From an old journal entry of mine

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Hi, everyone.  I work in tech support and have done so for the past five years.  Here's one of my favorite calls from 2002:

CALL OF THE DAY:

Client: Yeah, there is a printer here that needs more toner, and I was wondering, do I do that through you guys?

Me: (checks site documentation) Yes, we do take care of that for you. I can write a ticket. I just need to know what type of printer it is, the make and model.

Client: It's an X-RON.

Me: (thinking I didn't hear him properly or that this is a brand I haven't heard of yet) An X-RON?

Client: Yeah. It says X-RON.

Me: All right, could you spell that for me, please?

Client: X - E - R - O - X.

Me: (totally not laughing because I am totally professional) Oh, a Xerox?

Client: (Dubious; he doesn't think I know what I'm talking about) I guess.

I finish creating the ticket and give him the number and tell him he will be contacted by the local people.

Client: So that will fix the X-RON?

Aaaaargh. I believe that's called "functionally illiterate". 

 

Yep, these are the people we hire.

x-posted to callcenter and customers_suck

Comments

[inahandbasket]

wow.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

hahahahahaha. so, i could see it being an ex-rox if he were seletively dislexic. love how people put random letters that don't exist in names.

[abstrak-tokatl.livejournal.com]

uhm.... uhm... how the hell does one go from Xerox to Xeron?.... i mean, not just stupidity, but there is no way i can see language change from "ox" to "on."

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Well, I could kind of see it if maybe one of the letters wasn't readable, but he actually said the letter X, and then Ron. Not even "Xeron" which I guess would be pronounced like "Zeron". He was a real genius. We get a lot of callers who can't read. And the fun thing is that I do internal tech support--the people who call me are all employed at my company, most of them doing jobs for which they get paid several times what I do.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

functionally illiterate? that describes the lady who took 45 minutes of my time needing help to type a colon : on her keyboard.

she kept typing an L and i had to thus go over many other keys like home, end, backspace....ugh

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Usually I've had people call that a "semicolon" or, more commonly, the "two-dots thing." A couple customers I had at Dell called it a "two-splat."

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Which one, the Anakin one? Feel free to use it if you want to. :) I only made it in MS Paint. Same with the Jodie Foster one.

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

"The eyes in the smiley face!"

[katyism.livejournal.com]

i can understand calling it "two dots" or some other visual descriptor. but it's not a semicolon! the semicolon is the one that is only partially a colon, and partially not (hence the name) and it's a different mark. ugh.

as a side note, i like telling people what the tilde is for the first time.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

They like to call it the semicolon because in their mind, a semicolon is a half-colon and therefore should take less ink to print. Since a semicolon is a "dot and a comma," that should be the colon, to them. I guess.

[jecook]

Heh. My big joke a few years ago was "I don't have a colon, I only have a semi-colon!".

Yeah, kiddie humor.

[residentgeek.livejournal.com]

I had to have a guy type an ftp address (a chore in itself) and my supervisor was standing over me when I had to explain what the colon was. It was all I could do to muffle her laugher and hold my own.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

people who can't find their way out of a cardboard box and call us for help can't read, can't think analytically, and can't properly communicate with the rest of the species

And managers wonder why we're disaffected :)

"But Bob, why don't you like working here?"

"BECAUSE YOU'RE SO GODDAM STUPID!"

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

Every day I ask myself "Why do people who can not read buy printers?"

I've had blind people call me too.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

I dunno; I'm guessing the printer was probably bought for the department by someone else and he was just using it to print his Outlook schedule for the day (we have thousands of employees here who just can't read their schedules on the computer and must print them out every day. ;)