Just a note from the other side. Since I’m a technician at a Ford dealership, I have to phone their technical hotline for a lot of problems. Once had an engineer at ford advise me to remove the driveshaft from the truck to see if it fixed vibration problem. Of course, since the truck wouldn’t move without the driveshaft, I’m sure the problem would be fixed, but it seemed a bit drastic. Once had to explain to a customer that I wasn’t going to drive his Mustang to 120 MPH to check his “wandering” problem, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to ride in the passenger seat while he drove either.
I’ve done tech support for years, started at Intuit, went to AOL(and there I did 1st, 2nd and 3rd level support before going into network operations) and now work for a hotel reservation software company. I’ve had them all.
>The ‘any’ key call. Customer: "It says press the ‘ANY’ key to continue, but I don’t have an ‘ANY’ key. I even came up with a line to use for this one so the customers wouldn’t think I was calling s/he a dumbass.
>The cup holder call.
>The ‘I used a hammer to plug my modem cable(serial) into the parrallel port and my modem does not work’ call. Well, actually, that is not what he said. That is what he did. It took a while to figure that out.
>The ‘I stuck a 3.5 floppy into the 5.25 drive and now it won’t come out. And your company needs to pay to fix my computer.’ call.
>The ‘no matter what I do it says IBM on my screen’ call. Yeah, she didn’t take the sticker off her monitor. Though I still wonder why she called Intuit about it.
>The ‘You mean I have to own a computer? It says on the box that it will painlessly manage my finances, it doen’t say anything about having to have a computer’ call.
I could go on but just thinking about all the idiots out there scares me.
On the bright side, these days I get to dial into and fix the stuff myself which is a lot nicer.
Slee
You going to leave us hanging? What’s the line? 
Oh, a tech. support rant! Goodie! I have a whole tech. support rant half-written in my head that I’ll post some day, but here’s a few:
-don’t call me if you don’t want to do what I suggest you do… you’re just wasting my time and yours!
-drop the attitude: I don’t know who screwed up your computer. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was your cousin. Maybe it was your cat or some jagoff script-kiddie who gets his jollies by writing and releasing virii. I don’t know. What I DO know is that it wasn’t me, OK? My computer is working just fine, thankyouverymuch.
-it’s OK if you know nothing about computers. That’s fine. But if you are so clueless that you don’t even know what a keyboard is, please wait until someone is home who does, and have them call.
-please be descriptive: “it doesn’t work” don’t tell me much. Could you be a little more specific? Did you get an error message? Did the computer blue-screen? Did the router burst into flame and melt through the desk and you’re afraid that when it hits the water table radioactive steam will spew through the atmosphere causing horrendous mutations and future generations will be born more hairy than Robin Williams? Specificity is a good thing.
-if the problem you are having is not caused by our product, I have to refer you to the manufacturer of the product causing the problem. Sorry, that’s the way it is. Sure, I’ll take a minute to try to fix it; but it will rapidly become apparent that you need to call someone who has been trained on that product and/or has access to a database of known problems with that product. Arguing with me will not change that. Nor will the fact that you had to wait on hold for 10 minutes before you got to talk to me!
And that leads me to my biggest pet peeve of all:
-Don’t lie to me about how long you were on hold or how long you talked to tech. support yesterday! God that pisses me off! We get a few thousand calls a day, typically, and when we are REALLY busy the average time on hold is something like 12 minutes (we get daily reports on this). All it takes is for me to flick my eyes to the left to see that you were on hold for 9 minutes and 12 seconds before I took your call, NOT the 45 minutes you claim. And you were not on the phone with tech. support for 3 hours yesterday; again, I can flick my eyes to the left and see that you called twice yesterday, the first time you talked to an agent for 20 minutes, and the second for 12 minutes. Liar.
Obligatory anecdote:
This happened to a co-worker, thankfully, not to me. I don’t know what they were trying to fix or set up, but the following happened (or so he claimed, and I have no reason to doubt it):
Co-Worker: OK, right click on the desktop, please.
Dumb guy: What? Why?
CW: Er, because that’s what we need to do to get this worki…
DG: That’s stupid! Why should I do that?
CW: heavy sigh Sir, please just right click on the desktop for me.
DG: Fine! (proceeds to put the phone down, grab a pen, and write “click” on top of his desk) OK, now what?
