Hi! I'm Your Technical Support Rep.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

X Posted from a co worker's facebook page.

Hi! I'm your Technical Support Rep. I have a considerable amount of control over one or more important aspects of your daily life: television, telephone, and internet. Sometimes one, sometimes all three. Before we interact, I'd like to share some thoughts with you:



* I am here, simply put, to fix your shit. My job is not complete until said shit is fixed. Please just help me fix this shit.

* With that out of the way, know that I hate you exactly as much as you hate me. No more, no less. If you are at least relatively pleasant, I'm happy to help you- even to make small talk as I attend to the issue at hand. Conversely, if you are a total and complete jackass, I will make this the worst 10 minutes of your week.

* Neither I, nor any of my coworkers, are out to fuck you. We are not idiots. We are college graduates in technical disciplines, the vast majority of whom are here to work their way up the IT ladder to more fulfilling positions. Sometimes we have off days, sure, but we know EXACTLY what we are doing. Note that this does not apply to anyone outside of our department. They are, in all reality, idiots who are out to fuck you.

* So you've already unplugged the "internet box" and plugged it back in? Brace yourself, you're going to do it again. Most of the time I do this for a reason...unless you're a dick. Then I do it to see how mad it makes you.

* Don't lie to me- I can tell you have a router. It isn't illegal.

* To those who think they are "computer illiterate": The vast majority of the time, you are lovely customers: Patient, willing to learn, and most importantly, willing to listen. Thank you!

* To those who think they are CompSci PHD's: The vast majority of the time, you are retarded: If you already cycled your equipment and it didn't work, why did it work when I made you do it again? If you are so well educated, stay the hell out of the queue so that people who need help can get it.

* Supervisors don't have a magic wand that they can wave to make everything better. They are governed by the same protocol and use the same utilities as I do. In fact, supervisors are more likely to tell you to fuck off- believe it or not, they have other pressing issues to attend to. If a node goes down, they WILL put those 200 subscribers before you in Priorityland.

* Threatening to cancel does not intimidate us. We have an entire department that is paid to care about that, which means that I don't have to. Harsh? Sure, but I have more than enough work to do fixing shit, yelling at field techs, following up on cases, and explaining the concept of email to your grandmother that it won't cause me to lose any sleep.

* It worked fine yesterday? Oh, then I must be wrong. Let me reconsider the 40 minutes I spent troubleshooting your Win98 box. Check it out: Shit breaks (see point 1); If shit did not break, I would be mowing your lawn instead of sitting in this office.

* Speakerphone? Turn it the fuck off.

* Don't call back and have another rep troubleshoot the same problem. He will read the notes I left about how you spilled coke into your cable box. Even if he didn't, he would come to the same conclusion, and more people with undiagnosed problems would be stuck listening to that god-awful hold music.

* I am not blowing smoke when I say that I understand how frustrating it is to wait on hold, get transferred, and deal with bad agents. I too have called Dell's tech support line. The difference is that I actually DO care about your problem, so please just calm down before I kill your family.

* My company has over 20 million subscribers. I handle a region of about 2 million. To this day, none of them have ever called in to say "I just wanted you to know that my shit is working correctly." Maybe someday?



So what can I help you with today?

Comments

[kyidyl.livejournal.com]

To this day, none of them have ever called in to say "I just wanted you to know that my shit is working correctly."

I've had one...it was a strange, surreal experience.

[omg-teh-funnay.livejournal.com]

I had one, too!

It was magical.

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

I had one of these too. I wasn't sure what to do with it.

[sputtertoo.livejournal.com]

Never had one but I've done it a couple times, for ho-hos

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

These actually bug me. From a corporate perspective, they're not only wasting both their time and mine, but while they're in the queue they're wasting the time of everyone with genuine problems who has to stack up behind them listening to hold music while they take ten minutes to get around to telling me that everything is actually fine.

And I still have to write up a ticket for the call.

Seriously, if anyone wants to say "all is well", or send a compliment, email is the much preferred method.

[asknosecrets.livejournal.com]

I had O2 tell me "Give us a call if things start working" because they didn't know if the problem was their fault (they supply my internet) or BT's fault (they supply my phoneline). So I had to phone up once BT had been round to play with the wire and go "Yep, everything's good, hope not to see you later."

