It’s tier one tech support.
I was a tier one tech in Tucson for a small software company that shall remain nameless. Whether you were a novice or you were an experienced IT professional, the job was arduous and frustrating, demanding flexible thinking skills and the utmost patience.
The turnover rate was the highest I had ever seen in any job. After one week on the floor only two of us remained from the thirty students that were in my training class. I am quite convinced that I know why people left in droves. It wasn’t cause the job itself was difficult, even though at times it was damn near impossible. It wasn’t cause the company treated us poorly, ‘cause I have never worked for a company that treated its employees better than they did.
The reason people were more than willing to run away from a great job to put on a resume is, for all intents and purposes, you. Ok, maybe not you, specifically, I mean you are intelligent enough to read my work. However, statistically speaking, at least 88 percent of calls to tech support are from the functionally illiterate. More often than not, it’s not the operating system or the software or hardware that needs to be fixed, it’s in fact the end user.
The hardest part of working with computers is the end user. A computer, with few exceptions, will be nice enough to tell you exactly what is wrong with it. A friendly ‘hey fix this’ or a ‘please install that’ in the event viewer can solve most of your problems. It’s the average end user that causes most of the problems.
You can tell the intelligent ones; they are friendly, polite and easy to talk to. They always start the call the same way:
“Hi, uh, I was a little unsure how to do this thing, I tried to look it up online, and some of the answers I got seemed to vary quite a bit. I didn’t want to do anything until I was absolutely certain that I was doing it right, can you help me out?”
“Absolutely! Just tell me what I can do for you.”
“I just need to set up a folder so that no one else on the machine can get to them but me.”
“That’s not a problem ma’am, we’ll get you set up in a few minutes. The first thing I want you to do is…”
It is as simple as that. The people that I appreciate are the ones who are willing to go out and do some leg work, people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and try to learn something new on their own. Ultimately, when they feel that something is out of their comfort zone, they call and ask for help before they kill the machine.
Unfortunately, most of my calls were from the ones that weren’t willing to learn. They were the ones who knew how to do more harm than good, and the ones who loved to waste my sweet time.
“Uh hi, Jake is it? Well anyway, I have a problem, I’m hoping you can help me out with it.”
“Go ahead and tell me about it sir.”
“Every time I log in to my computer everything turns black.”
“Does it restart? Does it shutdown?”
“No it just turns black, I went in to my display settings and turned all of the colors black.”
“You did what now?”
“I turned everything black, and now I can’t see anything.”
Tier one support is the kind of job that makes grown men bang their heads against the desk in front of them. It is the type of job that makes adults run of the door yelling and screaming in frustration.
“Hi, Jake, I just got XP and now I want to install it, can you walk me through it?”
“Sure thing, just give me some more information about your machine.”
We spend the next 5-7 minutes going over every detail of his machine, from CPU speed to front side bus, to RAM. We discussed every minutia of his computer.
“Well sir it sounds good, and it sure sounds like your machine meets the basic requirements for XP, so let’s get started. First I need you to put your CD in the CD-ROM drive.”
“Well, I can’t.”
“And why is that?”
I already knew the answer before he gave it to me.
“I’m not at my computer, I’m at work.”
“Sir, how do you want me to walk you through the procedure if you aren’t at your machine?”
“I don’t know, I never thought about it, really. I was just kind of hoping you could tell me how to do everything.”
If anyone wonders why I don’t have any tact anymore, it’s because I spent all of it doing tech support.
“Thank you for calling Windows XP technical support, my name is Jake, can I get your name and case number please?”
“Goddamnit! I just went out and spent two-hundred fucking dollars on this Windows Millennium 2000 and now it says it won’t install on all of my computers!”
“Ma’am, I need you to calm down for just a moment. I need your case number so that I can take notes about what we do here.”
“You don’t need my goddamn case number!! You just need to fix my computers so I can install fucking Millennium 2000 on all of my computers!”
It’s a good thing for me the case number popped up when the phone rang. The woman calling sounded so ignorant that I am surprised she was able to match the digits in the support number with the ones on her phone keypad.
“Ok ma’am, first thing is first, this is Windows XP technical support. I need to know if you are using Windows Millennium, 2000, or XP.”
“It’s Millennium 2000!”
“Ma’am, there is no such thing as Windows Millennium 2000, now, is it ME, 2000, or XP?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know?”
“It will say on the box, ma’am.”
It’s a good thing most people can’t tell if I am being sincere or if I am being smarmy.
“It’s XP, but it still won’t install on my fucking machines!”
“Ok, ma’am, let’s look at one of the machines it won’t install on, we need a bit more information. Tell me, what does the machine tell you when you try to install it?”
“It says you can’t do it.”
“Can you be a little more specific ma’am? Can you maybe try to put the disk in the CD-ROM drive and start the installation process?”
“Ok, there! It said it again!”
“Said what, ma’am?”
“You can’t do it!”
“Specifically, what did the error message say, ma’am?”
“Installation not a supported upgrade path.”
“Ma’am, what version of Windows are you currently running on this machine?”
I already new the answer but I wanted her to answer the question for herself, so she new exactly why the installation wouldn’t work.
“I have ’95 on this machine.”
“Windows ’95 cannot be upgraded to any version of Windows XP.
“Well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that?”
“It says that on the box, ma’am.”
I was starting to lose my patience, but I knew that this call was far from over.
“Alright, let’s look at your other machines.”
“It installed fine on my laptop, but when I tried to install the fucking thing on my desktop it says something about activation!”
And there it is, the idiot’s trifecta, she bought one license for XP, tried installing it on one machine without reading the box, installed it onto a second machine and activated it, then tried to install it on another machine.
“Ma’am, how many copies of the software did you buy?”
“Just one.”
“Windows product activation allows the use of a single license on one machine only, that’s why it is saying you can’t activate it on more than one computer.”
“Goddammit! I bought the program, I can put it on as many machines as I fucking want!”
“No, ma’am, you didn’t buy the program.”
“Excuse the hell out of me? I have a receipt from Best Buy right here that says I did buy the program!”
“Ma’am, you bought a disk with the program on it, we own the program. You just own the product ID for it.”
“Explain that in English, asshole!”
“We own all rights and privileges to the program, we created it, and it is our intellectual property. You own the right to use the program on one, and only one, computer with the one license that you bought. We own the program, you just bought the right to use it, according to our terms.”
“Your terms? I didn’t see any terms that you gave.”
“Yes you did ma’am.”
“What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“Did you at any point click something that says ‘I agree’?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Did you read anything in the textbox that you agreed to?”
“It’s to damn long! How am I supposed to read it?”
“Ma’am those are the terms that you agreed to when you installed the program, the terms that I just outlined. So it seems that all of your problems are resolved, is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“All my problems aren’t resolved asshole! I still can’t do what I want!”
“You aren’t allowed to do what you want.”
“Fuck you!”
Click.
Now if they only let me answer the calls the way these people should be dealt with.
“Thank you for calling Windows XP tech support, my name is Jake, can I get your name and case number please?”
“Uh hi yeah, I need to get this antivirus program working with my computer, it’s causing all sorts of problems and I can’t seem to fix them.”
“Ok, what is the name and version of the program?”
“(Program name)
“Sir, that antivirus program isn’t compatible with Windows XP.”
“Yeah, I know, that’s what the upgrader thing said. It had a big exclamation point in a yellow triangle and it wanted me to remove it but I thought it was just full of shit.”
“Let me get this straight, Upgrade Advisor explicitly told you that the program was incompatible, and you went ahead and installed Windows without uninstalling the program first?”
“Yeah, what’s your point?”
“You’re an idiot.”
