Technical Tidbits revisited

Several months ago I wrote two entries here and here about stories from times as a technical support representative.

Sometimes there are just so many ludicrous things that happen, that it is difficult to know exactly what to say to these people. I moved from phone support to e-mail support for several months, now I am doing mostly phones, as the volume for e-mail support has dwindled to almost nothing. The company I am doing support for has made so many auto-responder messages to common questions, that if someone opts to use one that is sent to the auto-responder, we do not see the question at all.

In any event, there’s been some amusing e-mails that were received. One that I had recently was the following:

“If you, or any of your subsitaries are trying to use any of my belongings, including any and all inspirational and or intelectuall properity, cease and dissist immediately. and, if you, or any of your subsitaries are trying to use or broadcast on any part of my body, which includes the entire cloud of rings and everything within, including the living god and the lord, cease and dissist immediately.”

Due to the bizarre nature of the e-mail, all I could do was to close it, there was no answer I could possibly give to that. Another one I received was rather convoluted and it took a bit to figure out a good response to this:

“To whom it may concern Everyday now when I connect to the internet, I have problems getting my connection even when I have just connected I get the problem cannot connect to the server, what is happening. Please let me know it does not seem right to be constantly not connect when you have just connected.”

Of course, we always get the customers who are absolutely convinced that the problems they are experiencing with connecting is the fault of their ISP. Never once could they imagine that it might be something lurking on their computer, without their knowledge.

One lady that I helped yesterday, began the call very irate. She started yelling and stating quite emphatically that the problem was on our end, telling me she really hoped the call would be recorded so that the company would know just what she thought of them, and us of not doing our job. She said quite plainly that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her computer.

Since I tend to be rather calm in nature, I ignored her irate tone and did not let it bring a returning frustration. I have dealt with so many like her, that I am not easily phased by outrage on the phone, only those who will refuse to cooperate will tax my patience.

Luckily she was willing to humor me and I proceeded to investigate deeper into her operating system to see what was going on. Most of the techs have not had the advantage of OEM support as a background, they tend to go for the known fixes and I saw in the notes on her account that those had already been done.

I found what her system resources were and walked her through opening MSCONFIG, to see what programs were running in the background. She sounded quite astonished, no one had ever taken her there before and she had been anxious to find this information before. After that, I had her literally eating out of my hand. Explaining what various programs were that were needed or not, we came across one that was a virus.

Understandably, she was shocked and outraged that no one had bothered to look there before. Even though she did have anti-virus software installed on her computer, she had not updated the virus definitions in quite some time. As I told her, your anti-virus software is only as good as how often you update the virus definitions. She had not realized it could be so important, until then.

By the time the call ended, she was swearing her love for me, glad that she had called and reached me. It was nice to turn this blustering older woman who would likely relish turning someone over their knee for misbehaving, into one who was grateful for the new knowledge she had learned. I took the extra time to give her links to various resources I use for MSCONFIG, she then proceeded to say again that she wished the call was recorded so that she could insist that I receive a raise. While the calls are indeed recorded, we never know which ones will be listened to by our supervisors or the company we work for.

Those are the calls that make it worthwhile, being able to educate one who is eager to learn, turning the anger into excitement in finding resolutions to the problems they have had. Those are the calls that make me take longer than I am supposed to, ones that I might end up being reprimanded by my supervisors for making my call times higher, since going into MSCONFIG as I did, in the way I did, was not how we are instructed to do so by this company. I just know, after my work with the OEM, that certain components are needed, many are not.. and the way they would have customers turn off items in MSCONFIG, might cause various hardware components not to work correctly.

Sometimes, these people that I will never meet, strike a chord in me that wishes I could be the one to help them the next time. Few and far between, most definitely, but they make the really frustrating calls a bit easier to handle.

It also helps me deal with these sorts of questions:

“It says it’s going to restart.. does that mean it’ll come on automatically?”

“The modem.. is that the screen?”

But at least the one who was asking about their computer restarting, was not the one who thought pushing the power button on the monitor was how to turn their computer off.