your putrid guts” Jedi mind trick bullshit.[/li]
The way that it works it this: They just sit in dead silence. This is obviously designed to make me feel uncomfortable and thus reveal the super secret information that gives them the answer that they want. I hate this bullshit. It is obviously some stupid trick that they learned in their Incompetent Middle Management 101 class, it is manipulative and it assumes that I am trying to not be helpful.
fuck’em
[li]I also hate dealing with people that are stupid, yet have just enough dim awareness of this fact that they are bitter and hostile. Please understand that I am not the Tech Support that most of you have probably ever spoken to in the past. I actually care about solving problems for people, I am competent and polite. This is why I am thrown by people that respond to professional courtesy and competence with hostility. [/li]
Again, fuck’em
[li]People that send email as High Priority or mark voicemail as Urgent. This just screams of some sort of notion of entitlement or of your problems being more important every one else’s. I work my queue on a first come first serve basis. Period. If I could get away with it, I would bump you to the bottom of the list. [/li] fuck’em
[li]People that use the shotgun effect when contacting Tech Support. These are the people that email every single department in the company with a tech support question. Guess what asshole, Sales is not going to be able to answer your question. All that you are doing is helping to clog my in box with bunches of people asking me either what you are on about, or if this oh so important customer has been helped yet.[/li] fuck’em. A lot.
[li]People that send out an email for help as they are on the way out for the day, and copy their boss. This is obviously some plausible deniability bullshit so that they can claim to have asked for help yesterday and nasty 'ol tech support never got back to them. I don’t know who I hold in greater contempt, the buttmunch pulling this bumbling bit of manipulation, or the boss that will fall for it because they are to stupid to read a timestamp on an email. Also, it means that I can’t go home that day with the satisfaction of a clean queue because of your ill-conceived Machiavellian tactics for douche bags stunt.[/li] fuck’em
[/ul]
I am sure that there are more, but this is what has been on my nerves today.
Ha! I had to teach someone how to save files yesterday. Seriously, they had somehow managed to hide the File Edit Insert etc. menu, but still had icons. Never the less, I had to have this whole “I am going to resist letting you help me” conversation while she argued that she couldn’t click on the icon that looked like a diskette because she wanted to save to her hard drive not a floppy. :rolleyes: Indeed.
Ooooh, OR, Binarydrone–like what just happened here! We had a customer who was pissed about the support he received (internal tech support at our company) and emailed every distribution list for IT he could find in the mailbox–with the offending tech support person’s name attached at the bottom of the email! I felt bad for the guy, even though I’ve heard him do EXACTLY what he was being chewed out for.
I worked tech support for an ISP one summer. My god, what morons these people are.
I got the call from the lady that said she could turn the computer on and off by pushing the button right below the screen. It came as quite a shock to her when I explained what that big whirring beige thing under her desk was.
I was going to ask if that was just an urban legend. Somehow I already knew the answer though. I seriously want to ask these people how much they make, and if it’s more then me, I automatically get their job.
I got you beat there. I had to teach a nuclear physicist how to imove a file*… with the Windows machine he’d been using for three years. Nothing wrong with the PC; he just couldn’t quite get the concept. I have, in fact, learned that PhD’s are remarkably useless at any task involving a modicum of common sense and/or focus.
The only real problem with TS is that there are a great many peoiple who are fundamentally unwilling listen and/or put forth any effort. I can deal with someone who’s pissed but honestly wants to fix the problem (not those who really just want to yell). I can’t help someone who won’t work with me.
The biggest problem i have had with TS is the one who flat out lied to me and told me that my monitor was not compatible with Windows NT.
Pissed me off to no end. I had to argue with the guy for twenty minutes before he’d even transfer me to someone else who recognized the problem was a faulty monitor and sent me a new one.
Oh man. Tell me about it! A lot of the folks that I talk to day in and day out are PhDs and I have found that they are almost universally deficient in the finding their own ass with both hands department (although I am sure that they possess a profound expertise on Paleolithic nipple piercing and the implications on gender roles and early weaning as well as the Sumerian domestication of the wombat or some shit).
Yeah, but (like a Saturn dealer) I am different. I will never ever give an answer that I don’t 100% know to be correct. If I have the slightest doubt in my mind, I will research the issue and get back to the customer or hand them off to someone that I am positive knows the answer.
That said, I am sure that you have hit on something important here. My company, and by extension the type of service that I give, is really a rare exception these days. Most people don’t know how to react anymore when they encounter competent, professional service.
With DirecTV, you’ve got your television (of course), your DirecTV receiver, and quite often, a device like a DVD player or a VCR. How all of these devices are connected (and which channel setting you watch your various forms of video on) depends on what type of cabling is being used (coaxial versus RCA and/or S-video). So, you might have someone whose DirecTV receiver is connected by RCA cable to their VCR, which is then connected by coaxial to the TV. Or they might have all of their devices connected to the TV independently. And you have these old people who were still having trouble with basic remote control operation who now have all these devices to operate (often with a remote for each one), but who have no idea how to do it. And I’ll spend forever on the phone with them trying to explain that if you have RCA cabling connecting your VCR and your TV, then your TV has to be on a video-input setting in order to watch a taped program. Or that in order to change the channel on DirecTV, you have to use the DirecTV remote, not the VCR or TV remotes.
