'nother question for the peeps

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I've told y'all about the current problems here. Not much has changed but I still don't care so, from a personal perspective at least, s'all good.

Anyway, due to this messy situation, we are having to lie to our customers about a lot of things. Webmail doesn't display HTML properly, so we send them browser maintenance docs (clear cache, remove proxy etc). The official wait time for escalations is 48 hours, but we know for a fact that it'll take at least a week for it to even be looked at.

Once upon a time I might have felt a twinge of conscience every time I sent a filthy document of lies and misinformation to a customer, now its par for the course.

Question: What is the most heinous lie you have ever been forced to tell customers? What did your managers or higher-ups tell you to tell them that raised your hackles and almost made you side with the customer? (almost)

Comments

[justsomegurl.livejournal.com]

I work for a phone company that bought out 2 other local ISP's. At first we were forced to deny any affiliation with our other companies to the point where the same person could call on 2 different numbers (1 for each of the companies) and get the same person and we have to pretend we are not the same person answering the phone at a different company.

Thank god that is over now. It is now public knowledge that company A bought companies b and c and soon we will all have the same phone number

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Hahah.. We have different queues for DSL and dial etc. When someone comes through on the wrong queue we are supposed to transfer them appropriately, even though we may be answering calls from both queues.

Once I transferred this guy, he wasn't happy about it, and I got him straight back. I had some sort of prescience, knew it was him before he said anything, so I answered the phone with an Irish accent. As the call went on my accent fluctuated wildly from Russian, Irish, Scottish, English etc. My supervisors were listening in and laughing at me.. Good times.. Good times..

[annamaryse.livejournal.com]

I worked for my last company doing second tier software support. Last year the new version was released with some major glitches, and users called having all sorts of problems. As policy, we acted as if this was rare, but in actuality it happened to many users. The software was so messed up - the more they tried to fix it, when they'd fix one issue, something else would 'break' and we would only find out when the calls started coming in. The strain was unbelievable.

During this same period of time, as volume increased, our ability to actually take care of our users diminished - a simple case of man-hours. The message I began to get from management was that they no longer cared, or they wanted us not to care any more.... and things just continued to go downhill.

I am so glad to be gone. It was very stressful.

[jecook]

I was lied to when I started my current position almost two years ago. they told me that I'd be full time in 3-6 months. 6 months later, and they not only lied to me, but dropped the pther part timer at the main office. I'm almost certain that the extra workload and stress killed my old boss (who was awesome, and frankly died too early).

Fortunately for me several things have happened since then:

Executive management has changed. The IT department here reports to the CFO (WHich is partially responsible for the "cheap" feeling of all the machines that I have to smack around on an almost monthly basis), and our old CFO (who was directly responsible, IMHO, for the lies earlier) is gone along with the CEO. Their replacements are more IT oriented, and are willing to prybar the budget for replaceing the five year old machines mentioned above.

I also have a manager with both a spine and as twisted a sense of humor that I do while he gets to deal with the Executive management. And he's one both my side, and on the end users side as well (Yeah, shock and horror!) He's also worked in the trenches, and has half a clue as how stuff should work. It took me more then a few months to warm up to him, but I think I like him.

[jecook]

As far as telling my users lies, I can't. The best thing I can tell them is that my boss has to pronouce judgement on it...

The above post raised my hackles up the most, because the machines I have to deal with still have labels from the Ark on them...

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, used to be I had a conscience too. It only took 2.5 years to beat it to death. I'm almost ready for middle-management!

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Its good having a direct supervisor you can rely on, not only for admin stuff but to have your back in potential disagreements with upper management. Lord knows I start enough fights with management to need one like that.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

It wasn't a lie I had to tell end-users, but it was a lie my supervisors were telling our customers.

I worked at an outsourcing company, where we took calls for other companies (our customers). Each agent (like me) was supposed to work on ONE customer's account.

