Meme transcription:
Panel 1 of 3: A cute dog looks asks, “pls fix problem??”
Panel 2 of 3: The dog has become upset and says, “No Info!!”
Panel 3 of 3: The dog looks very angry and says “only fix”
Me in tech support.
Customer calls: "Internet is not working!!"
Me: "Router lights status?"
Customer: "Can't tell."
Me: "Why?"
Customer: "Router still in box."
Me: "..?"
Me (pretends it was just an error of communication): "Can you please describe the lights on your router?"
Customer: "I can't. It's still in the packaging. The box is on my table."
Me: "...??!? ... You ... need at least electricity to power this device."
Customer spirals into rage and madness: "I ordered wireless internet!! I won't plug any cables in! I did not want any wires!!!"
This reminds me of when we were the first ISP in France (we had a thing that was basically Compuserve with Internet bolted on — now some people will know what that was :-/).
We were at some kind of expo, I was the tech guy, I was with the cute sales girl. For historical reasons, we started with mostly Apple clients, then opened to everything else (this was the early 90s in Europe).
Anyway I was playing on my Linux machine (yay, early adopter) and she had a hairy guy that came in that was enthralled with the whole thing. So she spent a full forty minutes with him, explaining the whole local forum things, the Internet, the Usenet, the email, the whole shebang, the guy loves it.
So he really wants to sign on, but when he's filling in the papers, he's stuck. "Is it ok if I leave that blank?"
"That" was the phone number. The guy didn't have a phone line. At the time all accesses were through a modem. No phone line, no online access. The wonders of the online world were forever beyond his reach.
It took another ten minutes to get this through to him.
Was that minitel? I remember it being pretty popular in France.
Nope. ~~Minutely~~ Minitel was something else entirely.
As a high school student, I had a job like this for about a week. On my last day, I received this call just like yours and I said “You are quite possibly the stupidest person I’ve ever interacted with” because they were yelling this type of nonsense and screaming over me.
I do not regret my exit to the call center work life. You people have a special type of patience and deserve to be paid far more.
No customer service reps? Company fails.
Physical pain.
I mean, nowadays you can get wireless internet – via LTE/5G. For technologically illiterate users, I’d put the blame on whoever sold them a WiFi router.
Makes me glad that I don't need to look at user reports.
"This bug happened"
"Ok, can you tell us the things you did to make it happen?"
"You're the developers, figure it out"
Unfortunately, sometimes they can't determine reproduction steps because it's rare to happen and required multiple things, or they just didn't catch it. I definitely don't blame them, at least not in a lot of cases.
And sometimes logs or crash dump or whatever is all you need to figure out the bug anyway. In fact, ideally it should be more often than not.
That's true. I work in QA, so I'm all too familiar with the experience of "wait, wtf just happened". I don't fault users in that situation. My problem is when it's "I crash every time on this level", without any explanation
I had a WFM role that involved me listening in on recordings and live calls to techs for a few years... Hell of an insight.
My end user reports are as efficiently descriptive as possible. Every time I have to submit something or contact, I aim to have their experience as pleasant as possible. I aim to be a 5-10 min break for them and am more than happy to talk shit with them as long as they want to delay their next interaction with Kevin or Karen.
I do the same thing, and it pays off. Afew months ago, my Dell computer was being really laggy. I had a maintenance contract, and when I called them, I gave them a detailed description of the behavior and a list of exactly what I had tried before calling (it was extensive and exhaustive). I could hear the gears in the support repository head grind to a half momentarily and then restart in another mode altogether, and she jumped right to advanced troubleshooting. It was a great moment for both of us,.
This person supports.
Must be nice working at a place where that ticket doesn’t just get dropped into the dev backlog as-is.
'Link to public issue tracker'
Report there.
Works both ways.
"Sir please restart your computer and do sfc /scannow please"
"I already said that I've restarted the computer and I'm not using Windows."
"Okay sir please open Windows Update"
"??????"
Me: Contacts tech support while providing detailed information about the issue and what I've already tried.
Support: Tells me to try what I've already tried without fully reading my ticket.
I hate this, especially when you wait several days for reply.
I understand them. Someone saying they took the troubleshooting steps doesn’t mean they took them.
Also not everyone is on the same technical level. “I pressed the button on the screen. I thought that means the modem is off!”
My recent gem was essentially a reply of "I couldn't find anything on Google about it" and a "resolved" flag.
You see the problem on my machine, understand it's significantly affecting the organization, and know who the software vendor is.
Fucking call them.
Used to do outsourced IT for a lot of different companies including some large law firms.
Literally had one asshole lawyer put in tickets every time which consisted of something like:
"There's something wrong on my computer. I'll be away from my desk from 6:22 to 6:27, have it fixed by the time I get back."
Queue nothing getting fixed and this removed trying to leverage that as a reason why their law firm of 250 people didn't need IT services.
One of the reasons I moved on from IT operations. Management considers your department to be nothing more than a cost center and then goes all surprised Pikachu face when they take an axe to the IT budget and then everything inevitably goes to shit.
Is there a list somewhere of what words end up being "removed" or is it just kind of a case by case thing on lemmy.ml? Always wonder what the person said.
Would like to know too. Also a way to turn it off.
Having worked as a phone monkey and letter monkey previously, this is painfully accurate. The first skill you have to learn is effective questioning, as you only get a certain number of question attempts and the number is different per user.
My first tech job was with a place that did net security mostly marketed to fast food places. Some of the evening shift calls had me questioning reality since most of the people I talked to where fry cooks first, shift managers second, and by default of seniority the tech for a site as needed.
Countless 'the computer won't turn on' calls which ended up being them pushing the power on the monitor.
The one that called up just to listen to our hold music until I answered, which was actually pretty good, sort of an industrial/techno thing.
CS: The system just crashed, can I turn it back on? Me: Sure go ahead and let me know if there are any errors. CS: Hold on I can't see the button, the power is still out...
CS: Our internet is being really flakey. Me: What lights are on at the gateway? CS: It's hard to tell, it's underneeth the pop machine, by the way the pop won't stop spraying, how do I fix that?
And the one who got so frustrated with trying to fix things they hucked the firewall/gateway into the deepfryer and asked for a RMA.
I heard a story and saw a photo of a literally frozen router (as in, partially submerged in ice) before. Didn't expect a literally (deep)fried one too.
Had a 1st level rep call me once about a ticket I'd submitted (apparently they're required to initiate contact at least once?), say "Right, I see your ticket notes here, does the issue persist? Alright, I'll escalate it to the 2nd level, have a nice day!" and I'm pretty sure I've never heard any rep so cheerful.
That’s when you install Google Ultron and call it a day
Works with some values but not with others.
So which values work and which don't?
Also, submit ~~daily~~ hourly progress reports providing a detailed accounting of the steps you are taking to work on this. But please, no more than half a sentence, bc I won't be reading them anyway.
Took me ages on info to figure out Mortal Kombat 1 crashes on startup because Denuvo
As someone who’s team has to go on 1st line support rota every few weeks; The ticket queue has a metric shit-ton of these reports that just never get “fixed”. Can relate.
Me every fucking day with our testers.
What, they sent you a screenshot, isn't that good enough?
Yeah, I bought a phone from a brand popular in a... very populated country, so all I can't say is: "sir please fix the problem immediately"
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