:smack:
I like a tech support agent that can discern my level of expertise and then go outside the script to solve the problem, because 99.9% of the time the reason I’ve called tech support is that normal troubleshooting has failed, and so has advanced troubleshooting.
I have no problem with a good tech. I have big problems with any tech who lies to me.
After 13 years of tech support for a piece of desktop publishing software, the company I worked for bit the dust. Two years and a zillion sent resumes later I work in a bookstore, making bupkis. I was a little put out about it.
::hugs Binarydrone::
Life is good. 
“Support technicians are like mushrooms – kept in the dark while they throw shit on you all day.” Someone or other
You think that’s bad? Our tech support team supports a staff of around 5000 employees plus physicians who are notoriously inept at anything involving computers.
Repeatedly the techs have told me they wouldn’t want my job for all the money in the world.
My job (and it’s dealings with angry, stupid people) SCARES the tech people!
(I supervise the PBX office)
I love smart tech support people. And I let them know when they do a good job, and I also let their bosses know when they’ve done a good job!
I despise, however, calling and having them assume I am one of those morons that can’t find the “anykey”.
That is probably the toughest trick to get down for a tech support dude. The vast majority of folks that call are profoundly stupid, so it is easy to pick up the phone and just assume that you will be talking to a dumbass. I have gotten pretty good over the years at starting off neutral, and then upgrading or downgrading how I talk to folks based on the interaction, but it has been a learned skill.
That “any key” instruction really annoys me. When I get it, I test how many diffferent keys I can push without getting a response (there are at least 10 on a normal keyboard, including 2 shift keys, 2 Ctrl keys, 2 Alt keys, Caps Lock, Scroll Lock and Num Lock) Why not say “Press Enter” or “Press the space bar”?
I have worked in tech-support in some mode or another for bout 9 years. It is summed up for me with the following:
========================
A man in a hot air balloon is lost. He sees a man on the ground and reduces height to speak to him.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”
“You’re in a hot air balloon hovering thirty feet above this field,” comes the reply.
“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.
“I do,” says the man, “How did you know?”
“Well,” says the balloonist, “Everything you told me is technically correct, but it’s no use to anyone.”
“You must be in business,” says the man.
“I am,” says the balloonist, “How did you know?”
“Well,” says the man, “You don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help.
You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”
Isn’t the mere existence of Tech Support a rant?
I do the IT for my little office. I’ve not been formally trained, just picked up a lot from fiddling with and always realizing that the computer is not out to get me. But, oh, the questions!
Today my coworker called me into her office. Seems she couldn’t rename a file. 
I told her to show me what she was doing.
She was right-clicking on her folder, and creating a new Excel file. Then right-clicking on the file, and typing the name - deleting the extension. Then it would say “The file may not work if you change the extension” or whatever. Honestly, I know she’s not stupid. Can’t you figure it out? I did. Then I asked her why she as doing it that way, why not open Excel, then do “File-Save As”. Her answer?
“I dunno.”
Aargh. And my boss who seriously abuses her computer (banging on the keys, hitting ctrl-alt-del over and over and over again when it crashes, shoving the CD drive in roughly, saving things willy-nilly all over the place) then gets all mad and expects me to fix it.
Previous boss I had couldn’t get her Power Point presentation on disk. I took a look at it, 157 Megs! Every picture was saved in the largest format it could be, and nothing was done correctly. I spent two days inserting all the pics instead of C&P them in (or maybe the other way around) after saving them all as jpegs and smaller.
Aaargh!
While I’ve never worked Tech Support, I have worked with customers and man oh man oh man.
I used to work at a tropical fish store. Why do people ask for my advice and then accuse me of lying when I give it to them? Especially when what I tell them results in us NOT getting a sale.
A guy came in asking about a salt water angel. He already had an angel of another species in his tank. Different angels don’t usually get along. I told him not to get it, the other guy working told him not to get it. He got it.
He calls telling me his old angel is beating up the new one and he wanted his money back. We offer no gaurantee on salt water so I told him he could come in at closing and talk to the owner. The only one with authority to give him his money back.
The guy refused to come in unless I could guarantee he would get his money back.
He called at closing and talked to the owner. He told the owner it was my fault because I didn’t forbid him to buy it.
And this happened to a friend who was working in insurance at AAA.
AAA of Michigan is a full service company meaning we had roadside assistance, insurance and travel agency.
This woman calls up and tells my friend that when she had gotten home from buying her traveler’s checks, they had shortchanged her.
