Comments on: Mom Versus Dell Tech Support

By: Ramblings from the Marginalized » Mom Has A Need....For Speed

Ramblings from the Marginalized » Mom Has A Need....For Speed — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:05:27 +0000

[...] Mom calls Dell Support. They tell her she should get DSL so they can use Remote Assistant to view her computer. [...]

By: ack

ack — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 04:42:24 +0000

Yup, I started out in Tech Support way back when. Laptops being standard? Heck, they didn’t even EXIST! You had luggables, really.

External modems were standard back then. Yup, i’ve dialed a modem more times than I can remember. And downloaded or uploaded in xmodem or zmodem protocol tons of times as well.

That was also back in the days when customers would hand over the keys to the kingdom so freely it was scary. (root passwords)

By: MsQ

MsQ — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:38:31 +0000

ack: sounds like you’ve been on the giving end of support!

Zeus’ thunderbolts – 2400 BAUD rate! Wow. Those external what, Sportster modems? I recall – LO! in the days before laptops were standard for consultants – when I had an external modem perched on the PC tower.

If you had an external, remember watching the green lights to see the connection?

Or how about when you dialed in via the terminal? Something about “atdt ….” and waiting for the handshake.

Oooh! post idea!

By: ack

ack — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 07:39:19 +0000

Support over the phone. Ah, that brings back memories of way back when. The art of ducking calls. Working the “death shift”. (Starting at 5:30 AM when you normally couldn’t get out of the office at 2:30 like you were supposed to.) Overhearing the person in the cube next to you tell a customer that they needed to talk to their XYZ provider. Then thinking “That’s US!!!”

Dialing in to customer sites to fix issues, download logs, upload patches, etc. And thinking 2400 BAUD was fast.

Getting a call from “that customer” that you knew was going to take a while to deal with as he asked some seriously Freaky Shit questions.

By: MsQ

MsQ — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:20:54 +0000

Hey, Jake: You are not alone!!! I hear about “it” all the time. I probably do “it” myself!

Tech support is difficult, which is why I have a great deal of respect for those who do it. I also know that it’s up to the company that provides tech support to support their personnel!

We all hear about how lousy tech support is. But what about how lousy the callers are? Huh – I may have to expand this to a post.

Anyway, when it comes to internal support (like you calling your company’s IT department) I have heard horror stories about how people will call about the same problem over and over again.

For example, I was talking with one IT guy and he said that this woman would call every so often complaining how “it won’t print everything” and he would ask her to describe what she was doing.

This went on for months with her believing that it was the software’s fault.

He finally walked over to her building to watch what she was doing.

Turns out that she would click Print before the file had even finished being saved – she wouldn’t wait for the hourglass to stop spinning to indicate that the save was complete! That’s why she’d occasionally get an incomplete print job!

When he explained it to her, she went through the steps again and she STILL wanted to print – she was click-happy to just “get it done.” She didn’t want to wait for the file to save and it was the software that was “wrong.” He had to tell her to WAIT! as her hand went for the mouse.

This is when you think, “Wow, they don’t pay support enough.”