Relay!

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but I'm a hater on Relay calls.

Pretty much anyone can use the relay service. Perhaps I'll be evil on April Fools Day, and call my friends with the relay. Haha.

No seriously, I still hate relay service. Anyone feel anything on the relay service? Hate, love, head-desking?

Comments

[das-prompt.livejournal.com]

I'm torn. On one hand, yeah, they're a pain in the ass. But really, it's hard to blame the person for being deaf. It's like a bus driver complaining about having to pick up wheelchairs. It's extra work, but what else is the person supposed to do?

In practical application, I usually only complain about relay calls when they make me late, or the person is a general asshole behind interpreter. You know, "blah blah blah, shitty customer, and to top it off it was a relay call."

[kailiia.livejournal.com]

i sometimes have to deal with the recieving end of relay calls. my help desk works with phone repair and adsl support.. so you can imagine the issues there... the plus side is that they are usually completant typists so the actaul caller (not the relay analyst) doesnt make too much of a stink about commands or finding files. my own personal head desk though came froma a translated relay call. yup thats right.. original call was placed in relay for cantonese assitance and then through a translator for me.
so there was the person with the adsl network issue.
her relay operator
their translator
and me.. working on one issue for a good 2 hours with all the time take to send one sentance back and forth. (this kind of situation usually only take about 10 minutes to fix)

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't blame the person for being disabled at all...I guess I'm just frustrated tonight because I've had 7 in a row tonight.

7...

It's making my call time look horrible.

Oh well, I guess it was just the circumstances tonight. Perhaps someone is screwing with me...

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

Oh wow! Looks like I need to stop complaining then. :)

[prozacnation.livejournal.com]

Absolutely hate them!

The first thing they type in is "I want a tech to come out here and fix my computer! go ahead!"

Every single one I have also uses the "I'm deaf and I need a tech out here today!" excuse when trying to troubleshoot. That has nothing to do with whether you can unplug your modem from the power.

I'm sorry, I never had a good experience with a relay call. They are still equated with the regular customers who are assholes.

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

It's only a PITA to me when people that we KNOW have no verbal communications problems call in just to be pains in the asses, like they just found out about IPrelay.com and are screwing around.

Most of the people that use them have backup dialup connections, so usually I just give them my AIM screen name (one with the company name in it, it looks official) and just do it that way. It's easier and the customer usually appreciates it.

[basildestiny]

At the new job, I don't have a problem with them. But I'm doing customer service with almost zero troubleshooting needed.

However. When I worked tech support, I hated relay calls too. The people on relay calls were the rudest people I'd ever "spoken" to. The interpreter would cuss me out with no remorse, almost enjoying being able to cuss at me. I had several that escalated the call for no reason at all. It was indeed, like people were just screwing around with IPrelay.com or something.

[kedemel.livejournal.com]

Headdesking.

Headdesking.

Got stuck on an hour long relay call once - uggggh. And the relay operator was completely computer-illiterate, so things ended up garbled.

[tsutton.livejournal.com]

Dude, that's so wrong.

I use it all the time as I am deaf. I find your post offensive toward Deaf people.

How are we supposed to communicate with other people then?

[taleya.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with it, unless the relay operator is being a jackass (and I've had THAT happen)

Actually reamed the bitch in question out.

Apart from that, best one I had actually changed three relay operators. Also clocked the phone system on that call....

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Email? IM? IRC, ICQ, AIM, webforum? Pre-selecting a relay service with operators who aren't half an evolutionary level above sponges? Having some kind of backup or emergency plan in place, one that doesn't rely on simply hoping you don't get the operator who evolved from a wild banana?

It's bad enough trying to communicate basic concepts to direct callers. Having a third party in the loop whose only job is to degrade and scramble the information in both directions can never turn out well.

Fortunately for me, our organisation is large enough to have incoming teletype numbers, and most of our callers will either have one of three different chat/remote clients operational, or can grab a colleague to make the call. And yes, I have told near-deaf callers on the phone to go and get a co-worker so I could stop yelling the instructions down the line.

I've had relay calls. The operator was so far out of his depth that I switched the caller into IM immediately and hung up. Only to find out, of course, that they had the typing and conversational skills of a dead chipmunk. I even got a mild warning for dumping the IM log straight into the ticket log, as my boss seemed to be under the impression that it was my fault if a caller made themselves look like an illiterate idiot. Pfft.

But still, it was better than having to go through an operator whose neurons were apparently running at the speed of cheese.

I've had deaf callers, blind callers, callers with one arm (try doing a Novell reset with only one hand sometime, ouch), callers with accents they must have imported from the Old Country for the occasion, stutterers, gabblers and the terminally forgetful. I'll make allowances to get the job done, but I will not play let's-pretend-I-can-plow-through-this-on-automatic and drag out a call by two hours just so I can feel politically correct. I'm too old for that kind of crap, and so are most of my callers.

