you've had an experience like today's strip.
I did the ISP support thing for a while (a few years), and eventually I crumbled and blew up at a dumb customer.
*Below is this month's tech support gripe*
I am an understanding guy, I've always been happy to help newbs in all aspects of technology, from chat rooms to CS classes to my work.
But there are some people who are honestly too dumb to use a computer. One customer was having trouble working her WebTV, even after I made a free-of-charge housecall to set it up and gave her a half hour lesson, in the hopes that it would save me a lot of hours on the phone. When she continued to have trouble (failure to understand which link was selected, and just general confusion), she took it back to wherever she bought it... and bought an E-Machine.
But the customer who finally made me loose my cool was one who has been, I belive, featured before in UF. He was quite clueless, but believed himself to be "an expert". He called to complain that our servers were down. He wouldn't tell me the error message he was getting. He just said, "check it, you'll see". So I looked at the dialup servers, fine. Connected from a test machine. Fine. He insisted that I didn't know what I was talking about, and asked to speak to my supervisor. I was senior tech at the time, and working alone about 6pm, so I told him I was all there was, and said that I couldn't help him if I didn't know the error.
"The computer is not recieving a response from the modem..." he said, "That means your modem is off."
I politely explained that the error refered to his modem, even quoting the official Microsoft description of that error. He insisted that I was just "a stupid kid reading from a script", and that my docs were out of date, because he was running the new windows 98 and it was entirely different.
So, gritting my teeth and bending a paperclip into a knot, I said something soothing and tried to get more information. Several minutes, and many more insults on my intelligence later, he revealed that he'd just installed a new modem.
"Hmm, don't you think that might be the source of your problem?"
"No, this is a brand new modem! It works fine."
"Well, it sounds like a driver problem, and while we don't officially provide phone support for driver problems, I'd be happy to try a few things."
"No, don't you understand? This is windows 98. It doesn't use drivers."
"I'm sure it does. I've installed modems in dozens of Windows 98 machines, and they've always used drivers."
"You don't know what you're talking about. What's your bosses name?"
I told him.
"Alright, in the morning I'm going to call him in the morning and see if he needs to hire someone to straighten out his support department, because you are just an idiot."
I broke a pen in half.
"Quite to the contrary, you are the idiot. I've been doing this job here for well over a year, and on my own for six years before that, and I know what I'm talking about. I won't sit here and have some dumbass like you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. You can tell (the boss) whatever you want, and he'll be able to tell right away that you're a dumbass. So until you're ready to take my advice, please do not call for support again." *click*
Unfortunately, this was the home account of someone who worked for a major web hosting client. I still signed him up for some zoophile mailing lists and posted his phone number on a singles listing.
Now I delever Pizza, and gripe about stiffs, while I get a degree in a new and exciting field that has little to do with support. |
