I very occasionally end up doing what amounts to tech support. There are other people who are supposed to do it, but some people just call the person they know, regardless of actual job responsibilities.
Anyway, this woman calls me and describes the problem she is having. I tell her what happened, why her issue can’t be resolved directly and what the workaround is.
She goes on to explain that she’s been doing the same thing “for at least two years” and she’s “never encountered this problem before” and my explanation of what is going on is just wrong! I explained that she was incorrect. She had not been doing it like this for two years without problems, because it doesn’t work like that. “Are you saying I’m lying?”
At this point, I’m thinking. “Well, yes, basically.” but I’m trying to be professional, “Not lying, ma’am, but I think you’re mistaken about what has happened in the past. The historical data may have dropped off your reports without you noticing if there wasn’t a lot of it.”
And she got bitchy and insistent that she was neither lying nor mistaken and she had been doing it like this for at least two years. And I argued with her for awhile as professionally as possible and finally canned it by telling her the workaround was what she had to do and there was no other recourse.
All I wanted to do the whole time was scream at the top of my lungs, “YOU STUPID LYING BITCH. I KNOW YOU’RE LYING! HOW DO I KNOW YOU’RE LYING? BECAUSE IT IS NOT POSSIBLE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN RUNNING A REPORT FOR TWO YEARS IN AN APPLICATION THAT WAS ONLY RELEASED 13 MONTHS AGO! HOW DO I KNOW THAT IT WAS ONLY RELEASED 13 MONTHS AGO? BECAUSE I OWN THE GODDAMNED APPLICATION, IT’S MINE, EVERYTHING ABOUT IT IS UNDER MY PERSONAL CONTROL, INCLUDING THE PROCESS THAT CAUSED YOUR SO-CALLED PROBLEM! I REMEMBER THE DAY IT WENT LIVE. I REMEMBER THE DAY I GAVE YOU ACCESS. I REMEMBER THE DAY I SPENT FOUR FUCKING HOURS TRYING TO HELP MAKE THINGS EASIER FOR YOU TO DO YOUR JOB. AND NEXT TIME YOU CALL ME TO ASK FOR HELP I’M GOING TO REMEMBER THIS DAY, AND I’M GOING TO ROUTE YOUR CALL INTO VOICEMAIL OBLIVION.”
When I was doing tech support (mid-90s) we had one asshole who refused to go through phone support because “He’d been working on these damn machines for FIFTY years!”. Well, he’d eventually do the phone support (because we wouldn’t set up service until he did) and it was inevitably something stoopid (“So…you’re an A+ Certified tech…but you didn’t know you can’t boot with an unformatted floppy in the drive? And you thought the problem was the POWER SUPPLY?”)
One week we were having a contest to see who could get their talk-time the lowest while still resolving problems and I got the asshole. Rather than go through the 40 minute “I’m too damn good for Tech Support” rant, I cut him off at the knees. When he said that he’d been working on computers for fifty years, I asked him “So. What was it like working on ENIAC?” When he didn’t know what ENIAC was, I pointed out that it was the ONLY computer around 50 years ago. He said he had one that he built from a kit. I said “No. There was only one of them in the world. If you’re gonna lie, at least do it right. Now do you want tech support or not?”
Caught in his lie, he gave in and we determined that he hadn’t defragged his HDD in about a year. Total call? 12 minutes.
Then he called back and complained and I got written up, but that’s another story.
I had just the same sort of caller today. They were up on a high horse complaining that they lost “su” rights to the application on such-and-such servers, and that it was working fine last week and wanting to know why we removed the access permissions from his ID and that if we’re going to mess with users’ access we could at least call them at let them know we took their access away and that he’s going to escalate this issue to his manager.
Finally. He stops long enough for me to say anything:
"Oh, yes. You’re trying to su to the sandbox? (don’t ask…) We just received the request to set up the sandbox application yesterday. Let me check…I’m the workflow coordinator here, so I can find out where it is…Ah, here it is. It was assigned to someone in our group this morning and it looks like we’re waiting for the application name to be propagated to all the servers so we can set up the application. It ought to be completed by tomorrow morning. Let me just check the access logs to see what applications you were using last week and see what wasn’t working today for you. "
<caller> Oh, no, that’s OK. I’ll just wait until tomorrow.
Uh-huh. It’s amazing how shy people get when they realize that I have online logs of everything they’ve done for the past 60 days. Every server. Every application. Every command. Every mis-typed password.
jacquilynne–sounds like you work with the kind of people who sent out job listings for Java programmers, a year and a half after Java was first released, saying they wanted people with five years of Java experience…
