Phone Message

[dpaul007.livejournal.com]

We're getting bombarded with calls this morning due to a production server going belly-up.

Our team lead just put up the newest phone message detailing the outage. Always the cynic, I predict the starfish won't pay a bit of attention.

However, liakela, who sits next to me, came up with the best phone message evar:

"Thank you for calling the ******* ****** Help Desk. Goodbye."

Comments

[liakela.livejournal.com]

You need to get out your Mr. Rogers voice and say, "Ok people! Time to put on your listening ears! Can you do that? I knew you could!"

[thatvoiceguy.livejournal.com]

By the time enough frantic calls have been made, the outage verified, and the front-end message put up,

every

single

user

has called in, wanting to know if there's a "problem with the e-mail" and that "I figured I'd call just in case no one else did."

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

your team lead must be a hawtie

[snoopyh42.livejournal.com]

Whenever we'd have an outage when I worked in a call center, I started answering the phone, "Thank you for calling $COMPANY Tech Support. We are currently experiencing an outage on all our mail servers. Does this address the problem you are calling for today?" MOST of the time, people got it because it was a different voice from the automated system, but a few still blustered on through.

[jecook]

Heh. I used to carry my company's after hours cell phone, and also took after hours support calls on same.

The client that was paying us to do that decided to change T-1 providers, and gave us all of 48 hours notice. This was for ~12 sites, all using T-1 and public IP space, with each site havinga full class C (and at least one of them having two.

Fortunately, we managed to get the PBX we had just put in programmed to act as a firewall for me ( and provided instructions to each site on how to change the first three octets of their IP address, but I still got slammed with over 70 calls the first night. After the first one, I stopped answering the phone, and in fact, turned the ringer off, and just started checking the voice mail once an hour or something.

I demanded hazard pay if that client pulled it on us a second time, and made the CFO cry after getting my Overtime amounts.

[200iso.livejournal.com]

my ISP had a message like that a couple weeks ago.
"we are currently experiencing an outage in the downtown area. if this addresses your problem, please hang up"

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

You would think a message on the phone would make you hang up, but noooo...people still have to talk to me. I hate when they still have to talk to me, but i'm like you. Quick call time because of it.

Phone Message

[lackland.livejournal.com]

I liked "thank you for calling customer care our new support number is (hang up). it makes for short call times

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

I get this a lot. Usually, I know when something has messed up before the folks who maintain it do.

I've taken to answering the phone, letting them introduce themselves and saying things like 'Hi. Are you having trouble with X program today?' before they get further than their name. This has been known to provoke laughter, fortunately.

I work internal support. You'd think these people would talk to each other, but no.... I've gotten phone calls from people that I know have offices next to one another.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Five years ago, each of our 400+ offices had a tech officer. Part-time only, true, but it meant that 40% or so of their time could be spent on tech problems. They got training, manuals, emergency contact numbers, the works. Everyone in the office knew they had to talk to this person first about any computer problems.

Fast-forward five years. The funding for these tech positions has evaporated. The training is non-existent. The helpdesk, instead of taking necessary calls from 400 trained techs, is taking calls from twenty-five thousand staff who can't tell their computer from a bowl of fruit salad.

The amount of time wasted by all these people waiting in the phone queue for calls that are resolved by 'reboot' alone would probably pay for those 400 techs, with a couple of bucks left over for training the end-users.

But reinstating the office techs would be an admission of failure on the managers' part. So instead, my days are filled with goober calls.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

Mgt likes to throw money at bad ideas in hopes that they can make them work.

[infy.livejournal.com]

Someone down the line has gotten this remarkable idea that calling the helpdesk is a hell of a lot cheaper than actually bothering to train the basics to their staff.

Unfortunately, this is technically true. Since the cost of the helpdesk is prenegotiated and budgeted ahead of time (at least where I work), we'll continue to get these people who would be better off writing up their spreadsheet in the fruit salad. "No, ma'am, you'll need to contact the Dole helpdesk...can't help you. Have a nice..**click**"