h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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.

"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."

Welcome to the wonderful world of customer service. Driving, shopping, and dealing with tech support are three activities which seem to rob people of their intelligence and manners the moment they get behind a steering wheel, walk into a store, or dial a tech support number. There's no excuse for it and the only reason they continue to do it is because we have to bear the brunt of their rudeness and arrogance in the name of customer service.

Interesting that you should mention childishness. I've dealt with far too many people who, when they find they can't have what they want, throw a tantrum along the lines of 'I'm never coming to this store again', 'I'm going to get you fired', and ''. Is that the behaviour of an adult or a two year old child?

Goats, btw, have much better manners than most customers, in my opinion.

Goats do.

My wife kept goats when she was younger (and living somewhere less arid) and she speaks highly of them.
I too have spent some time around goats and they are indeed much maligned.
But nothing carries the same allegorical weight as a goat. Nothing conveys the singlemindedness with which a goat can pursue, say, the contents of a pocket that it is sure contains food. And nothing captures the occasionally distressing smell of a goat either. Where humans occasionally hum, a goatsmell in full majesty is nothing less than a Brass Band with a Kazoo Section playing the 1812.

But apart from that, goats are fine and upstanding citizens and I apologise to them all for comparing them to customers.

Do you not get a button that will cut off the customer and play him/her "Jingle Bells" for 12 seconds, which you can explain as an automated response triggered by the abuse monitor?

Trouble with manuals, though (here's the customer coming out in me) is that when they were printed they were too long and longwinded, and now they are online the information is hard to look up if you don't already know what your problem is called. This is improving rapidly, but I have spent many frustrating hours looking for a way to nullify all styles on Word, such as the cheerful way it decides when you want to write a heading (I gave up).

Your problems will die out with the present generation. A fat lot of good for the moment, but reflect on it and think "I am the last person who will have to do this". Collect samples.

"Manuals are too long and longwinded"
- as a former Techwriter, I can state with perfect glee that they are meant to be long because they cover a lot of ground. And some of them are longwinded because they need to be.

We get paid by the word.

In all seriousness, so are all instruction books. Reading isn't just for entertainment.

But hey...you paid to learn to drive, right? What's stopping you going out and finding an instructor? Maybe taking a few classes? Perhaps even (gods forfend) pushing the F1 key and asking the Help feature?

Sorry.
You said you were a customer.

Oh, and that comment about "this problem will die out with the current generation"?

Ageist!

The young are JUST as capable of ignorance and downright stupidity as any previous generation!

A week ago, I spend thirty minutes of my life trying to tell a college student how to connect a device to the electricity supply. There are only so many ways you can say "plug it in" before the red mist descends.

Ageist . . . yes, I've seen my six-year-old grandson get the hang of all the games on mousebreaker in no time flat. The guy who didn't know how to plug in was just winding you up.

Sadly, I don't think so.

The thing about Tech Support is that it's like being a policeman. The world polarises into three kinds of people:

Those who can obey simple instructions.
Those who cannot.
Other Tech Support folks.

Types One and Three are few and far between.

The worst type of user is the one who, having made a total screaming mess of his PC, will call and argue the toss about the best way to fix it. A subcategory of this type will get his wife to make the call and then take the phone off her half way through the call to argue with you. These calls are always fun since the caller has missed the fundamental truth of the situation; YOU messed the machine up and YOU called ME to fix it. So why make the situation more difficult?

So, while I congratulate Recumbentman's infant relative on his skill with Mousebreaker games I have to point out that this is a bit of a logical disconnect. A small child you know is good at flash games on a website and therefore everyone of that approximate generation has total technical mastery of computer hardware and software? Come on! My granny could bang out 'God Save The Queen' on the piano. Does that make her generation ALL musically competent?

There is a connection. It is said in science that old discredited theories only die with their proponents. It is said in maths that you don't get to understand it, you only get used to it (Von Neumann, I think).

The new generation may not understand pooters, but they will be used to them. That is an advance.

Oh.

I see. So my kids and grandkids, who if they have any sense will not follow me into tech support, will not have to deal with this problem.

Isn't it funny to know that this applies to so many of today's issues?

What -- the "wait and it might go away" solution?

ah... I sympathise.

I hate 99% of my customers, and am on a mission to develop a "customer virus" to wipe them off the planet.

the 1% that are normal are acceptable collateral damage.

I'm not defending ignorant customers but it seems to me that tech writing is often relegated to the status of "oh bugger! We need to write a manual for this too" status in many tech companies. Our tech writers are always complaining with some justification that they are always the last to know when a new product is being released.

I'm currently trying to decipher an ISDN modem installation manual for my PC, and I'm making no sense of it at all. Plug and play didn't work, it references directories and file names that don't exist on the CD, the drivers have not been digitally signed so I get really ominous messages from XP, and there was no setup.bat file.

So, to an extent, if companies want tech support headaches then one way to do it is to write a shockingly inadequate manual. (I'm suspecting, Gradient, this sorry state of affairs may not apply in your case ).

Woodpigeon

It sounds like Woodpigeon has fallen afoul of the dread Curse of Babel Fish.

Take any reasonable sentence. Translate it to french, then from French to German, then from German to Italian and finally from Italian to Korean and then back to English. Nearly everything ends up as "To the inserting of the initial particle manly donkey".

I agree about the quality of manuals; some companies seem to think that they can reduce costs by printing manuals that refer to old hardware, do not match the hardware they are packaged with and, in some cases, are printed on singleply toilet paper (and in extreme cases, it's used). You have but two recourses -

The Mighty Google, which will bring you much joy assuming you can get online and look up the right stuff.

Refer to Manufacturer. Send a nasty-gram. They often work wonders.

It may interest people to know that I am in the process of creating a book on the subject of getting good tech-support. There will be two versions - one, for Users, will be helpful and supportive and actually contain information. The other, for the Techie market, will be bitter and angry and sarcastic and should therefore sell like hot-cakes. When the first three chapters and a synopsis are ready I shall be off to hawk it on the Publishers market.

I look forward to reading it.
(still writing my book here...)

I met a woman once who had set up in business translating manuals (written in Engrish) into English. She made a pretty good living at it, and the manufacturers she worked for loved her a lot.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" talks a bit about manual writing, that was Robert Pirsig's job. He said that the manual for assembling say a barbecue is the last thing to get done; and when he goes to the factory, the guy that they send to explain it to him is not the one who can demonstrate it best, he's the one they can spare . . .

One of my favourite books.

I'd forgotten all about that one.

*adds it to 2005 reading list*

All I remember is him and the boy travelling accross the desert on a motorbike and one of them has the runs.

Or am I confusing it with something else?

That's the one, only I don't remember the runs.

I do remember that the book got oppressively boring in the middle, and later that all made sense; the writer was repressing a memory that had to come back to him and liberate him/itself. Brilliant structure.

"Quality"

And yet Lila, that followed many years later, was a ghastly flop.

But isn't that often the way?

Oh...

*looks at calender*

Merry Christmas to all.

Merry ones all round

But, Sho, some writers turn out quality every time . . .

Lila had a few ideas but mostly it was just silly. Suggesting that the concept of debating/electing democracy came from the Plains Indians. Come off it.