Lost Cause

Over the years, a few responsibilities have become intrinsic parts to any position that I hold in a company. Besides being ‘the dude who rants a lot,’ ‘the dude who always looks like he needs sleep’ and ‘the really irritable guy’, I have also spent a portion of the last few years as a trainer, in one extent or another. First, as the lead mentor at a call center that offered directory service for cell phone users, and as a pseudo technical trainer for end users in my building.

I started training, specifically mentoring, with admittedly inauspicious intent. I wasn’t looking to share my knowledge with those who were lacking, or make the team better as a whole. I started training because I absolutely hated answering phone calls all day.

The job consisted of sitting in front of a computer with a headset on and connecting people to phone numbers we found in a database. I was one of the faster operators in the building, with my call times averaging between 15-25 seconds apiece. Stretch that out over a few hours, and there was often a case where I would take 1000 or more calls in a day. Stretch it out over the year, and well, you get the point. For someone who gets bored with everything easily, all the calls that I had answered had taken their toll.

I also saw training as an opportunity to impress management with the wide variety of abilities in my skill set, and hopefully, an opportunity to meet girls. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, most of the management learned that I was an impatient ball of nerves. Even though my trainees would walk away from the experience with a greater knowledge of the job, they might also walk away emotionally scarred. Management kept me on as a mentor, but never promoted me any higher.

The experience with the women at the job wasn’t much better. With the exception of one girl that I met in my tenure, the girls that were coming in were too old, too young, too dumb, too aggravating, too boring, too crazy or just flat out not my type.

Although I started with mixed motives, but ultimately I found the experience rewarding. As many times as I had to prevent myself from choking the trainees, the time I spent with them taught me patience and teaching techniques that have traveled with me to other positions. The biggest lesson that I learned was, no matter how hard you try, no matter how intelligent some people are, not everyone is capable of learning everything. Most everyone is naturally either right or left brained, favoring one over the other since birth.

After a certain amount of time trying to teach someone, a trainer must write some trainees of as a lost cause, wish them the best of luck, and show them the door. It’s not something that a trainer likes to do, but is necessary as part of the job. A new hire who isn’t keeping up with the rest of the class, slows the class down as a whole, becomes a liability to the manager they are going to report to, wastes the trainer’s time, and ultimately, wastes their own time. Giving them their walking papers just helps them to find something they are better suited at.

Take one trainee I had for example. For our purposes, we will call her Sharon (mostly because I can’t remember her real name). Sharon was a woman in her early to mid-thirties. She had spent a good majority of her adulthood as a stay at home mother, taking care of her two kids and the home. With her kids getting a little older, and not needing her at home during the day, she decided to get a job to occupy her time.

Sharon was a musician by nature, more comfortable with the keys on a piano than the ones on a keyboard. The only real experience she had with computers was checking her e-mail and browsing the web. Her typing skills were sub-par, compared to the other trainees in her class, she barely had enough speed to pass the typing test required to get the job.

After three weeks in classroom training, learning the ins-and-outs of the job, like everyone else, she was handed off to the mentors to refine the skills she would need to be successful. I was the first one to sit with her and watch her work.

“Sharon, is it?”

The only response I received was a slight nod, indicating that she was a little nervous.

“Ok, Sharon, I am going to plug my headset in and listen in to a few calls of yours to see what rough spots you might have, and how we can polish them out.”

“Ok…”

I plugged myself in, took a seat next to her and began listening to a couple of calls, noticing that her average call time was well over a minute. The expression on her face was looking more and more anxious by the second. I tried to ease her into the experience as simply as possible.

“Just relax, pretend that I’m not even here.”

Her first call came across the line. A friendly recording played, asking the customer what city and state to look for information in. The customer promptly responded.

“Phoenix Arizona, please.”

Sharon managed to finally put a sentence together.

“How can I help you, sir?”

“I need the number for a Dairy Queen on Bell and 29th.”

“That will be just one second sir.”

Completely in a daze, she sat there and stared at her terminal for about twenty or thirty seconds. No typing, no looking at her notes, just sitting there and staring. She looked as if she was about to type something, then turned and looked at me, completely at a loss as what she should do next.

Hoping that all she needed was a direction, I wrote down ‘type the word dairy in the first box’ then showed her my notepad. She read the note, followed the directions to a letter, sat and stared for another twenty seconds, then stared at me again, looking for another clue.

I wrote her another note, ‘Begin your search’. She read the note, stared at me again, and then wrote. ‘How?’ directly below the message I had just written.

At this point, I was starting to get a little irritated. Either she was too nervous to function properly in this job, or after three weeks of paid training, she had not yet learned what key to use to complete her primary function. I pointed to the proper key, and she did something that no one I had ever mentored had done. She slid the keyboard in my direction.

As a general rule, to prevent dependency on others, everyone in the mentoring program had decided collectively not to enter anything into the trainee’s keyboard. We were there as advisors only, not to do their jobs. We wrote notes, gave them pertinent information and spelling, and gave them pointers along the way, but never did their job.

