Journal Entries
The "Good Tech Support" Entry
Posted May 11, 2005
I work in tech support. Oh the humanity.
Emergency Room doctors see people on what is potentially the worst day of their lives. Policemen see people at their worst. In Tech Support, we speak to people at their dumbest.
Here are some rules to make getting good tech support easy, so even if you such at teh interweb you'll be able to talk to a techie.
1: Be at the computer that isn't working. No matter how good we are, tech support people are not trained to work via telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis or other psychic mind powers.
2: Know what you're using. If you have no idea what version of Windows you use (and yes, it makes a huge difference) go to Start, Run and type winver in the Open: box. Then click OK. It will tell you. And no matter what you might think you do NOT have ANY of the following:
Windows 99.
Windows XL Home Pro 2000.
3: AOL is NOT an operating system.
4: Do as you are told. Seriously. Only click or type that which you are told to click or type. Don't click or type anything else. And listen to what you're told! If I spell out ipconfig phonetically, letter by letter, PLEASE don't type rpcornflag instead.
5: Get to know your hardware. It's yours so it's reasonable to assume you know what it's called. Do you treat your kitchen appliances this way? If I ask you to find the fridge do you respond "Oh? Which one of the white boxes is that?" No, you do not. Please treat your modem and router with the same respect.
6: It's a modem. Not a Modium.
7: Your internet service may have given you a username and password. Try to remember what they are. If you are asked for a username, provide it. Don't tell us your address, social security number or steam into an intricate description of the issue at hand. We have reasons for everything we ask.
8: No creation of man is perfect. Man makes computers and man makes the internet. Sometimes it breaks. Live with it. You do not have a god-given right to instant planetary communications. So when it breaks, we'll do our best to fix it and you can live without it for a few hours. Go outside. Read a book. Your inability to play online cribbage does not signal an apocalypse.
9: Email is not a transporter like on Star Trek. It is NOT instant. No, it isn't and I can tell you exactly how it works if you have a spare half hour so that you will understand why your ranting seems childish and annoying. Here's a hint: a 35mb digital picture of your gap-toothed grandchild will take forever to send because when it's converted to text so that SMTP can process it, the file doubles or triples in size.
10: Don't pretend to have knowledge that you don't actually have. You sound pathetic when you start mumbling on about subnet masks when the actual problem is that your ethernet cable is unplugged.
11: ...the list actually goes on from here, but it's a tenet of my personal faith that everything should go up to 11.
Discuss this Journal entry [2]
Latest reply: May 11, 2005
meh
Posted Apr 22, 2005
I just want to point out that despite dozens of insistances to the contrary, I'm still not Australian.
Discuss this Journal entry [3]
Latest reply: Apr 22, 2005
A Merchandise Idea
Posted Jan 5, 2005
I had to put this somewhere that would be time/date stamped for possible copyright purposes...
"The Matrix" coffee stirrers...
"For those times when there is no spoon".
There.
Another idea heaved onto the beach of life.
- That is all.
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Latest reply: Jan 5, 2005
Christmas Thoughts
Posted Dec 22, 2004
It's THAT time of year again.
The trees have been brought inside, lit and decorated.
The preparations are being made for a meal of frankly epic proportions.
People who don't normally drink are eyeing bottles of Advocaat and wondering what it is you do with them.
Perfectly serious people are looking forward to wearing a silly paper hat and telling the world's worst jokes to people they love.
It's Christmas.
But beneath the commericalism and the worries about how much you've spent and how much weight you'll put on, you must all take care to remember the spiritual aspect of Christmas. We celebrate for a reason, a reason that reaches out to us down the millennia and is as true today as it was so very long ago.
We need to party really hard if we want the Sun to come back.
So remember...when you're tentatively mixing advocaat with lemonade (it's made from lawyers, apparently) or slipping on that paper hat and feeling the teensiest bit self conscious, you're helping remind the Sun where the fun is! Don't doom us all to an eternity of darkness and misery...Have A Merry Christmas!
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Latest reply: Dec 22, 2004
Swear, curse, curse swear (The Bad Day at Work Mix)
Posted Dec 17, 2004
I’ve been in Tech Support for far too long. I know this because constant exposure to basic human ignorance has made me view the general population as a bunch of ignorant barbarians. Worse, the majority is willfully ignorant and has the manners of a goat.
How did I get this way? Why am I so cynical? It’s because I spent eight hours a day every day talking to idiots.
Not the common idiot, no sir. The brand of idiot that calls a tech support line is special. This kind of idiot wants something but has no idea how to go about getting it, and when they fail to get what they want they become abusive and childish which (as we learned in kindergarten) gets us nowhere.
Most people have no clue what a computer is or what it does. This is insane. Before you are allowed to own or operate any other piece of complex technology you usually have to show that you are competent to do so. You need a license to operate cars, boats and aircraft but not a computer.
It might be a consumer durable but you have no clue how it works and frankly, that’s not my fault. So the first thing you need to do, as a computer owner, is:
Get Some Education.
The acronym “RTFM” exists for a reason, people.
Here are the basics, for those of you too cheap to buy a book or too confused to make it to a library.
Your computer is a very complex piece of technology. But for all that, it will only ever do what you have told it to do. Seriously. It will never ever do stuff on its own. I don’t care if you’ve seen all the Terminator movies, the computer is not smart or self aware or evil. It just does what you told it to do.
This means that if it’s done something you didn’t intend, you must have told it to do the wrong thing.
So if you want to make sure it only does the right things you have to know how to give it instructions. Right? That makes sense to me, it probably makes sense to you and it will continue to make sense right up until you sit down at the computer…at which point the monitor will start beaming Bozo Rays at your brain and you’ll turn back into the gibbering moron who insists that the computer has a life of it’s own and it won’t do what you ask it to because it’s infested with tiny goblins.
And here's something that just makes no sense to me whatever: people call and they preface their problem statement with "Well I'm totally computer illiterate" or "I'm really a dunce at this" and my first thought is:
"Oh %^&$. How am I supposed to help this person?"
Imagine you were a bookseller and someone approached you with a paperback and said "I need help with this. But I'm illiterate."
Here's one of today's gems. I paraphrase for comedic effect and brevity.
"This setting, which is on a secure password protected page that only I, the customer, have access to, has been mis-set. Why did you, who has no access to it, set it like that?"
And here's a classic problem statement from yesterday:
"It's broken".
My in-parenthesis response: What? The whole internet? What the frag did you do??? Someone call Darpa! Someone call Cern! Get me Al Gore! (username) has deleted the freakin' Internet!
That's not what I said, of course. I'm a professional.
But I was sorely tempted.
And here's another thing.
Why do people wait for three days to call us about a problem?
Why do people intentionally wait until they are angry and frustrated before they take even the most basic of steps to solve their problem? Imagine if people treated Doctors this way. You'd end up with conversations like this:
"Well, when the area around the cut went black and started to smell bad I thought I'd leave it alone and see if it would fix itself...and now you're telling me it's gangrene and I have to lose my whole leg? That's just not acceptable!!!"
Actually, come to think of it...people DO treat problems this way.
So that's something to feel better about.
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Latest reply: Dec 17, 2004
Dark Side of the Goon
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