techrecovery | Nov. 17th, 2008

Nov. 17th, 2008

demented-pants.livejournal.com

Now, I'm usually INCREDIBLY patient with my users. Even the most persnickety, dense user usually rolls off me like water off a duck's back.

But this guy tonight...

He was doing things without instruction, refusing to listen to me when I explained things, and my least favorite, he was yelling at me. Any time I suggested something he decided he had to scream all the reasons I was wrong, despite the fact that I was, of course, correct.

I finally had to mute my headset and be like, "Screaming at me will not solve your problem, you fucking asshat," just to get the profanity out of my system without him hearing me.

It SHOULD have been a simple dial-up troubleshooting exercise. The MS Knowledge Base had the fix and gosh golly gee it actually worked.

Too bad it took me an extra fifteen minutes to convince him that I was right and just because there was no obvious result after he'd run the wizard didn't mean the wizard didn't complete successfully.

I finally ended up just muting my headset and letting him finish yelling about how it didn't work, and then politely informed him that, yes, the wizard did run correctly, and I can tell that because he had two dial-up connections that showed up in his network connections box that weren't there before, see?

That shut him up and I was able to tell him to get off the phone, try to connect, and then call me back and let me know what the results were. Needless to say it worked.

God, I love that little disproportionate thrill of superiority I get when I'm right about unimportant shit.

Current Mood: annoyed

blondebeaker.livejournal.com

So I got to deal with a customer today who had a install tech come to their home and install a service. The customer ranted and raved in Spanish for a good five minutes, before calming down and actually explained the situation.

The install guy walked into the home, with dog crap all over his shoes and walked all over the carpet. When asked to take off his shoes because, hello smelly dog shit on the shoes, the tech said "Hey you have a wife! She can clean it up!" But it gets better.

He also greeted the family with "YO WHAT UP DAWGS?" (I will admit this bit cracked me up, thank god for mute buttons)

But the one thing this twit (the tech not the customer) said that had me waving down a supervisor was:

"Catch you fucking sand n*****s later!"

Yeah methinks someone got fired. Oh and do you know how hard it is to try and explaining that in the customer notes and having to keep it under a hundred words?

Oh and something on the lighter side, I had a customer who wanted me to transfer to someone who was American. "I don't want to talk to Canadians, or anyone else who is not born and raised in the US of A and not white." And when I tried to tell her that there is a very slim chance of that, as only one team (our virus protection team) is the only one in the states she wanted to be transferred to a 2nd tier supervisor....our escalation team.

Those guys are in the Philippines. And because I like those guys I warned them before transferring her to them.

Our

Current Mood: annoyed

donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com

I work in a Canada-based tech support office that serves plants that are mostly in the United States. We have maybe seven techs out of a total of eighty who speak with noticeable accents: one British, one Cameroon-French, one British-Indian, one Australian, one Filipina, one Spanish, and one Indian. (People also tend to think I'm Irish. Right.) This being a rather metropolitan city and us not being a company of xenophobic fucks, it isn't actually an issue because these techs are good at their jobs and perfectly understandable. It also wouldn't be so much of a pain in the ass if these technically inept people, who often do not display any basic problem-solving skills or any other noticeable qualities beyond a stubborn insistence that the problem cannot possibly be with their equipment because "it was just working yesterday," didn't insist that their inability to follow instructions was as a result of the fact that one of my more experienced techs rolls his Rs on occasion and omits them at the ends of words.

People being the dicks they can often be, every now and then one of our accented speakers gets callers who insist they need to speak to "an American" and refuse to do any troubleshooting. Our Abuse department head takes great pleasure in dealing with the most obnoxious types of these to the effect of "if you will not treat my workers with respect, you can find yourself with traffic shaping out the wazoo until you explain to your local CS office why you're being a bigot." He doesn't quite say it in that many words, but it's what he's carried out on them.

My favourite story was when one of the techs, exasperated by a rather PEBKACky woman completely refusing to deal with him and wanting to "talk to someone who speaks American," stood up and announced loudly to the tech pit, "This woman here would like to speak to someone who speaks American. Does anyone here speak American? Don't worry, ma'am, I will find someone who speaks American for you." The entire pit broke out into laughter and jeering to the effect of, "I dunno, I just speak Canadian English," and, "I don't know if she'll understand us, they just speak American over there," and even, "They fought a war to boot the English out and now they want it back?"

Eventually we decided that the call should be transferred to our British tech, who would put on a proper Queen's English accent and ham it up as best as she could, which elicited cheering and applause from the pit to the point where Network Ops and Dev were gophering in their cubicles and wondering what was going on, and the Abuse head also came around to see what was going on. In the meantime, the previous tech had returned to the call only to find that the caller had disconnected.

He later told us that he hadn't muted his headset. She'd heard every jeer.

:D