Tag Archives: phone

I Guess ET Won’t Be Phoning Home

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Someone I used to work with once inadvertently taught a very valuable lesson to a new Linux user who they were on the phone with. He told the user to run a command to remove a directory with some files in it located in their home folder. They were already in their home folder, so he asked them to run:

rm -rf folder_with_files

The customer ran the command with an asterisk thinking they were being clever and saving themselves time typing.

rm -rf part_of_folder_name *

They meant to run something a bit different.

rm -rf part_of_folder_name*

That space meant that they were actually listing two things to delete:

1. A folder that didn’t exist, because the whole folder name was not typed out.
2. Everything else.

Since they were in their home directory, this wiped out their whole home folder.

Let this be a warning to new Linux users.

Rm doesn’t have an undo.

And listen to what you’re being told when you call support.

The Tech Support Callers Everyone Loves

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…and by loves, we mean we love that we have job security and can secretly feel superior. We remind ourselves this every day. It’s a mantra that keeps us going back to the phones no matter who we have to talk to.

Here is a short list of some of the regulars who call phone tech support. What a coincidence, these people call you too?

If you think you are one of these people, I assure you, the people who do these things know not what they do.

The Nommer
This guy waited until his lunch break to call you. How do you know? Because he’s nomming, slurping, and smacking in your ear. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, he pops a cough drop in his mouth and starts clicking it against his teeth in your ear.

“…click-clock-click …smnosh-smnosh… Yersh, Ihve jrest shent crunch… gulp… you an email with the error.”

The Ummer
This customer is characterized by uncontrollable verbal tics such as: “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”. We also have, “um”, “er”, “ah”, “like”, and ending every sentence as if it were a question. A lot of people sound smarter than they are, but these people never do.

“Er. Um… Uuuhhh… I have… like…. Ah. Veesta Ultimate?”

“Ummmm… I’m running… like… the newest one, Snow Leopards..?”

The Entitled User
When people are way too good to know anything about their own computer (or try to check for you), check system requirements, or take responsibility for messing something up (or at least not blame it on you), there is a good chance they are an Entitled User. There’s nothing you can do, say, or fix that will change that fact.

“Why do you make this so complicated? It should just work. What do you mean this won’t run on my computer? You have to support Windows 2000. I’m going to put you on hold. I need to reboot my computer.”

I use Vista, Have UAC Still Turned On, and the VOLUME PUMPED
I don’t know what the call is about yet, but I know it will be painful more due to the fact I have to listen to:

“BOM!”

every time I ask you to do anything.

Can You Hear Me Now?
This guy is jealous of your headset. He cannot type or use a mouse with one hand. He thinks that speaker phone works with his dog barking, children crying, and wife talking to him in the background.

Even better, he’s in traffic not even at his computer. How does he expect to troubleshoot the issue? I don’t know either.

“Noise”

Idiot Pirates (ur doin it rong)
“So… I downloaded this from a website and I can’t get it to work right. Yeah… I didn’t buy it. It’s the free version. I don’t know what pirating is and I don’t think I’m doing that, but my friend said there was this free version. So I went there and I downloaded it and now it doesn’t work. Can you help me?”

Conspiracy Theorist
This guy is super paranoid. You’re out to steal his identity, send him spam, break his computer, and take his money and still not get anything working. He is not going to give you the info you need to solve the problem. He wont even give email address so you can look up and see what he has or send him a fix. What he somehow doesn’t realize is that he’s already given you (the company you work for) all of his info. What he doesn’t know is that you’re trying to help him and his identity is not worth stealing (since apparently it’ll mean an ulcer).

If you get far enough, he might start letting you know what he thinks the issue *really* is and insist you should check into it. These will not be plausible theories, they will be somewhere in left field or even outer space.

“Why do you need my email address? No! I’m not giving that to you. As it is, your company’s website has already broken my computer.”

Yeah I Tried That. It Didn’t Work.
You’ll wrack your brain. You’ll troubleshoot until your brain bleeds. I, the customer, will then admit I didn’t actually do what you told me to about twenty minutes (or three emails) later. It’ll be fun. Whee.

“*Sigh* Ya… I did that already. Of course I did.”

When The Dinosaurs Were Old
“I remember when we didn’t even have computers. What start menu? What’s that? Slow down there… you’re going to have to repeat that. I’m not very computer savvy like you youngsters. You have to understand… *long unrelated story*. Wait, you don’t make this? I called the wrong number? Are you sure?”

“(horrified voice) I might need to upgrade!?”

Anger Management
I don’t know what’s wrong or how serious it is, but I’m angry and I need someone to blame. It’s not my fault, so guess who’s going to take the fall? I’m not interested in getting this working so much as ripping out your heart and eating it.

It’s not that the customer is always right, it’s that he or she HAS a right… that is the right to verbally abuse you.

“$%*&^%”

Phlirting

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Working tech support as a woman I think is mostly the same as for guys with a few very, very obnoxious, notable differences, one of the biggest being:

I get hit on. Yeah, over the phone. Ya, rly.

“So, where are you located? Oh. Really?”
I wish I made it up, cuz you’ve been kinda creepy this whole call.
“Oh, hey, my ex is from New England. I used to go on up in there all the time.”
Orly.
“Ever come down here?”
TWSS.
“No? You should come down here some time.”
Hah… yah… for crying out loud, I’m a voice on the phone!