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

I've had one from my boss saying "Did you change something with the VPN? It's working so well today" while I was ripping my hair out not being able to connect from home myself. :)

EDIT: Hair. Not head. caffeine more need I.

;)

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

One recently made me banana bread. It was great. (I love face-to-face tech support.)

[archatos.livejournal.com]

Has happened to me a couple of times. I worked at the complaints line (I'm boss there now - muahahahaha!!), so it was just extremely weird. Customers calling in, being presented with the "welcome to complaints, Archatos speaking", and then they just wanted to let us know that we had some great techs sitting downstairs, and we should let them know that they do an excellent job.

Catches you off guard when you're used to being either yelled at or presented with some weird ass problem that nobody knows how to solve (for instance that you need to have your Norwegian laptop serviced in Angola).

[fallconsmate.livejournal.com]

whats fun is when "they" send an actual person out to troubleshoot, there *is* a problem, it gets fixed, and overnight, with no apparent reason, the same problem appears again.

in a computer owned by someone smart enough to know NOT to tweak with anything themselves. *shakes head*

[barbituratecat.livejournal.com]

I spent two months following up with a customer who had a serious issue that we just could not fix, for whatever unknown reason. I have a sneaking suspicion that our techs were refusing to their jobs properly and prolonging the issue, because by the time it got to me it was just stupid [like 15 calls, several home visits, numerous escalations, etc].

They also installed two modems in her house and told her that 'viruses' were the reason her modem was dropping offline o_0...

[fallconsmate.livejournal.com]

makes you real sorry that "conk idiot field support goob on the head with the almighty Clue-By-Four" isnt in the troubleshooting guide, doesnt it?

[barbituratecat.livejournal.com]

It was a really, really bad situation. De-escalating it took a looonngg time and repeated call-backs.

Part of the problem was that the customer lived in a remote area of the province that was handled by one independent field tech, so she was always getting the same guy, over and over. He had already decided the problem was with her, so he just refused to look at it any further. [As if it's not hard enough dealing with certain customers, that we need to worry about co-workers screwing us over!']

[fallconsmate.livejournal.com]

ohhhhh. like the fool who tried to tell me he wasnt obligated to go under my doublewide (years ago) to install my wiring because "you have ductwork under there and i am not dealing with ductwork!"

funny, all my vents were in the ceiling. and i was pissed off by this point. gee, two phone calls later and i hear him "but...but...but.." and the next guy to come out said "yeah, he isnt working for us any longer..." *innocent look*

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

Like when they [name deleted, I have left them since] decided to fuck my password instead of reading the goddamn ticket open by Bell-Nexxia... (DSL was down and blamed it on the password instead of telling me "Bell-Nexxia has a ticket open, should be back sometime") and then blaming it on my hardware, and claiming it was fixed while it was not. 48 hours later I finally got somebody who check the new password they had forced me to change to realize the original monkey didn't type it in properly.

And I know other people who got the same crap from the same ISP the same week-end.

[brothersterno.livejournal.com]

eventually, i got the cellphone numbers of the field service manager for a particular company. Problems with Field Service techs suddenly get resolved when you're calling the manager and then the manager's manager at 9pm their time at home when they would rather be watching TV with the kids.

The flip side is that their techs would escalate on us, which I enjoyed, since I rarely had a problem.

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

I got told that hackers were rebooting my modem 200+ times a day.

[silece.livejournal.com]

You are lucky they only hit your modem. My antivirus software tells me hackers can get in and kill your children or rape your pets.

[azleaneo.livejournal.com]

All I know is how much I hate when I power cycle everything, have it not work, break down and call tech support, just to power cycle it with them and have it come up.

However, I don't tell the tech rep that I've already tried to power cycle. I let them go through their procedures because it's easier that way. When this happens, I just assume that there was a small down time that was over while I was on hold, or that the tech rep saw something I didn't, fixed it quietly, and had me power cycle again.

Or it's just Murphy's Law.

[brothersterno.livejournal.com]

tech rep saw something I didn't, fixed it quietly, and had me power cycle again

Personal favorite tech support trick. Like if (company) fucked up or something happened, a powercycle takes long enough that I can fix the real problem, and you're none the wiser. I know, it's not honest, but it's easier than trying to explain VPI/VCI builds to a user.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Or at least if not fix the problem, it:

- gives a minute or two to run preliminary diagnostics on the infrastructure leading up to the caller's kit;
- allows a quick check to see if there are any tickets outstanding for disruptions in the area;
- provides a moment to check the caller's history for similar occurances;
- gets the caller to concentrate on their PC screen or modem lights, if you've asked them to monitor it (and sometimes even come up with useful information, shock horror); and
- assuming your own infrastructure is operating normally, lets you remotely see if the caller actually HAS rebooted what they say they've rebooted, or are just flailing around hitting random things, thus setting the appropriate diagnostic level for the rest of the call.