They had me working on three. That meant they could charge all three customers the full price for my services, pay me for the work of one agent, and pocket the difference.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Man that sucks.. I would have been telling them that if they didn't reduce my workload they would have to pay me the equivalent of three paychecks..

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

I had no recourse. I was a dime a dozen. They would simply have fired me and hired someone else.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

That also sucks.

That's one good thing about the present situation. They aren't hiring any more staff and people are leaving pretty rapidly, so we can get away with almost anything.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a real sinking ship!

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. It's great!

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

*throws you a life raft, a paddle, and a waterproof margarita kit*

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Hahahah! Now THERE'S an idea.. I'm on grave. I think I might bring some liquor in tomorrow night.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

I won't tell! Now, if only there were a way to sneak a hookah in here...

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I like the way you think ;)

[klytus.livejournal.com]

The worst lie I've ever had to tell...

"I love my job!"

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

That's pretty heinous alright..

[shirenomad]

Telling all our clients that their webpages, already several months behind schedule, would be ready "soon"... when we were down to two employees and were desperately begging for cash seeking investors.

I got fed up after about two months of that and made it one employee. Never regretted it, even though I spent the next three months unemployed. A year later, I have no idea if anyone ever got their pages.

[harry-whodunnit.livejournal.com]

The last company I worked for had a policy that we couldn't tell customers there was an outage until we'd had it confirmed by the NOC, who were not only in a different building, they also worked for a different company.

Usually, they wouldn't get back to us in less than 48 hours, if they ever bothered to confirm at all. So the biggest lie I've had to tell, simply because it had to be repeated dozens of times in a day, is "We're not aware of any problems".

[methedras.livejournal.com]

I used to work with jahbulon as a technical supervisor, and constantly had to chase down faults with our parent company's NOCs in both the US and Hong Kong. *cough* MCI *cough*.

Though the company's policy was the same - "We wont put any updates on the ISP website regarding outages, even though our phones are running hot with people calling about an issue, and we wont put a message on the phone system until we have NOC/ROC confirm there is a fault and have waited roughly 4 hours for an update from them."

It was entirely frustrating, especially considering my main contact point was Hong Kong, and calling them continuously was painful as they barely spoke any english, and were completely non-committal.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

At least our new NOC speaks English. Makes the prank calls more interesting.

[methedras.livejournal.com]

Haha, what a novel concept, not having to sit and repeat yourself countless times over, yelling and screaming, to get those slackers to do anything.

[floatingpencil.livejournal.com]

"No, there are no known problems with [latest version of software]."

Lies, lies, lies. It doesn't become a 'known problem' until there's a fix for it, you see. Then its existence can be acknowledged.

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

I've done that too.

I also worked for a bank who didn't have compatible end user software for Windows XP. This was three years ago. 0_o People would - rightly, IMO - bitch and moan about it, and we had to lie and say it would be a "few weeks". When it was released on the site, it crashed the 486 the site was probably running off of and we had to lie and say it had been removed for "further testing". A week later people were calling in reporting dozens of bugs (random freezes, weird output etc etc etc) so the software was taken off again...

Wonder if they ever got their shit together?

PLUS: love the icon. Eliza Dushku is my future wife...

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Uhm, I should say the site crashed because so many people tried to download it at once...would have been even funnier if the software itself had put the site into meltdown. ^_^

[trayce.livejournal.com]

At one point in my current job, I had to deny we blocked any ports on the network at all. Even though we did, and for perfectly good reason (temporary blocks on known worm & trojan ports). A guy rang up complaining he couldnt run a MS SQL database, we had to deny everything, and then the damn senior noc said "oh yeah, forgot about that" and turned the blocks off anyway. Gah!

Last job, company hosted its own Unix websites but farmed NT ones out to w3bc3ntral to host. WHich was amusing when ex WC clients would come to us, claiming WC dicked them around, and we'd have to be creative in our stories about the "new" service theyd be getting...