I’ve been getting this since I started on the phones.

Yesterday I got a super long pause after my customary call ending question, “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” The laughter following the pause wasn’t any more of a comfort. “Well, uh… you COULD but it’s not related to this stuff.” Oh. No. You. Didn’t.

The other day one of the guys got told,

“So you like to hike? You ever hike up here? Oh, yeah, maybe I’ll run into some time.”

For a moment I thought, how sexist of me to assume that the guys didn’t get the creepy flirting stuff.

Then I was told that she had started the call with a thinly veiled threat about how he better help her, and knowing where we were located, and how she could come down here and ask for him if she didn’t get helped.

Yowza. That’s a bit scary. I can’t say that I get yelled at or threatened much. I guess I kind of prefer the awkwardness of phone flirting.

This post’s screen shot is from the Gameboy Advance release of Final Fantasy 6. “I’m tech support, not some 900 number phone operator!”

Communication Technology

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So, people have a hard enough time with regular socialization skills. Now with all the tiers of communicating, it’s a wonder anyone can keep up. It’s not just technology to master, otherwise geeks would be super-pro at socialization.

First there were people communicating at social gatherings and work.

Then there was phone.

Now there is *deep breath* AIMPhoneMSNICQCellPhoneMySpaceEmailFacebookBlogRTSTextMessageForumMMORPG *another breath* -you get the idea. You figure this would ease communication. We’d be super in touch with everyone all the time. No. Because there is no way someone is going to call you to tell you something important if they can text you even if you disabled text messaging because you’re either dirt poor or got sick of getting texts of “hi :)” (or both). Even though you told them in person that you blocked texting, they forgot and they don’t like talking on the phone. They’d rather enjoy Olympic button pressing and staring at a post-it sized screen for 5x the time it would take to say what they needed to. They scoff and think that if you really cared to keep in touch with them, you would enable texting so that you’d get that one important text out of 500. And don’t dare ask them to email you, because that’s *totally* not the same thing.

I once had a boyfriend who argued with me on the phone until I downloaded an instant messaging service to talk to him. It doesn’t matter that we had cell phones, texting, and SKYPE (back when you could dial out for free). This was his most comfortable way of communicating, so I better adapt. On some level, I can understand. You can minimize the other person, don’t need to listen to their tone of voice, can play your RTS or MMORPG, have both hands to type unlike a cell phone, and they don’t know if you got up to get a bagel or pee. On the other hand, we were kind of trying to be emotionally intimate. One other advantage of online messaging is that I still have logs from these chats. That’s what I need… a record of how much I don’t stand up for myself. Hindsight is supposed to at least be softened by memory, and here I have a .txt file showing how pathetic I can be.

Sure, check your email, but make sure you have your FacebookMySpaceLinkedInRandomNetworkingThingies configured to let you know when someone sends you a message on one of these websites. But usually, you can’t read it in your email. I go into my email, see I have something on facebook, and in facebook go to my wall or my inbox… TWO separate methods of communication in ONE networking tool that tells you through email.

Woe onto you who have more than one email. I have two… one that I have had since… before it was cool. The other I got in college and has forums for jobs and places to live and alumni and dialogs on campus and stuff for sale and calls for art. It also has instant messaging built in too… so instant messaging services open and go into your email with yet another instant messaging service and texting on the cell phone in your pocket that can also ring… I’m sorry if I haven’t got around to checking my other email in awhile.

We’re not at the sad part yet. Want to know what the sad part is..? I’m part of a generation who is used to it. Sure, I set my boundaries. I’m on facebook. I’m not getting MySpace too. I’m not enabling texting for the pope- if you’re at your cell, call me!

But I’m used to it to the point where it is ingrained in me as a socializing solution to my communication shortcomings. That’s right, I sometimes look for even more alternate forms of indirect communication… Sure, I could turn around and say something to the funny and good looking guy in my IT class who I’ve thought was pretty cool since the first class (even if he does have a girlfriend but who cares it’d just be nice to communicate). Or, instead risking getting giddy and giggling like an idiot, I’d could go run, cmd, net send…

But the instructor set his boundaries. Thou shall not abuse net send or I shall disable it. Don’t make me do it.

And then people started writing batch files that sent net sends by the hundreds… and logged into other computers with remote desktop to say ‘it wasn’t me’… and flirted using poetic computer based metaphor (Oh, wait, that was just me… and him… as far as I know).

It’s ridiculous, and I realize it. I looked myself in the eye reflecting in the monitor and made a decision.

I asked for his cell number in the parking lot. *cheers* Score one for the communication revolution! At some point in the future, we will hang out and communicate outside of class- in person!

…now I just need to call it …and stop giggling at everything he says to me in person. Yes, even I- currently rated number three most confident on the compare people face book application of all my facebook friends who also have said application- can get shy. (see documentation above)

With all the additional ways to communicate and keep in touch with people, it’s true, we still don’t know how to communicate with other human beings. The opposite sex… oh, forget about that. This isn’t Star Trek you know. We don’t have the technology.

Follow up posts:
Communication Revolution: Quashed!
Wednesday Night