(no subject)

[crankyholly.livejournal.com]

I am in tect support for Insert name of major cable company here.

Last night, a customer (Let's call him... Dickwad X) called in regarding his email timing out. He's using OE and Outlook. He's running a router and firewalls. The email was sending sometimes and sometimes not. Dickwad X had already called in today, and the previous tech told him that since he could telnet in and go through webmail it wasn't anything wrong with our servers. Very very true. The guy called back, I send him an email and he replies to it through our webmail.

"Sir, our servers are up and running. Normally, I'd say there's something corrupt with in outlook and OE, or there's a conflict with your firewalls. The first is very unlikely since it's on both computers."

"No your servers are down."

"Sir, all of our email runs off of the same server, if that were the case, we would have hundreds of calls in queue."

He argued with me for 30 minutes that it was our shit and not his!

Finally, I kept repeating, "Our servers are running and you can send and recieve email from the webmail. There is nothing else I can do for you."

Fuckers.

Comments

Christopher Columbus Problem?

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

If the MTU is set wrong at the router or firewalls, fragmentation will occur and varying latency could sometimes cause a timeout, especially with SMTP.

IIRC, most WAN connections have an MTU of 1500, same as Ethernet, but PPPoE based links are limited to 1492. Hence the nickname "The Christopher Columbus Problem."

[prozacnation.livejournal.com]

This is where my supe doesn't understand why my call time is sometimes high each night. I got the "the others receive the same calls." Maybe they hit the release button and I don't.

I swear I get ALL the email calls like this that take 30-40 minutes to explain to the 75 year old asshole from Florida or Colorado that it's not us it's them and that they are typing in something wrong into the mail settings.

One woman I got on the phone was 75 years old (kept saying it to me over and over again) and was trying to configure Entourage on her mac which she had no clue how to use.

I was just following along on an interactive site on how to configure it.

She said her son was able to send and receive and now she couldn't and it's obviously our fault and was getting snotty because I was going to fast in saying the instructions on how to set it up. If she didn't repeat everything I said five times in a row and then say she was 75 years old, I'm sure she could comprehend the process.

Then she went on to tell me about how she moved into a new house and cut her leg up and hasn't been to see a doctor...blah blah blah...just concentrate on doing the mail. If she was tired and hurt from the leg then why did she call us?

At the end of the call she started to get snarky with me (I don't think I mentioned this was the day after christmas) and said that she had to get her email for her ministry...as she and her husband were ministers or something.

I said that we can help her with the mail settings, however if they are not working, we don't service the product. If she can receive email through webmail, then we can no longer help her.

She ended the call with a snarky "whatevah"...and I gave her the reference number to call back when she felt better.

Christmastime
Ministers
Ministry
Snarky

I think I'm missing something here. O_o