Who’d be a Technical Support engineer? Well for many it’s a way into the industry and a future of beleaguered uncertainty and share options, for others it’s a job they enjoy (or so they believe). But the potential techie should beware, the path is fraught with pain and things that your mother never told you about…..
We’ve all been there, sat on the phone listening to hours of Gloria Estefan or Barbra Striesand, merely because you need to know if your “XF73R-3” is compatible with your “ZX21J/2340” and the manual only talks about the “XF73R-2.11 Lite”. Then just as you’ve resolved hang up and jam your two peices of hardware together (usually after about 3 hours) with the hope that they won’t inflict violence upon each other, the phone finally answers. This also tends to happen just as you are cramming another Oreo into your mouth causing you to spill Frappacino all down your “Death to Bill” T-shirt. Some officious little shit says “Hello SIR can I help you”, but the inflection is “fuck off and die you moron”. As you spray the mouthpeice with brown crumbs and drool “Yeff, Yeff I glot a plollem wid my (belch), oops, sorry…” the conversation jumps straight into “the ritual of taking down the useless information” without so much as a “howdya do”. This starts with giving your name, address, phone and social security numbers, shoe size, living dependents, ethnic background and seemingly endless stream of deeply personal data. “How many times do you get it up a week sir? Sorry but we have to get all the information for the files otherwise we can’t proceed with the inquiry and it’s all because we want to understand our customers better…”. You think/rant to yourself: “Well if you really want to get to know your customers better then throw a big party and buy everyone a drink, don’t ask me all of this drivel under the pretense of becoming bosom buddies, especially given that you hated me before I even became a customer, just because I was thinking about buying one of you products”. So like a mouse to the mat, you start to complain (Enforced Barbra Streisand will do this to the humblest of consumers) but not really complain, you just start the next sentence in a slightly elevated tone. As the second syllable of the “complaint” comes out of your mouth you are rapidly transferred to the “SUPERVISOR” who is actually the cleaning lady. She then tells you how important you are to her and “Cheese Wizz Incorporated” the corporation that owns them, but in the end you are thankless bastard who does not deserve the right to consume (anything). Well she doesn’t actually say this, but this is how you feel after the brief discussion. But it’s all OK in the end and she puts you back to the technician you were dealing with. Or so you think… Imagine your surprise when Barbra Streisand blurts out that she thinks you are “Like a Rose”. You hang up the phone, sigh quietly, and then hurl yourself out of the window to the inviting concrete 30 floors below. Or in my case onto the couch which some midnight miscreant has left outside my window for the last 3 weeks.
Strange as it may seem, I believe there is something about hold music that seems to focus your thoughts. After a couple of hours on hold I have usually thought the problem through and resolved it myself. Perhaps they subliminally embed their FAQ’s in the music and you pick up the right answer through a sort of osmosis. Well maybe it’s a long shot, but there might be something to it. Perhaps another in the long line of MM patented ideas.
Yes, getting support is a frustrating business, but try if you will, to imagine what it’s like for the poor miscreant at the other end of the line. They have usually been drafted in “en masse” from the nearest mediocre technical college, given a phone, a PC and a soap box to sit on, 15 minutes verbal training from the cleaning lady and a foot thick manual “to digest in the next 25 minutes before you go live”. Life’s fuming detritous is then given access to their right ear for eight hours a day, five days a week. Such was my introduction to the world of support.
When I started in the late eighties (the years, not my age), computers were still primarily DOS based and almost completely impenetrable or to put it into some perspective, designed so that only Engineers could use them. They were full of cripplingly nonsensical terminology and had grotesque UI’s. Some sick minded bastard, then decided that the general public should be given access to them and so the art of computer support was born. I was one of those people with seemingly inexhaustible patience and so I got to talk to all the idiots and nutters (clinically insane). One of these plagued me for seven years throughout my changing career in the industry (this is true) and it was only by relocating 5,000 miles away to California that I finally severed the umbilical. She was a nice person and we became sort of freinds, except for the fact that you rarely greet freinds with “Oh God! What is it now?”, but she was utterly insane, so I reserve the right to witticize (another new word) about it all. I ended up as a sort of “computer social worker”, running errands for her after work and sending her free stuff as a sort of “hush money”. She even got my home number and would call in the evenings at the exact moment the first fork of dinner reached my mouth and the Simpsons had come on. As far as I could tell she spent all day on the phone looking for people like me in large corporations and then grinding them down until she got free stuff (clearly not that mad!). She would then trade her swag with someone else to obtain a thousand years supply of light bulbs or subscriptions to “lunatics weekly”. I swear this is true, and I’m even suspicious that it was the primary reason I emigrated. I could feel my sphincter clench every time the phone rang.
