techrecovery | (no subject) (Reply)

So yesterday all the people who are no longer affiliated with the university had all their accounts disabled, as per a notice that was sent out a month ago, three weeks ago, two weeks ago, last week, and yesterday. This means if you check your university email regularly and are on the disable list, you would have gotten FIVE emails, once per week, warning you that your account would be shut off as of midnight last night, and giving you helpful links about how to back up your email somewhere else and other important stuff.

So of course all the people who ignored or deleted those emails (aka "didn't ever get them") are calling us today going WTF WHY ARE YOU DISABLING ME?? NO ONE TOLD ME!!! etc.

This is one of those times when customers lie their asses off and whine at us.

"I never got that email." Yes, you did, you probably just didn't read it.
"Well, I remember some emails like that but I thought they were just notices so I deleted them." They WERE notices, which you are supposed to read for important information, dumbass.
"Since I never got it, can you turn my account back on since it's your fault that no one told me?" No, we can't turn it back on. Our job today is to take your call and tell you who to email to get temporary access so that you can back up your account stuff.
"But I'm doing important research for an important professor and he'll kill me if I can't log in to campus sites and do this work!" Your professor got these notices, too, and should have contacted us way ahead of time if he knew you'd need your account still.
"But you guys are the computer guys. Just turn it back on for like an hour and then disable it again." We can't do that. All we do is tell you who to contact to get it done. We don't actually have access to turn accounts on and off at will.
"Are you stupid? My email account's disabled! How can I send them email to turn it back on?" Try hotmail? What century do you live in that you just have one and only one email account (the university's) that you relied on for life and death? Remember the email outages last month, the ones you called to whine about? BAck then we suggested setting up alternate email accounts with Hotmail for just this reason. I even gave one of you a Gmail invite code.

To make things more complicated, they decided to do this during Thanksgiving week, which means they left us all alone. The people who actually can turn the accounts back on, the ones we have to tell customers to email, are GONE for the week. That means in addition to telling customers I can't help them and they'll have to contact these other people, I get to hear them whining about how long it's going to take. It's Thanksgiving week. None of the offices except us tech support peons are open. No, I can't tell you how soon after they get back on Monday they can fix your problem. No, I don't have the authority to tell your professor/boss that he should extend your project deadline from Monday to a week later. You tell him.

This "didn't get the warning emails" is getting old. I know for a fact that every person whose account was disabled was emailed. If the emails bounced back, the system account administrators made sure that person was notified by other means. EVERY SINGLE PERSON was contacted about this, more than once, a month in advance. READ YOUR EMAIL PEOPLE. Calling too late because you think we can press a button Just For You to fix your problem isn't how it works.

crossposted to customers_suck.