techrecovery | This is a bit of a long one... (Reply)

So I'll cut it. I no longer work in tech support, but I can't resist posting this one.

I worked for 10 months doing extended-warranty tech support for a now non-existent (thanks to a merger) UK box-shifter. It was their policy to get callers off the phone as fast as possible, while trying to make sure that they didn't call back - and making sure they didn't get an engineer if it could possibly be avoided.
My pod were the best techs there and because of this, we tended to get a lot of calls that other people just couldn't deal with. We all had our nicknames and was the Callback Queen - I was the person who dealt with the screamers, the liars, the idiots, the people who the less experienced (and less patient) techs just couldn't deal with. Sometimes they were transferred to us, but if it was busy, I'd get a callback sheet.
My pod were more prepared than others to break policy to get things done - faxing out instructions to customers who needed extra help (have you ever tried giving support via talktype? The operators never seem to type what you say at the customers) or emailing drivers from a special hotmail account we'd set up (and which the IT dept didn't know we could access) for example, which meant that customers with unusual problems were a lot more likely to get help from us than any other pod.
One slow Tuesday morning, a callback sheet landed on my Team Leader's desk, with the dreaded words 'old person' on it. Now, we all had our prejudices - I hated dealing with single mothers (because they were always paying more attention to the child than to me, which was of course my fault) and people with parrots (because I have fairly sensitive hearing in the squawk frequencies). I didn't mind old people, because on the whole, they know they're stupid, and are prepared to go through whatever you want them to... you just have to know how to handle them.
So, I call up our old man's details and it seems he's got a laptop - this is really supposed to be dealt with by a specialist team, but in practice, they're a bunch of idiots so callers are only transferred to them to get a hardware repair.
So, I called him. It seems that his grandson tried to install 'a game called red hats' and now the machine won't work. Aha. I explained that his little darling had actually deleted everything from the machine, and that we'd have to use the restore pack.
He's perfectly happy with this (first one EVER!) and even has the thing right there. I nearly fainted. So, we boot up to the CD, and hit '3' to go to a DOS prompt. I checked that his windows partition really was gone, and as we weren't allowed fdisk on our restore packs, started on helping him use our partition remover app.
All he had to do was type 'zap_hdd'. Piece of cake, eh?
This call took me three and a half hours. The man couldn't type. He didn't know where any of the keys were. He couldn't cope with the idea of the lowest thing on the screen being the newest. He couldn't just tap a key, so he got multiple copies of every letter.
The conversation went something like this:

ME: Alright, Sir, what's the very bottom thing on your screen?
OAP: There's a big foot thing...
ME: On the actual display part, Sir...does it have a c:\?
OAP: Oh, yes.
ME: OK, can you tap the z key for me?
OAP: Done that.
ME: And what does it say on the screen now, Sir?
OAP: It's still got the c:\
ME: Is there anything after that?
OAP: Aye, five Zs.
ME: Alright, Sir, do you know where the backspace key is?
OAP: Erm...
ME: OK do you know where the enter key is?
OAP: Oh aye.
I hear a click.
ME: Did you just press the enter key, Sir?
OAP: Which one's that?
ME: What's the very bottom thing on the screen now?
OAP: Bad command or filename.

As things went on, it became very difficult to stop him pressing enter after every key. Eventually I called this the 'bad command or filename key' and he stopped.
I could not get him to press the backspace key, ever. He just couldn't find it. I had a photo of his laptop model's keyboard in front of me, and described it in terms of what was to the right left of it, below it, what was written on it, no chance. Always he got the enter key.
By this point my team leader is waving madly at me to put him on hold, so I told him I needed to double check that I was looking at the right model of laptop, and he goes into piped classical land.
My TL said it had gone on long enough, and to send him an engineer. This would have spoiled my perfect record of no chargeables - engineers sent for the wrong hardware error, or a software error - so I wasn't going to do it. I knew I could this, and anyway, there were no calls in the queue.
So, I carried on. I didn't manage to get him to use del or backspace, but I eventually managed to get a line with zap on it.
By this point, all the team leaders were listening in, and several techs were listening at their sides. A huge challenge - two keys at once. It took half an hour to get him to type in a _ rather than a - or a 0.
It took another 20 minutes to get another zap ready to get the _ after it.
After three hours, we evenually had zap_hdd at his c: prompt. I asked him to press enter - it said Bad Command or Filename. I asked him to start at what he typed and read out exactly what he'd typed. He'd managed to catch another key at the same time as pressing enter.
The next go, he got it right. In under a second, his partitions were removed. I had him restart the machine and this time select 1 to reinstall the OS, which I left going. Three and a half hours. My average call time was under 10 minutes.
He never called back.