Through discussion my friend found out that while she had booked her trip through our travel agency, she had bought her traveler’s checks at her bank.
When asked why she didn’t call the bank…
“Well this was the only 800 number I have and I didn’t want to pay for the call”
My mother. Computer programmer, works for a certain large company in the phone industry.
Recently, she emailed me to ask me, “How do I append a new page at the end of a Word doc so I can copy and paste the 12 other docs I want to put in one file? Will the page numbers be in order automatically?”
OY.
a) I’m not sure I understand why she doesn’t know that already
b) Apparently she doesn’t want to bother trying it out before emailing me. :dubious:
c) I might be a tech writer, but that doesn’t mean I know everything about Word, Excel, and/or Office that there is to know. I work on documentation for developers, for Og’s sake.
i am the senior technician for a small fire alarm company. last night just after i got home i was paged to call the owner of a day care. the digital communicator of her fire alarm was showing telephone line 2 failure. i asked if she had phone work done. she admitted that the phone guy had disconnected her line 2 wire. there was a line fault and her phones were not working.
this afternoon, i went there to meet the phone guy. we verified that the problem was on the phone line not the fire alarm communicator. when i left, we had isolated the fire alarm communicator and the phone line was fine as long as he did not hook the rest of the line in. the fault was obviously on the line after the communicator.
while i was eating dinner, i got a call from the day care owner. the phone guy had hooked the bad line back into the fire alarm, and the communicator was still showing telephone line 2 failure.
i carefully repeated: disconnect the rest of the line. the fire alarm is clear now right? the problem in in the line after the fire alarm!!!
i am sure i will be there tomorrow…
Late at night, a policeman once found a man searching under a streetlight.When asked what he was doing he replied that he had lost his keys. The policeman helped him look for a moment, then said, 'I don’t se them here. Where, exactly, did you lose them?"
The man pointed off in the bushes off the side of the road, well into the darkness. The Pliceman asked why the man was looking 20 feet away uinder the spotlight. The answer:
“There’s more light here!”
Sadly, there is a certain kind of person for whom this is a daily reality, not a story about idiots.
How come whenever I call tech support I end up talking to script reading idiots?
There should be a menu choice, so the “Any Key” people can talk to the monkeys, and the rest of us can talk to the smart people.
I only call tech support when I’ve exhausted every other troubleshooting option available to me. I search the internet, ask a GQ, call my good friend who works in IT in my last company, etc. Then, and only then, do I call Apple. By this point I’ve generally figured out it needs service. Why oh why do I have to spend ten minutes on the phone changing useless settings with teir 1, before they finally transfer me to someone competent, who confirms my original conclusions in about 4 seconds and sends me out a laptop box.
Level 2 and above tech support, be they at apple, comcast, or any of a myriad of companies, have always been fabulous. Level one is just so bad sometimes. . . I fear I come across as rude to the few good eggs out there. I’m just so sick of being forced to redo every single troubleshooting step I already took before calling.
Well yes Obsidian, but please realize that the level ones will be pasted if they don’t do at least a preliminary diagnostic of the situation, hence the redo of trouble shooting steps.
And I have so many nuisance calls from level ones that send cases to level 2 “at the request of the customer” only to have a frustrated customer because there was no basic troubleshooting made before, and of those, there is a good chunk that indeed had forgotten to plug a cable or had an unsupported device. :rolleyes:
So remember: that second level is great because a grunt at level one took a bullet for the team.
My major grumble is having to convince some customers that they are NOT overseas due to my accent. :smack: the good news is that is not frequent, the bad news is that some times I get calls that are not condescending, prejudice can be palpable in them.
- Ed. Second Level Tech who is becoming a 3D animator.
You just made me think of a guy I worked with a while back. He had an Indian accent. Every so often he’d answer the phone, pause, and then I’d hear:
[deep sigh] You ARE talking to an American.
What’s really, really sad is that he wasn’t talking to your average joe off the street, but managers and other muckety-mucks at large corporations.
I never have that problem. When I get a level 1 tech, the first thing I do after they get my contact info, is tell them in detail exactly what I’ve done to try and fix the problem*. After they read what they are supposed to do and figure out I have already done it I get to second level support. In fact my old ISP used to transfer me directly to the network operations department because the only time I ever called was when something on their end broke. About half the time I could tell them pretty much exactly what was going wrong. Kinda nice.
Slee