why oh why.

[miharu.livejournal.com]

Have any of you worked with other techs that perhaps shouldn't have been hired to do tech support? Either for being just plain rude or as dumb as a bucket of rocks?



I work with a lady that's been at the help desk here longer than anyone else in the department, even our supervisor. She's an older lady, probably in her 60's, and I had heard that the reason she was hired was because of a discrimination lawsuit that had been pending at the time she applied. That may or may not be true but I can't say it would surprise me: she still refers to notes for commands and aliases that we have set up with our internal system that we all type probably about a zillion times a day - and like i said, she's been here for at least five years. Half of the time she's really good with customers, mostly because she can speak to them in a way that they can easily understand. The other half of the time, I'm shocked to hear how sharply and mean she talks to the customers. I applaud her effort to try to plunge headfirst into technology and her attempt to help other people out and I suppose that it's nice to not be the sole female in the department. However, it's usually like the legally blind leading the completely blind when she's on the phone. A couple of weeks ago she was trying to explain to a customer the different account options we have (dialup, DSL, wireless) and she insisted to the customer that DSL was not broadband because it 'comes through the phone line.' I really wanted to explain to her the difference between narrowband and broadband when she was done with the call but I didn't want to argue the point with her in case she didn't believe me. It's not a huge point, but when you're arguing with a customer looking for help about whether or not DSL is broadband and just confusing them further, it doesn't seem like a terribly good idea to me.

Comments

[ngtmagicks.livejournal.com]

I currently work with this one guy. He was introduced as the big mac guru here, and in listening to him, it's all different.
He has this amazing ability to be condesending, rude, and he interupts the customers all the time. He makes snide comments after or during the call on mute, and in general is not an easy person to deal with when he is on the phone. Yet for all that, once a day he's really, nice, hit's all the QM stuff, and get's 100's on his shopper reports...Derrrrr..
Yet this guy, can't explain the difference visually between a mac classic desktop and OSX, nor can he without referring to notes check some of the basic things like what version of IE the person has, on any system.

[hoffman-log.livejournal.com]

Where do you work? Because I'm currently looking for a job, and if idiots like this can work there, I can't help but think that I could be their F*&%in' supervisor...

_MaH

[miharu.livejournal.com]

i think they're keeping her around as a liability case until she gets her degree in a few weeks. after that, hopefully it will be idiot-free around here.

if you want to relocate for 7/hr to start, i'll tell you where i work ;p

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

Funny, at this DotCom I worked for before the fall, I became the Mac Guru even though I'd known nothing about MacOS when I was hired because I: A) learned really fast when we started to support Macs, and B) the previous Mac Guru was just like the one ngtmagicks described, except ours didn't get anywhere near 100% score, and I did.
At this DotCom we had a woman in our customer service pool who was even worse. We were a free ISP that offered only dial-up, so how hard could customer service be? Too hard for her. After her second time through our 1 week CS training program she still couldn't find here way around the very basic system CS used. My boss had me side-by-side with her & monitor remotely for a shift and then evaluate her. My God, she barely knew what the internet was. Somebody would ask if their brand of modem was supported, and instead of referring to the requirements listed on our intranet she's escalate the call to tier 1 support, which ment another 20-30 minute wait on hold for the customer. My evaluation included the comment that whoever hired her should be re-evaluated as to their ability to qualify job candidates. Unfortunately, one of the team leads jumped the gun and told her off calling her a stupid bitch right before the call center director called her in to his office to fire her. When she sued for discrimination the team lead was canned, but we were stuck with her. Internal support hated here more than we did. I know Windows has issues, but she broke her's at least every other week and IS had to come by and restore her image.

So the situation was resolved by promoting her to a team leader position. Yeah, she got the title 'team leader' but the team she was now supervising were the folks from a temp agency we had doing CD order fulfillment. Previously we supervised them by rotating which of us techs got the shift off the phones to watch them. Of course, when they offered her the promotion, they didn't mention they were already planning on outsourcing that function. So a month later they out-sourced CD fulfillment and cut the temps lose, and since they didn't need a team leader for the temps anymore... That was one problem solved.

[daerlyn.livejournal.com]

All the freakin' time. Just before I started working at my company (about seven months now), they switched over from seperate agents for billing/c-serv and tech support to 'unified agents'.

So we have people in our office (mostly female agents, sadly enough, but there are a few guys) who needed to be trained in tech from the ground up. Still, we do dial-up and DSL, it's not like it's that hard. But I can point out at least one agent that I was cleaning up after on a regular basis before I moved to graveyard, because she still can't remember how to trash the prefs in Mac 0S 9.1. Another who's been on project work for the last month (that the graveyard shift takes care of once the wheels have been set in motion, changing plans for clients and the like), who has gotten so many errors due to this alone and created so much extra work for what is, when you get right down to it, actually a billing deal! You know, the thing you were originally hired for over a year ago! How do you not get this yet? She's dumb as brick in her personal life too, though.

*pant pant pant* Whew. Okay, I'm better now, sorry.

[liquidmercurial.livejournal.com]

I had a call yesterday where the tech had removed a bunch of stuff from device manager but didn't log what it is he removed, and then suddenly this customer's computer couldn't boot. He logged that after he removed "some stuff" from device manager, the customer couldn't boot, and that he was transferring it to tier 2. When I got it, I marched over to my supervisor and told him I was going to gauge that tech's eyes out. I then went over and asked him what he had removed and he said, "Only the usb device."
I said, "Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"So all you removed was our usb device?"
"Yes"
So I started to walk away and then he says, "And an ethernet card."
I turned, "So you removed our usb device AND an ethernet card. ANYTHING ELSE?"
"No, but his computer won't boot now."
I just turned and walked away thinking, "Right, that's all you removed... And why the hell would you remove a NIC when it's a problem with a usb device ?!?!?!?!"
Needless to say, this isn't the FIRST time this tech has fucked up. Luckily, I got that guy's computer to boot again and is online, but if I ever get an escalate from him again, he's going to die.

[nomad316.livejournal.com]

i have seen my share of bad techs.we had one trash the customer's Tcp/ip and apple talk control panel's and empty the trash to top it off the EU did not have the OS cd.from there he said i cant do much with you I'm sending you to level 2 for help.one other tech comes to mind was this this one tech that would make up stuff he told one of our satellite customer that a corona broke off the sun and crashed into the earth near her home and thats why her dish does not work.and for some reason our QA dept never fired him.

[mayna.livejournal.com]

hahah *wipes tear from eye* that's hysterical...