[kerberos.livejournal.com]

Had that once.

The deaf guy wanted shellacces and was wondering what kindoff shells we where offering.

It was ooh so much fun to get the relayguy to type in /bin/csh /bin/ksh /bin/tcsh. 8)

[dkphoenix.livejournal.com]

What the_s_guy said. The problem is trying to communicate what may be very technical information through an intermediary who may or may not even be able to spell the words.

When I worked support we strongly, strongly encouraged callers using the relay service to email instead. It invariably went quicker, and left all parties involved much happier. (It was a small desk, and I handled all the email, so when I knew one was coming through in advance, I'd sit on the refresh button.)

[dkphoenix.livejournal.com]

(try doing a Novell reset with only one hand sometime, ouch)

I feel your pain. I had to attempt to talk someone through reloading the firmware on a notoriously touchy switch once, via relay operator. It wasn't pretty.

[tsutton.livejournal.com]

Yes, I always use emails/web form as possible. But not all companies have website/internet and they are only available by phone.

>>The operator was so far out of his depth that I switched the caller into IM immediately and hung up. Only to find out, of course, that they had the typing and conversational skills of a dead chipmunk.<<

That's taking too far by calking them "dead chipmunk". Deaf people do not use English as their first language (like me) - they use sign language as first language before developing English in school/college.

I am assuming you (and others) have never taken an Deaf Awareness course? If so, I suggest that you raise the issue with your boss to have a quick course on Deaf Awareness - you will learn a lot that you did not know.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Given that the caller in question was holding down a government job at the time which required almost constant reading, writing and computer use - yes, I would expect him to be able to spell basic words in IM chat.

I'm aware that the various sign languages (and yes, I know there are many different ones, as well as their assorted grammatical structures, ability to indicate tenses and other modifiers via body positioning etc) have little relation to most purely verbal/written languages. Yes, it is a whole different structure. But deaf or not, this guy would have had to do a lot of communicating in (written/typed) English every day for years to get to the position he was in.

Fortunately for him, most of our Executive corps and middle management also have the communication skills of a retarded chihuahua, so he'd be well down the list of "people to demote for being unable to type at a kindergarten level".

(OK, he wasn't as bad as online gamers. But it was still irritating, especially as I was expecting someone who'd initiated a teletype call to be able to, you know, type.)

[kallell.livejournal.com]

Stop looking to be offended. Just because someone is disadvantaged doesnt prevent them from being an asshole. Also just because someone uses a service for the disadvantaged does not mean that they endure that disadvantage.

The OP didnt even insinuate that his issue was with the deaf, but that the relay service calls and even mentioned that half the problems are from those that dont need it. The_S_Guy was discussing certain individuals not "every deaf person".

Lets stop the PC BS and take the statements at face value instead of OMG he said that about someone different from him, he must hate them all!

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Did you know they get paid more than I do? Ugh.

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

No, I don't have a problem with the disabled. I just found it strange to have 7 in a row. 7 relay calls in a row.

[spacebird.livejournal.com]

Headdesking. I only get about one a month, thank God, but every one I have gotten has been with a deaf person who could not type. As the relay person had to relay exactly what was typed, the conversations went something like this:

"Now I need you to type in the IP address, XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. Go ahead."
"Do I ned to ethnet wire inside the CPU? Go ahead."
"Yes, you must leave the ethernet cord plugged in or this won't work. Go ahead."
"But for I wireless was wanted. No need wires. Go ahead."

In these cases, not only was the customer a dumbass, but he could barely type so I needed to decrypt a lot of what was said, and on top of that the added time of relay... yeah, not a big fan of these calls.

[(Anonymous)]

wow. i think the most i ever had was 2 in one month.

I usualy didn't mind them cause handle time was thrown out the window.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

I went through 6 or 7 operators in one call once. they get to switch off for their breaks. Damn I need to be in a union too.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Operators "don't need" to hold state in their head - in theory, they are all perfect interchangable translators and could swap out from one sentence to another without anyone being the wiser.

Techsupport, on the other hand, needs to hold state (usually not quite as badly as programmers, as we can flush the buffer between calls). Swapping in another tech would only work if the new tech scanned your to-the-moment log (and you'd included everything you'd done) and then took over. If you've been troubleshooting for an hour or two, that's a lot of state to absorb.

What would be nice would be access to an out-of-band channel to the operators, so we could upgrade their mental programming and knowledge separately from what we're relaying to the caller ("Are you using Unix, [OOB] that's U-N-I-X, Unix [/OOB]". Or at least determine if a given operator has basic protocols (knowing various punctuation mark names etc). If nothing else, I'd like to be able to drop the operator into and out of a "raw char" mode where they really do act like dumb terminals, allowing me to craft the exact string they're typing.

"OK caller, you'll need to type the following CHARMODE newline charlie delta space charlie colon backslash tango echo mike papa newline ENDCHARMODE and press the Enter key. Go ahead."