Don’t worry, man, i appreciated your effort. And you centered the text and everything!
How is that possible? No one could possibly type a 300 page document in one sitting.
This just in to our help desk just this morning:
Subject: bazwrd
Hi bles tshc may bazwrd
Can you guess what it means?
Hi please change my password
PS. Anonymous Coward - I hear ya, brother! Testify!!
[QUOTE=sciguy]
– I was on a “double jacked” call with my manager for evaluation. He plugged a headset into my phone to hear the call and to see how I did. Once he was ready, I took the next call in the queue.
Me: Blah blah opening spiel, how can I help you?
Caller: How do I find sex movies on the internet?
{note: it was a requirement of our script to restate the problem. I fudged it.}
Me: So…you’re looking for media files on the internet?
Caller: Yes. I want to see these sex movies that are on the internet.
{I hemmed and hawed, then sent him to the ISP’s search page}
Me: You can use this to search for anything you want.
Caller: So I just type sex movies in this little box?
Me: Yes sir. Anything else I can help you with? {thankfully, no}
[QUOTE]
Ahh, been there done that.
Me: Thanks for calling AOL. How can I help you?
Dirty Old Man: I can’t get MY PORN!
Me: Ok, can I get your name?
Dirty Old Man: I’m <he gave his name and username> and I CAN’T GET MY PORN!
Me: Ok, let’s check …
Dirty Old Man(he sounded like he was about 110) tacked ‘I CAN’T GET MY PORN!’ on everything he said. Everything. I was monitored on that call by my boss and another tech, they were listening to me to help the tech out. I was the example of how to troubleshoot a call. Apparently they were laughing nonstop through out the call. My boss walk up to me at lunch and yelled ‘I CAN’T GET MY PORN!’.
One of my peeves when working support at AOL was porn sites. People would call up and say that they couldn’t get to www.teenshavingsex.com or something similar. Ok, no problem. I cannot test that site at work for the obvious reasons. But then you would get callers say they can’t get to www.GFTV.com. So I’d go to www.GFTV.com to find out if the site is working and discover that GFTV stands for Goat Feltching Teen Virgins. ICK.
Slee
Ooops,
Dear MODs. I didn’t mean for those links to work. Sorry about that though they do not lead to any porn.
Slee
Who should really wake up before posting.
I once had a near-deaf guy call me. I had to shot over the phone, which annoyed and amused the people around me. I was so desperate once I actually asked if his other ear was any better. To add to the ridiuclousnes of the situation, he had one phoine he could talk to me on, and another phone I could talk to him on. One of those phones (the one I talked to him on) was in another room from the computer. He was very nice and I chatted with him while we were waiting for something about his home in Germany.
Believe it or not, I succeeded (I think… it was a long time ago). It took me about 1&1/2 hours.
Many of the big companies keep splitting the support departments up among many subcontractors or different departments, or both. Then, they don’t really pay for the kind of interfaces between them they need, or don’t realize how important it is. On top of the matter, there’s often a huge disconnect between the techie you talk to and the guy who’ll actually fix a hardware issue. And sadly, they have so many control issues that a lot of these places shut down communication and contract, adding in extra layers. They will eventually get rid of most frivolous uses of those channels, but this also builds in many extra layers of bureaucracy and slows support massively.
In that case, allow me to say a hearty “fuck you” for getting that song stuck in my head. 
Since I’m generally one of the guys who pre-troubleshoots and calls in with details like, “your routers with addresses 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.4.8 seem to be misconfigured and routing packets in circles,” or “2.3.4.5 drops packets for a few seconds every two minutes like clockwork,” I’ve often wished the tech support folks would give us a way to identify ourselves and get past tier 1. My two suggestions:
-
Ask a fairly technical filter question, with one of the options being “I don’t know.” For example, networking support might say, “If your network uses DHCP, press 1. If your network uses static IP addressing, press 2. If you don’t know which your network uses, press 3.” All options could take you to the same place, but if you knew the answer to the question, the tech knows he can treat you like you have at least half a clue.
-
If you call in to support and demonstrate that tier 1 is a waste of your time (e.g. by providing all the proper details without prompting, and by having already done the tier 1 troubleshooting steps), they should give you a Support Promotion Code which you present on your next call to automatically advance to tier 2.
But galt, that presumes that your lusers actually LISTEN to the question and have enough brain cells rubbing together to know that they don’t know the answer. Or that they don’t just push buttons willy-nilly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard of lusers pressing the first option available simply because they think it will route them quicker to “a real person”. Or how about the lusers who click things, just because they’re there to be clicked? “Why did you hit delete?” “Because it was there and I wanted to see what it did.”
Cynical Max 
I try to stay away from desktop tech support, but I have been roped into it on occasion. My favorite “war story” is the guy who was so completely amazed that I could control his PC remotely. He asked some questions that threw me off a bit, and I got the impression he may have known at least a little bit about computers, so I gave him a little explanation about how the remote control program worked, what I could and could not do, etc. I fixed his problem and was ending the call feeling good that I had broadened the man’s knowledge a bit when he asked:
“Hey, wait… So how come my mouse wasn’t moving while you were doing all that radio control stuff? Do I need a new one?”
Ugh.
The one statement I heard doing support that told me it was way, way past time to quit:
"I’m no computer expert, but this doesn’t sound like good advice to me."
Who said it was in one sitting? How do you know that that one document was not sitting open and unsaved for two weeks? This was IBM, remember!
I used to do TechSupport for a (formerly) well known database company (starts with SY and ends with BASE) and we had one customer who used to do this for things we told him he should test. It went something like this:
Me: OK. Could you try doing a “bcp in” of the table, but first rebuild all the indexes in the master database?
Customer: OK. <sound of frantic typing>
Me: NOT now!!! And especially not on your production database, without backing it up first!!!
This customer actually did not have a test environment. Their DBA would just play around on their production database when the traffic was low. The scary part is this: the customer was DENIC, which is the central registry for all domains under the top-level domain .de, and this was their customer information database :eek:
When we had especially clueless customers, I always liked to add a little note to the call, that the problem was in OSI layer eight. 
One of my colleagues (who was a real guru, and didn’t care all that much about performance reviews and the like) once had a call that went something like this:
Email from the customer: When we do this and this and load this file and then change this setting while running this unsupported version we get this error. How do we solve our problem?
Email from the TSE (and this is an exact quote!): “Don’t do that”
The TSE then closed the call without further comment
Boy, you sound like quite a prize, the kind of jerk that rolls his eyes and sighs when you ask him a question.
I’m a project manager in a software firm, have worked and managed in tech support, and have taught software classes. I’ve worked with people that run the gamut from uber-beginner to hyper-geek. I’ve had my share of “cup holder” type calls. So I know something about communicating technical information to non-technical people.
Any you know what? What you’ve just described is complicated. The primary rule of technical design is not to make the user feel stupid, and I challenge anyone with no experience in putting home video components together to intuitively figure out what connects to what, with what remote, and which settings to change on those remotes.
Oh, and I’m in my forties, which probably qualifies as “old” to you, but I can’t wait until the year 2050 and you have to ask some kid how to hook up the retro 3D plasma converter, or whatever else it is that you’ve never seen before, and you see the patronizing eye roll and hear the condensending sigh.
I’m guessing you’d last about 15 minutes in our tech support department before you were fired for being the jerk you describe yourself to be.