(no subject)

[demented-pants.livejournal.com]

Me: Rockstar tech support professional, exhausted after 9.5 hours of a 10 hour shift.
NBIU: Nice But Illiterate User.

So I take the guy's username and begin the call. He basically just wants some simple Word formatting help. Fine. We're happy to do that; that's an easy call, and I will be off the phone in plenty of time to clock out at 8 am when I'm supposed to.

Only 7:50 rolls around and the man doesn't understand a goddamn thing I say. It took him five minutes to see the little double set of arrows you use to set a left-indent down the entire side of the page on the ruler, even when I was saying, "It's two triangles with the points touching, and the bottom triangle has a rectangle underneath it, to the left of the top ruler."

That was when I finally gave up and said, "Hey, why don't you just e-mail it to me and tell me what you need changed and then I'll e-mail it back?"

Then. THEN it took ten minutes to explain how to open explorer, log into our e-mail system, and send me an e-mail, during which time I must have repeated the part before the @whatever.whatever FIFTY TIMES. It's four letters. It was then that it hit me: when I finally snap, they'll be hauling me away while I scream, "SIERRA CHARLIE FRANK LIMA! SIERRA CHARLIE FRANK LIMA, YOU ILLITERATE FUCK!" I, of course, proceed to feel guilty, because I am a customer service person and there is no excuse for being rude to the customer.

Two or three minutes later, still no e-mail. Even AFTER I sloooooowly spelled it out for him, he transposed two of the letters in the (four-letter) username. So I walk him through forwarding it, get his formatting issues - all half-dozen of them - fixed in a grand total of 25 seconds.

I e-mail him back and by this time I'm already running ten minutes over. I then proceed to have to take the next five minutes walking him through how to download an attachment and open it in word to print out.

Seriously, though. The absolute worst calls are the ones where the user is just an asshole, but only slightly behind them are the calls when it takes 45 minutes to do something that would have taken two if the user had just LISTENED TO WHAT I WAS SAYING THE FIRST TIME.

Sometimes you just have to SEE the Stupid

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

I had a user who was going all batty over 'her system' duplicating files 'on it's own' when she tried to delete them. She makes the typical end-luser noises about having had this problem for years and there is a ticket history and see what the other people did to fix it, etc. I remote in and sure enough, there are Copy 1 and Copy 2 and Copy 3 and so on of LOTS of her files. She says this happens when she deletes files... Hrrmmm.....

I watch her try to delete 30 or 40 files. She's holding down Ctrl and clicking on each additional file to add it to the selection... and partway through the clicks to early and drags the selection and Presto - More Copies!

A minute of explanations and instruction in Ctrl vs Shift selection methods and this three year old problem is laid to rest.

How can it be that she knows about Ctrl-Select but not Shift-Select? .. Or that over the past few years nobody has caught it?