[knottie.livejournal.com]

It's not Murphy's Law, it's the second law of tech support that I learned (the first being "They Lie").

If something isn't working that ought to, have someone else stand behind you and watch. (Having tech support on the phone counts as watching). Swear to god, it fixes 90% of the stupid crap. Of course, I don't tell my users this; I tell them that we make sure their computers are scared of us before we send them out.

[preserver3.livejournal.com]

Amen.. It's the second law. Things rarely break when someone who can fix it is watching. They break when the person who can fix it is in a foreign place, far from any form of communication.

A form of this law for programmers is that you can work on something for a week, and the moment you ask any other programmer to look over your shoulder, you find the problem without their actual help.

[anthalus.livejournal.com]

A subform for programmers is that when you finally decide to look at the area of code that you did not leave notes for, that is where to problem lies. Can't count how many times I have made that mistake. Usually it is something I deleted and did not leave a note for.

[pne.livejournal.com]

A co-worker of mine once had this; after calling over another co-worker, he asked her what the problem was, and she pointed to the screen and said, "That semicolon missing right *there*". And she couldn't get him to believe that she had only just spotted it when he was standing behind her.

A variation of this is what we call "playing 'dog'": we ask someone else to come over and explain the bit we're having trouble with. It doesn't need to be someone from the same team, or even a programmer at all (hence the name: it would even be enough to have a dog come and listen to you). The thing is that explaining it to someone else forces you to organise your thoughts in such a way that (the theory goes) you're more likely to figure out how to proceed on your own.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Works surprisingly often for me.
Granted, when the code get sufficiently complicated you might want someone more intelligent than a dog to help you look anyway.

;)

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

The classic 'it just works when a tech looks at it, no matter how technical and clueful you actually are' solution. Fun when you're the magician, not so fun when you're the clueful guy who got frustrated.

One reason I HATE Smartjacks (you know how many T1's I've seen come up after looping the smartjack for testing?)

[jecook]

... This must be the reason why field telco techs VASTLY prefer dropping a hard loopback on the line.

*is fortunate enough to have not had a major problem with a smartjack*

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

I firmly believes computers know when you call tech support, and decide to work, JUST THEN

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

I had one do that, which was fine, but normally they don't come back to life after you let the magic smoke out, and the motherboard turns extra crispy...
that was a WTF moment all round.

[oh, and the reason I called... needed to let them know I'd need a new modem, after the lightening fried it and my tower... they still had me go though the script though!]

[major-error.livejournal.com]

indeed.
at my last job, just after an office expansion, I was called over to look at a problem. No sooner did my foot cross the threshold into the area did the user exclaim, "Nevermind, it just started working..."

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

I have had this happen on the phone numerous times. I find it kind of funny. ^_^

"Yes ma'am, we practice voodoo troubleshooting."

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Machines will work on my test bench that work nowhere else on the planet.

Maybe its because I follow the Grand Moff Tarkin school of hardware repair. Make an example out of one ill behaved piece of hardware, and fear will keep the others in line.

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

I have a theory about that, which I patiently explain to any new hardware I get. I never, never, have any piece of electronics larger than my largest window or heavier than my ability to fling.

...My technology, by and large, behaves.

[barbituratecat.livejournal.com]

I hated having to waste time on a call trying to get someone to unplug their damned modem again when they 'just did that!!'. Buddy, whatever you think you unplugged, it wasn't the modem, because I can see how long you've been online. And when your modem says it's been powered on for thirty days? You did not just unplug it.

And I didn't even have the luxury of having a drink every time someone tried to tell me 'Well it worked YESTERDAY, it can't be broken today!!' :(

[arabwel.livejournal.com]

I feel for you guy.. ISP tech spport i purest form of hell.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

It's not so bad. I mean, it has its moments... but as far as purest form of hell... imo, it is no where near as bad as working for the department of Juvenile Justice... been there. O.o