Asshattery Abounds!

[dpaul007.livejournal.com]

Our clients are salespeople who've been issued laptops that they use to schedule their customer visits and such. Quite often, these Type-A personalities think they're highly-skilled technicians as well as marketing drones. We think it's cute.

One highly competent in-duh-vidual called and stated that he had a virus. Holding back the urge to tell him to take two aspirin and call us in the morning, I asked him how he came to that conclusion.

He said that a message came up that said "XML Parsing error. You do not have sufficient privileges to install."

Oh, the joy.

"No sir, that's not a virus. That's an error message that you'll get most every time you go to an unauthorized website while using your work computer on the company network. Please remember that visiting that kind of website is not a career-enhancing move, as [name of company] can access your web history at any time. We at the Help Desk highly recommend you limit your web surfing to your own computer at home."

I believe his mumbling was a quick "thanks" followed by the unmistakable sound of of a phone being hung up in a hurry.

Lying bloody users

[jprocksmyworld.livejournal.com]

[x-posted to my own journal]

Don't think you can get away with telling me that you forwarded the bloody email to me. It arrived over two hours ago. I can see it coming into the building in the mail logs. I can see it being delivered to your mailbox. I can even see that it's been opened. And I can see that you never bloody well did anything else with it!

Claiming that my system "must have lost it" when I can prove (not that it'd do any good) that you're a lying scumsucking butt-crack does *not* endear you to me, and is *not* likely to make me want to help you in the future! ARSE!

MUWAAAHHAHAHA, MAKE LOVE, NOT SPAM, HAVING AN EFFECT!! (xposted from my journal)

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

you may remember my post about this screensaver that lycos is launching, well it looks like it's having an effect, and I LOVE IT!!!!
i'm going to install it on AAALLLL my machines!!!!

BBC NEWS Technology Anti-spam plan overwhelms sites
Anti-spam plan overwhelms sites
A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control.
Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
But analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way.
Lycos said the idea was to get the spam sites running at 95% capacity and generate big bandwidth bills for the spammers behind the sites.
The screensaver has reportedly been downloaded more than 90,000 times since it was launched.
But monitoring firm Netcraft has analysed response times for three of the sites the screensaver targets and has found that the campaign is being too successful.
Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.


valis
*only you can prevent spam*
thankies for the linky cutie rubberella !! just for that, you get a freebie

Question for my fellow tech support call takers

[katyism.livejournal.com]

When on an extremely insistent/worried/whiny/too-talkative-interrupty customer call, and you cannot fix or explain the problem they are having, how do you get rid of them and get to a point where you can hang the fuck up, politely?

For instance, in my support center it is a strict rule that we do not attempt to support people's coding problems with making their silly little web pages. We can tell you the basics of Front Page, we can tell you how to upload your shit on the server and set permissions, and that's it. I cannot go through your web page source and enumerate every typo, bad syntax, and bad reference you and your shitty web editing client put there. Even if I know exactly what the problem is and coudl tell you what to type to fix it. For the users we deal with, we'd get in trouble with that because then they'd have us teaching them the basics of HTML over the phone and writing their code for them.

Anyway, I'm rambling. My curiosity here is how do you handle the whiny callers who still go on and on about the problem, bugging you to fix it because they "KNOW you know how", even if you've repeated over and over We Do Not Support This, please contact your computer manufacturer or go visit the online HTML training course on our site, or whatever the protocol is. I'm interested in creative tactics and ways of putting things differently that will get the customer to shut the fuck up and ask for help from a more appropriate source.