Basic Email Knowledge or lack thereof.

[graafen]

An incident arrived on our stack about 10 minutes ago:

"Unable to reply or forward emails.

User has no icon to reply to or forward emails and has no send button in new emails."

This incident was originally logged two and a half days ago, and during this time has been passed back and forth between 1st line, 2nd line, and the Exchange team, the user chasing and complaining all the while. Finally some bright spark grasps that the user is on C-SUP (see my earlier post for more info) and sends it to us.

So I call the user and after five minutes of explaining the process of entering a password I'm finally able to remote control to his machine. I assume that this must be something to do with the user's Outlook profile. How wrong was I.

I'm looking directly at the user's desktop and aside from his toolbars being in different positions to the default setup everything is fine.

Me: "Are you sure you can't see Reply or Forward? I can see them."
User: "Where?"
Me: *points to them with cursor*
User: "Oh! They weren't there earlier."

Once I again I assume wrongly that I've reached the boundary of the user's ineptitude. He continues...
User: "Ahh, but if I go into an email I have no send button!"
Me: "Show me"

The user double-clicks on an email in his inbox and is presented with it.
User: "See? No send button!"
Me: "Err... you need to click 'Reply' or 'Forward' first."
User: "...oh."

Now we've hit rock bottom. Not only can he not see the wood for the trees but he hasn't grasped basic email client functionality. And all this after complaining to the previous agents.

Comments

[major-error.livejournal.com]

give him Pine or Elm and say, "no more helpdesk calls until you can learn..." >:)

[genjutsu-01.livejournal.com]

I had to call tech support and they had to remote access my PC for my email, but the call was over in a matter of 2 seconds

my distributions list got fucked :(

guy got it done though :)

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

basic client functionality? Nah. Basic deductive reasoning, 4 year old level.

Actually I think my 3 year old godson would be able to figure that out.

[kalium.livejournal.com]

Your average three year old is probably more familiar with computers than your average forty year old, so...

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm 40 years old!

[kalium.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry

Erm. You're obviously not average.

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

They were trying to send a Note?

[soruk.livejournal.com]

Better, find a Death Note and write their name in it.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

What's scary is that the rest of the techs this went through didn't catch this. Or is this a particularly annoying customer?

[madjacktech.livejournal.com]

I've seen rare occasions where a customer actually WAS missing the 'SEND' button in Outlook;
but......
those were in the days of OfficeXP and it's predecessors, when a corrupted normal.dot would fark everything up.
"My Word's freezing!" "Are you getting an error?" "Yes. Changes have been made that affect the global template Normal. Do you wish to save?"
"Okay, run winword /a. Does it work?" "Yes." "Your normal.dot is corrupt."
"My Outlook is missing it's send button!" "Are you having any problems w/ other Micro$haft apps?" "Yes, I get this error "Changes have been made something something when I open Word." "That's because that global paper template called normal.dot is used for when you're typing in Word or Outlook." "But it's not Word I'm trying to use!" "Trust me. Search for normal.dot." "Found it." "Delete it." "You sure?" "YES." "Okay. Go regedit/HKCU/Microsoft/Office/(9/10) and delete the Data and Options keys." "Done." "Restart." "ZOMG, It's WORKING!!!" "See? Next time you see that error, don't wait so long to call in to fix it, and this won't happen." "But why did the hardware support unit say it was a virus?" $Me laughs.....