Does... not.. compute.. malfunction..

[morningside.livejournal.com]

If there's one thing that annoys me about tech support - apart from users in general - its those people who call up and when they don't get the answer they're looking for, it just breaks their mind. There's usually a couple at least in each company - they just sort of 'um.. erm.. um...' . You can imagine the wisps of smoke curling from their ears as 'Wrong... answer... have... not... dropped.. everything.. to.. help.. me.. bzzzzt... does not.. compute' bounces around their heads. Worst of all is they keep going to the point where you have just say 'goodbye' to shake them out of their miasma - at which point they're coherent for a moment and then slip back into the 'umm' coma. You just have to put the phone down otherwise you'd be there all day. Even worse is when they stay silent and sometimes won't even acknowledge the answer you gave them because it doesn't fit into the square hole in their heads (and no, I know they're not hard of hearing). There's a skill to getting rid of them, I think, which involves saying goodbye, and putting the phone down without appearing too rude to anyone listening in, but without giving them a chance to prolong the conversation. I'm not getting paid nearly enough for this.

Comments

[hoffman-log.livejournal.com]

If there were a way to detect these people before it happens, I would SO take advantage of it by speaking like i'm on speed.

"Uh, hi. My floppy drive doesn't work."
"OksirwhatIwantyoutodoischecktomakesurethatthere'snodiskinthedriveandifthereisthatit'sinsertedproperlyandafterthatI'dlikeyoutorightclickonmycomputerandselectpropertiessothatwecangotothedevicemanagerandcheckforanypossibleIRQconflictsdidyourecentlyinstallanynewsoftwareorremovesomethingimproperlyfromthecomputer?"

HAH! Delicious...

_MaH

[oddigy.livejournal.com]

I would have to say that the worst customers are the ones who you finally convince their problem is happening because of (insert correct reason here) ...but there's this general air of disbelief surrounding them...

...so they call back later on and get someone else, expecting to get a different answer!

Of course they don't realize that person #2 is looking up the call history and telling the customer "Person #1 told you to do (this) and said it fixed the problem" to which the customer will usually reply 'oh, well, I just wanted to be sure it wasn't something else.' etc.

...I haven't worked the phones in close to 4 years, and I only miss it sometimes (on nights like tonight where I ended up working a 12 hour day because of incompetent programmers, bleh.)

Also... in my travels, I have never run across a case of a floppy drive sharing its IRQ with something... unless it was one of those USB 100MB disk drive things. ;)