Stupid Escalations....

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

So, after a lot of hard work, I was eventually moved up from the regular support floor to digital voice, and after a few months, bumped over to Level 2 support for the ISP I work for. It's been a long road, but I've worked hard to get there, and am happy for it.

One of the things our Level 2 support reps have to put up with [even though it is the manager's job] is to take customer escalations.... of course, this may be why we have around 4000 tickets in queue, because we keep doing everyone ELSE's jobs, but I digress.

So, I had the pleasure of taking one of those escalations the other day. The customer was calling in because of slow speeds on his internet connection. The level 1 support rep said the customer refused to troubleshoot with him, was downloading a movie and would not stop the download to run our speed tests, and absolutely refused to disconnect from his router.

I pretty much already figured out what the problem was before I took the call... but here we go.

Get the customer on the phone, and give him his two options - Stop the download and run our tests, or call us back when you are done downloading. There was a good, maybe ten to fifteen seconds of silence before the customer [and his wife in the background. I hate speakerphone] went on another tirade and finally pulled out another laptop and directly connected to our modem. What happened?

He was averaging 1.7 Mbps on a 1.5 Mbps connection. Gee.... why am I not surprised. Connected it back to the router [where the other laptop was still attempting to download movies and I later found out WOW updates, apparently]... his speed was now testing at half. Gee... I wonder.

Why are customers dumb, and why wont they listen to us the first time. I mean, sure not all our level 1's know what they are talking about, but why bother calling if you are not going to cooperate.

At the end of the call a screamed bellowed out from the background [frome one of the kids I could hear romping around], and the entire call broke down into a degrading digital static and the call dropped. I was half hoping the market had taken an EMP or something so I wouldn't have to deal with them for awhile. :P

Anyways...

On another completely unrelated subject... seems one of our markets went down for a day because, as is stated in the resolution ticket, "The US Air Force took out two GPS satellites. Issue has been resolved." I wonder exactly what they mean by "took out," but alas I can not seem to get an answer. :P

Joy.

charming...

[red-scully.livejournal.com]

Ugh, a user called me up at ten to five on Friday (I shouldn't even have been there, but I had to finish a rebuild for Monday morning and it was taking FOREVER), to say she had logged out and now couldn't log back in. She also said that she had a ticket open to have her shared drives changed on Monday morning because she's moving teams, so she wondered if this had caused the problem. Suspecting the work had already been done by $colleague, I had her check the context she was logging onto (I should clarify that I'm living in Novell hell right now) and compared it to her account, but all was fine and dandy; furthermore, there were no notes in the ticket to suggest the job had been done and she certainly still seemed to be mapped to her current job's shares.

The user then went on to say that $colleague had come round earlier and said something to her about the open ticket, but she didn't know what he'd told her. On a hunch, I asked her to try logging in with the standard password we use for resets, and SURPRISE, it worked just fine. I know that $colleague would never change someone's password without telling them first, so I asked her if he had mentioned that he would do this, and got the following gem of a response:

"Oh, I don't know. I didn't listen to him. We don't bother to pay any attention when you IT people start talking - it's not my job to understand that stuff."

I couldn't decide whether to rage or weep, so I basically told her that next time she might want to try LISTENING, and then stormed off home. OH LORD SAVE ME FROM THESE PEOPLE.