Quick work rant

[davenh.livejournal.com]

I thought I would take a moment to share what is quickly becoming one of my little pet peeves. That peeve is, people who call up in a snit or a tizzy or whatever saying that "I'm having a problem with your system" or "your system isn't working" or whatever variation of that you want, then the problem is something like they don't know their password.

The email web page is not showing up? You can log in but you can't open any of your messages? That is a system problem.

You've never used our email in the first place, or you forgot your password, or the dog ate your password?? (Yes, I actually have had one of those now, though that person wasn't saying they had a problem with the system.) That is not a problem with the system, and please leave your 'tude at the proverbial door.

Comments

[davenh.livejournal.com]

11 years.

[davenh.livejournal.com]

Oh, have no doubt, I am definitely accustomed to the "it's your fault not mine" response. "What's wrong with your email system, why won't my message go out?" You misspelled this address. "Oh." The classic "this never did this before" or "this always worked like this before"? Been there, done that, more times than I care to count or remember. It just strikes me as a disconnect that people shouldn't have, something akin to "there's something wrong with my car, I don't have my car key."

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

I love those. I love it when they start off with "What are YOU PEOPLE doing down there?" and then proceed to say there is a problem with "YOUR SYSTEM."

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

I had people getting snarky about how we need to unblock this webpage NOOOOOW. Two days after we redid all the pages that show up if you can't get to a site, so now it clearly said that the website is unavailable, please check the spelling or check with the site administrator. I had to explain to him that state government sites are .vic.gov.au, not .gov.au .

Oh, and my dog ate our registered post shipping slip - that was a fun few days until it arrived!

[davenh.livejournal.com]

But they're the same thing, aren't they? I get that frequently with .com and .edu. "I tried to go to blahblah.com and it isn't working, what's wrong with your site?" You mean blah.blah.edu? "Same difference." No, not really, 'cuz mine works, yours is wrong. :)

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

I love it! It's so stupid. How can they think that different words are the same thing?

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

My own defusing tactic for those is to suddenly turn their narrow question into thousands of possibilities and leave them flailing in an ocean of options.

Usually with just "And which of our several hundred separate systems are you having problems with?".

Works for "_The_ server is down!" complaints too.

It seems to work on a similar principle to gas equations - increasing the volume of possibilities decreases the temperature and pressure of the query. Who knew that hot air was so consistent across disciplines?

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

I actually did have a problem with my user name at work.

Believe it or not... the one internal tech support sent me, and I oh so carefully noted down... was actually not the one they set my account for.

Oh, I could log on, because there was another guy withe same last name and initial [which is the format for user names] but his account permissions were very different to mine. [they also managed to set the same password on both accounts].

So, it really was the system that time.

The irony is, I work as tech support as well. My department provides it for other companies.

Still it was kinda funny; "No, no... I'm the other White S! Sayyy... you couldn't set my user name to that could you?"

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

We had a similar issue with two people with the same first and last name, but in different states. It upsets me how much their accounts have been stuffed up across the whole time they're both been there.

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

My personal favorite is:

"My internet's broken."

"What symptoms are you seeing?"

"It tells me my password's wrong."

[louisville-mike.livejournal.com]

My favorite:

"The system has been installed for two years and stopped working yesterday. I haven't changed anything.

Riiiiiight...

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

"Which 'anything' haven't you changed?"