Unlike most she really just wanted free stuff, she never really had technical problems, but of course Tech Support is the dumping ground for anything that does not lead directly to increased revenue. As a result, it’s surprising that more tech support people aren’t serial killers or mass murders. If you think about it the stress levels are unbelievably intense and it’s mainly brought about by casually unthinking consumers! It’s remarkable how little most consumers think before they call a help line. They usually have little in the way of ability when it comes to describing the events surrounding their particular problem or be appropriately prepared to deal with such events. Usually they’ll be calling from a mobile phone halfway up the north face of the Igor in a blizzard with poor reception and Yaks mooing in the background. The equipment which broke is at home in their apartment somewhere in New York. Sorry but before we proceed any further, New Yorkers (and especially those involved in Real Estate) are by far the most obnoxious and unreasonable category when it comes to issuing support calls (customers are divided into unofficial categories with secret code names wherever you go). To illustrate a relatively common scenario, one guy (from guess where) had left his handheld computer on top of his car where it (of course) fell off and he subsequently reversed over it. His way of dealing with this problem was to phone support and scream profanity at whoever picked up the phone until someone owned up and admitted that it was our fault (blinding logic I thought!). In his own mind, it was clearly the sort of incidence that should be covered under the manufacturers warranty. He’d lost all of his data because he’d never backed it up in the million years since he’d owned it and clearly this was all our fault. I expect we sent someone round to hypnotize him against the “backup procedure” and I recall personally placing the machine on his car roof when he wasn’t looking. But the killer part is when he claimed that he’d phoned up a week earlier and someone (he couldn’t remember who, but it was definitely a human being of undetermined name, age, gender and accent) had guaranteed that we’d fix I free for him and send round Julia Roberts for a night of sexual gratification.
They’re not all like that though, better still are in the “Vague” category (around 99% of them). We know them as the “Hordes of Nebulum”. For example: “Well, I was just doing a report, when the thing on the screen stopped and then the other thing wouldn’t work (you see computers are made of “things”). Then I took the white thing on the side off and it fell in the coffee cup, because it’s got a design flaw so you can’t hold it properly, which I want replaced, because it’s not my fault if you can’t design one properly, and then it just stopped altogether and the thing came up on the screen and then the light came on so I hit it with brick, because that’s what the last support guy I called told me to do”. In instant recognition you pounce, with your toadiest tone of voice. “Ah! Mr. Smith! I thought I recognized your voice, I was the last support person you talked with and I don’t recall anything about masonry abuse when we talked before. I expect you’re having trouble breathing unassisted again aren’t you? Now remember it’s very simple, it’s “in”, then “out” and try to do it every couple of seconds otherwise you might expire and then where would we all be? A lot happier I expect. Simply go through the process which I have faxed, video-taped and explained to you, gosh, is it 14 thousand times this week already…...”
The thing to remember is that many peoples response to the unknown is fear. Fear creates a failure to comprehend even basic principles and this, in turn, creates anger. By the time many of them get to the phone they are usually exiting the forth stage which is violence and heading for the fifth (apoplexy). The cat’s already dead and the gun is now pointing at the head of whoever is sat next to them. This, despite the myth, is not a time to call someone “Sir”. It makes them feel like they are in a fast food restaurant, which clearly does not inspire any great level of confidence. You’re chance to stop another senseless death is at hand, you must make them you’re friend, be personable, but don’t overstep the mark because you could be next!!!!!!!
MM.
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