My own silliness

[taii.livejournal.com]

Thought I'd share a silly moment I had about a year ago on a previous helpdesk I worked on...

I was taking a call from a user abroad, and as such we were authorised to VNC on to their PCs so we could view and - if necessary - take control of the PC for the user.
So, I was chatting away, watching what the user was doing and then she had to run off to do something.
While she was away, I went to set my phone so, if her line was accidentally disconnected, I wouldn't pick up another call. Instead of hitting the AUX button, I accidentally hit release.

Oh, shi!

I sit for a few seconds, wondering what the hell to do, as I hadn't taken a contact number yet.

I looked at my PC, and realised I had her PC session open in front of me. So, I hit her start button and opened up Notepad.
And I typed:
"Sorry, accidentally hung up on you. What's your contact number?"

Few seconds later, the number gets typed back in and I call her back.


The 2nd level had a good laugh at my expense when I told him what I did.
He thought it was a great idea, though

Comments

[thalionar.livejournal.com]

great recovery! :)

[jecook]

::claps::

Excellent recovery. I award you 5 gold points.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Good job! :) I've done that several times.

[koryweb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the place I work uses PCAnywhere primarily, although we will use RDP or VNC from time to time.

Over the years notepad has been employed to communicate to the customer. I actually teach that method to newbies if they get stuck without being able to talk to the customer. PCAnywhere also has a chat feature where you can open a chat window between the remote and host PCs. Very helpful.

Also, if a client wants you to dial in, fix whatever, and just disconnect, it's nice to leave them a message indicating you're done using notepad as well.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

we use vnc/pcanywhere and notepad when we have the people from italy working on our machines remotely(we are in canada)

the drawback is their primary language is italian, and they type at about 2-3 words a minute sometimes.

i've been known to walk around the plant and come back and they'll still be working on the same paragraph.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I've had some amusing moments with calls taken via the National Relay Service (a human-in-the-middle text <-> speech services for helping the deaf communicate via phones).

In a recent example, the NRS operator appeared to be having a hard time of it translating the caller's typing and putting my techspeak into words, so I got enough information to IM the caller directly and dropped the NRS out of the loop.

I was then I discovered that the caller had the same typing speed and spelling ability as the average AOL chatter.

Possibly I'm easily amused (hell, I KNOW I am), but I had been expecting that someone who was (a) deaf, and therefore more likely to communicate more via text, and (b) employed in a job that needed a lot of typing anyway, would be able to completely blow past me in raw typing speed, if nothing else.

Oh well. At least I saved the NRS operator half an hour of mental pain, and I could cut-n-paste the IM buffer directly into my log... which I got chewed out for later, but that's another story.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

I am deaf myself, I've been using computers for about 24 years now(i'm 29)

I used to type a lot faster than I do now, but I'm getting old. My top speed was about 70-80wpm. Now that I'm geriatric, I'm in the 50's or so, and my accuracy isn't 100% anymore.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I found IRC to be the best typing speed booster around, although you really do have to find a channel or two that's not only interesting (a Herculean task in itself), but doesn't run too fast to contribute or two slow to help.

Hmm, that reminds me - less than four months to my decade-of-IRCing day. I should buy a little cake, or something.

[taii.livejournal.com]

IRC greatly increased my typing speed, also taught me to touch-type a bit.
However, although I'm faster at typing, I'm probably slower at getting sentences out because I actually make more typos.
My most common being 'thoguh' [which I intially spelt right there... dammit]

The hard task is not the interesting - it's finding one where they use proper english :)
I'm at about 5 years of IRC, personally

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

about a month to mine, first found it in very early september, 1995.

now i'm a regular in 30 channels on 4 networks.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Damn, that's impressive. I've only ever been a regular on four channels, and one of those is dead and buried.

[servermonkey.livejournal.com]

Nice save.

I've run into a similar jam myself a couple of times here and there.

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

I, too, remember using notepad to communicate with a customer.

I had control of his machine via SMS, and his machine is nowhere near a phone. He was using his cell, and it died on him.

... he typed soooo slow!

[nightsinger.livejournal.com]

That's awesome. Props to you.

I would sure love to be able to take control of my lusers' phones the way you can a computer!

[caponex.livejournal.com]

The ISP I work for uses GoToAssist (10 geek points if you can guess which ISP I work for!) and I've been on a call and session with a customer when their cell dies/they accidentally hang up/whatever. Notepad has come in handy, tho my level doesn't do callbacks, so I've had to put in something like "Your call dropped! I can't call you back, as we are inbound calls only, but looks like your issue is fixed. Thank you for calling !"