And then you get the ones who want to argue with you because once upon a time, someone (a relative, friend, or maybe even another representative) told them something that conflicts with what you’re telling them and they just can’t get it though their heads that the information that person gave them might be wrong, so it takes five minutes to get them to perform one little troubleshooting step.
At one of my other call center jobs, I used to have a sign in my cubicle that said, “Customers Are Stupid.” I’d like to have one at DirecTV that says, “Old People Are Stupid,” but since they frown on that type of thing, I’m thinking about putting up a picture of an ice floe. No one else will know what it means, but I’ll be laughing on the inside.
I get the same shit. My solution is to let them sit there in silence for a few seconds—just long enough to make sure that’s what they’re doing—then I say, “All right then, if there’s nothing else I can help you with, thank you for calling DirecTV and have a great day.” We’re not allowed to ever hang up on customers, but saying that usually gets the point across.
I’m wondering if Binarydrone works at my company as the lusers seem awfully similar.
Some of the calls I’ve had in the past:
Phone rings, I answer, and immediately get hit with I’m not sure I’m in the right spot, but the fucker is stuck! Doing my best to maintain some composure and not laugh or swear back at them, I say “The what is stucK?”
This caller (I’m ashamed to say that it’s actually my mother, adapting to a new laptop) might want to try Diet Pepsi… I can’t find the Tab key
It’s on the left side, might say “Tab” or have an arrow pointing into a line. Oh! So that’s it! Why don’t they put the name on it?!
I dunno, Ma. I guess they wanted to save a little paint.
As for Piled High and Deeps not having much grasp on day-to-day reality, I’ve seen them in action. An acquaintance who works at NASA on some sort of artificial intelligence project got a scratch on his shiny black car. Most sensible folks would either:
Live with the scratch
Take the car to a detail shop
Take the car to a paint shop
What does Friend do? Go to a hardware shop. Buys the first can of black paint he sees and opens fire on the scratch. FLAT black paint. Fortunately, the car had been fairly recently washed and waxed so the paint didn’t stick too well and was easily buffed off.
Working tech support for a local government agency with about 200 employees, I was disturbed one morning by the very high volume of calls we were getting about the printers not working. I checked, the spool had borked, so I cleared it and people could print again.
15 minutes later, same problem. Same solution.
5 minutes later, same problem.
Hmmm.
It seems that someone was printing so large a document that the spool was running out of space. It had a few hundred megs of space to use, but it was still all full. I call the user up and see what’s going on. She was a constant cause of trouble with us, so I dreaded this call. Eventually, I was able to discover that she was trying to print a four page, picture encrusted 1000 recipient mail merge document from Word.
I eventually broke it into a dozen pdfs for her to print (Why pdfs, you may ask? Because Microsoft employs idiots) and sent her detailed instructions on where they were and how to open them (double click). Got a call 20 minutes later because the printer was spewing out “garbage.” It turned out that she had opened the pdfs in Word, disregarded the garbage on the screen and merrily started printing. A few hundred pages later, it dawned on her that this just might not be going right, and called me. The best part was that, while I was trying to argue her into just double clicking on the documents (“They told us to do it this way” “Yes, and now I am telling you to do it this way!”), she tried to put the phone down to put more paper in the printer.
I worked at EA/Maxis tech support for 6 months, taking mostly Sims calls. You would not believe how insane some people got over their goddamn Sims. On top of that, if the expansions were installed in an order other than the original release order, the whole thing was fucked and sometimes required a regedit. Attempting to explain a regedit to someone who confuses their AOL version with their Windows version is an exercise in self induced baldness.
After that, I worked at Sony PlayStation tech support. Someone who can’t figure out how to match the colored A/V plugs to the A/V ports on their brand new 27" TV really is too stupid to play video games anyway.
After that, I worked for a company that makes GPS software for Nextel phones. Sometimes I would have to conference call with Nextel support, and that was just a nightmare. Combine a user who doesn’t understand how to use his phone’s Java capabilities - or even the whole concept of Java - with a Nextel level 1 tech who refuses to believe that the problem is in fact on their servers, and you’ve got a perfect shitstorm.
My boyfriend has been working in internet tech support for the past 4 years. My favourite stories so far have been the person who was running ‘Microwave Windows’ and the person who was SO ANGRY that he had been duped into buying a modem and an account to get internet access… without being informed that he needed a computer as well.
I’ve never worked tech support, but I’ve become the default tech support person in my quad when the real troubleshooters aren’t available (I’m not a computer expert by any means – I just happen to know more than my coworkers do).
I used to have a horrible whiny coworker who didn’t understand computers at all, and was always demanding that I fix things for her. One time she got bumped off the network and wasn’t able to save changes to a shared Excel file. She demanded that I e-mail her the network because she’d accidentally deleted it from her hard drive. She wouldn’t listen to me when I told her she just needed to reboot and sign on again. According to her I was just being bitchy and uncooperative, as usual.
