techrecovery | Dumbass of the week

(X-posted to

ts_sucks)

A guy I'll call "Bill" calls yesterday from a local business because his DSL isn't working. It's a simple setup - modem and one computer, no router or any weird fancy shit. I take him through all the steps: power cycle, check DNS settings, release-renew IP, set static IP, etc., and nothing works. I'm seeing normal traffic between us, which means there's probably something up with the TelCo. As a last resort I have the guy try to ping us and our router. Nothing.

So I put him on hold for a second, give TelCo a call, find out what the hold time is, and come back to him. I tell him that the wait time is about 26 minutes, and I would call him back when I get a TelCo rep to help us. Twenty-six minutes pass, I get the rep on the phone. The rep pulls up the account while I call Bill. The lady who picks up the phone tells me that Bill is "uhh... not available right now." I tell her that he's expecting my call, and that I have the TelCo on the line. She goes away for a few seconds, and comes back asking me to call back in 10 or 15 minutes.

What. The. Hell.

Now at this point, I am so taken aback that I say, "Sure, I can do that." I get back to the TelCo rep and tell him that I was just informed that Bill is "not available." The rep says everything looks fine from his end, and that he'd need to talk to Bill to do further troubleshooting. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I go to lunch, call Bill's business again, at which point I am informed that he is out for the day. I tell the lady that the TelCo needed to talk to Bill, and here's the number for the TelCo's tech support, have a nice day.

The moral of the story is this: If you call your ISP tech support, and your tech waits on hold for half an hour - while you go about your business - to get someone to help you, it's common courtesy to be available when she calls you back with help.

And if Oscar from Verizon happens to read this, I'm sorry my customer was a moron.