techrecovery | Feb. 18th, 2009

just customer care for an ISP. Here in Ireland we had some pretty severe (for a small damp island) weather in early February, and the vast majority of our wireless internet services were adversely affected, so we had a lot of calls that went like this:

Caller: Why isn't my internet working?

Me: That's because of the weather.

Caller: Ah, that's grand so.

And then there was one one that went like this:

Caller: Why isn't my internet working?
(Please note, he has our cheapest, most basic internet service, good for web browsing and not much else. The chances of him knowing more about our network than our network operations team are slim.)

Me: That's because of the weather.

Caller: I don't think that's the case.

Me: No, really, it is.

Caller: Well it doesn't stop working in rain, and rain is heavier than snow!

Me: o.O No, really, the weather has caused problems all over the country... (Biting tongue to stop from asking where he got his degree in radio engineering, since he knows so much.)

Caller: (triumphantly) Well how do you know that's what's caused my problem if I'm the first one to call in about it?!

Me: You're not... we've had lots of calls from your area. It's been investigated by our network operations team. They say it's the weather.

Caller: Well I don't see why that should be!

Me: Fine. I can transfer you to tech support (so they can tell you the exact same thing...)

I felt rather sorry for the poor tech he ended up talking to. Why does someone who calls their ISP to ask why their internet connection is down then accuse them of misleading them when the ISP answers their question?

What did he expect? That we'd say "Oh, you saw through our clever lie! Yeah, your internet connection doesn't work becuse we went out to the highsite and smashed it with hammers. Just to annoy you, because we hate out customers and are evil." Gobshite!