Dear god, she's back

[snarl817.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, I talked to a VERY stupid customer. I mean STOOPID. Now, you should understand, I don't do Windows support or any kind of desktop support...I support enterprise UNIX servers. This customer needed some documentation. I couldn't get her to find the document on our webpage, so I emailed her the link to the pdf file.

She calls back. She can't get the link to work. Not because the website was inaccessable (I should know, I sshed into my server at home and was able to wget the file), but because she was too stupid to figure out how to copy the link from the email and paste it into her browser window. I got tired of trying to explain it, so I download the file and email it to her.

It takes her 2 days to figure out how to open the file.

A few days later, she calls back. She wants me to convert the PDF document to Microsoft Word format because she can't figure out how to get Acrobat to print. Her comment abou it was, "Nobody uses Acrobat, they ALL use Word. [You] should have your documentation in Word format instead." When I told her that she needed to refer PC desktop support questions to whomever provides PC desktop support for her company, she argued with me.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot query.

One of my coworkers eventually talked to her, and he wound up transferring her to a manager because he was unable to work with her. I'm not sure HOW she got her job, but I really want to believe that it somehow involved her being on either her back or her knees, because NO manager can possibly be so bad as to knowingly hire someone that incompetant, and keep them employed. My coworker checked the database, and discovered that in a 3 year period, she's called in on accounts from 5 different companies.

Well, she's back. Her call is sitting in the queue and I flat out REFUSE to talk to her. She's seeing errors from 5 days ago and wants to know why, but doesn't understandwon't accept the answer the previous techs have given her.

Comments

[jecook]

Yep.

I have, at this very moment, a ticket rotting away in my queue. I'm waiting for the customer to get back to me on the information I requested from her, so I can forward it to the network admins.

That was almost a month and a half ago. I think I'll send a follow up email and close the ticket if I don't hear back.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I'm sure her title is something odd, like "Network Administrator"

Yes, I've met some that bad.

[tecie.livejournal.com]

I've started resorting to odd analogies to get people to stop asking windows questions (I'm a UNIX admin as well) --
"I can drive a car very well but I'd have trouble pilotting a zeppelin" is something I used today to make them understand that I don't deal with end users or their issues for precisely the reasons you listed above.
I'm almost thinking there should be some sort of licensing course to operate a computer. Something like -- oh I don't know -- TRAINING for new employees rather then telling them to call the helpdesk or find some schmuck who looks like a computer geek. They certainly waste enough of our time telling us not to make other people uncomfortable and not to physically harm one another.
Maybe it will become a reality when people start suing for massive security breaches because some executive installed spyware on their machine and was able to get around it because the idiot network admins were afraid to tell them no.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

In all fairness, in most larger shops and contracting firms, resumes and CVs are handled by someone whose job description is more HR than IT. Unless you're sending something directly to another tech in the potential employer, RTF or W97-compatible DOC is the default way to go.

And while having a direct channel to the relevant IT area would allow much more efficient communication, most places will make HR the first stop for policy/admin reasons, and because often the IT managers don't want to have to wade through the utter crap that is the CVs of the bottom 75% of applicants.

Consider it a basic intelligence test - can you fashion a series of bytes which will get your data past the HR firewall?

CV bollocks

[gev.livejournal.com]

even when I was on the job market, I never sent a resume that wasn't .txt.
if plain text wasn't good enough for them, I didn't need to work there.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Her call is sitting in the queue and I flat out REFUSE to talk to her.

We were fortunate enough to have a cop-out option, in that if a (corporate) user became a black hole of stupid and fail, one of our middle managers would be assigned to handle all further correspondence. At least one user was told that they were no longer allowed to contact the helpdesk directly, and why, and the reasons were cc:ed to their manager.

They did have to really work at it to achieve this level of response, though. Normal levels of stupid didn't cut it. It had to be something that ate operators' brains and continued for at least some months before it would get looked at.