I slid the keyboard back in front of her hands, and pointed at the key again, this time more explicitly identifying the key she needed to use. She gave me a dirty look, angrier than any other I had ever seen, then pressed the button. Thirty or so listings appeared on her screen, they were various businesses with the word ‘dairy’ in the name from around the valley. With the listings and their street names in front of her, she should be able to scroll the listings to find the proper one. Instead, she starred at the screen for another twenty seconds, and slid the keyboard in my direction again.

“Sharon, I’m not here to do the job for you, just to help you out. Scroll down until you find the listing.”

She did as I had instructed, scrolling down to the bottom of the list, where I saw, quite clearly, a listing for Dairy Queen at 2900 E. Bell. I promptly took the tip of my pen and pointed it at the entry displayed on the screen.

She pulled her hands away from the keyboard, leaned back, and tried to soak in what I was telling her. To help get my point across, I started tapping the listing with my pen. Either completely oblivious to what I was trying to say, or functionally illiterate, she informed the customer of the progress of her search.

“Uh, I’m not finding anything for that listing, sir.”

Now, fairly irate, I took my pen and started poking at the listing on the screen with the enthusiasm and fervor of a convict shanking a prison guard. My pen tip bounced off the screen 6-7 times, leaving ink marks on the glass. I did everything I could think of to point out the correct entry besides taking a Sharpie, circling the listing and writing, “This one, stupid!” on the glass.

“Just one moment, sir.”

A two minutes after she picked up the phone, Sharon’s flickering, 3-watt light bulb she calls a brain, finally turned on. She turned to me and smiled with a sense of relief.

“Here we go sir, I have…”

I put her calls on hold and explained what she did wrong, making sure to inform her of every minutia of her errors. Repeating them 3 or 4 times to make sure that she was aware of them.

I took her calls off hold and the pattern repeated itself. For two hours, she would get a call, slide me the keyboard a few times, and I would resist the urge to smash it against the desk in front of me. After fifteen days of training, she was unable to make sense of the system. I took some time to browse the average call times of the other students in her class. Each and every one of them had reduced their times well below the recommended 48 seconds they needed before being passed off to their managers.

Sharon’s average time was in the 120-second ballpark.
Afraid of having an aneurysm, and fearing I was taking the wrong approach, I backed off for the day to let her get some time to go it alone. I headed back to my desk, chanting, and finished my notes on that day’s progress.

“…Calmblueocean, calmblueocean, calmblueocean, calmblueocean….”

I usually keep my notes rather professional, but I was so wound up from the day’s events that I couldn’t help myself.

Notes on first mentoring session for new hire Sharon:
Despite my apparent inability to aid in Sharon’s development whatsoever, I continued to sit with her in the hopes that something, anything; that I was trying to tell her was sinking in. I was sorely disappointed.

Sharon is completely unable to figure out even the most simple of calls on her own, turning to me as a crutch, even for listings that were well known landmarks down the street from the building we are now in. She repeatedly makes the same mistakes, even after being told how to correct the mistakes a multitude of times.

Her inability to retain any knowledge that I have given her whatsoever shows either complete contempt for my experience as a CSR, or the attention span of a 5 year old.

A short list mistakes Sharon made repeatedly in my two hours sitting with her:
Using the word ‘The’ as a keyword for searches
Asking what state ‘New York City’ was in
Letting the air go dead for more than 3 minutes
Putting customers on hold to get a drink of water
Mistaking the ‘call termination key’ for the ‘begin search’ key
Repeating words such as ‘crap’ on the air when unable to find a listing
Not searching all available outlets when trying to find a difficult entry

In short, she is completely unable to perform even the most basic tasks required of her as a CSR. Furthermore, I am not an expert, but it is my recommendation that she be tested for a learning disability. Sharon, at times, exhibits signs of illiteracy.

I also think that HR should review the requisites for hiring, if only to save the time, money, and effort it takes to train someone such as her.

My recommendation:
TERMINATION!!!

I came into the office the next day after some introspection. After much thought, I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and figured that I might be the problem. I passed her off, along with my notes, to another mentor. I figured someone with a softer hand and more patience would have better luck.

Out of sight and out of mind, I was at my desk finishing up some notes on a rather successful session with another trainee in Sharon’s class. The training lead, Amy, took a seat next to me.

“Uh, we need to talk about your notes on Sharon…”

“What about them? I thought they were pretty concise.”

“Well, Jake, they’re rather…”

“Rather what?”

“Mean!”

“Mean?”

“Jake, listing mistakes she made is expected, but questioning her literacy? Don’t you think you are being just a bit rough on her?”

“Actually, I thought about it a lot last night, and came to the same conclusion.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I handed her off to Stacy.”

Stacy, was without a doubt, the best person I could think of to mentor Sharon. Calm, personable, patient, and persistent, she was always the best fit for someone who needed a seemingly insurmountable amount of improvement.

No sooner had I spoken her name, she walked up. Her face carried a look of shock, as if she had just witnessed a violent crime. This was completely out of the norm for someone who usually had a smile on her face, even when things were rough.

“How’s it going, kid?” I came to the conclusion that she had the same luck that I did, but she looked like she needed to vent.

“She typed the word ‘return’.”

“Say again…” Amy was confused, as was I.

Stacy started again. “I told her ‘now hit return’ after she typed the name of the listing. I looked down to write something, then looked back up, and the word ‘return’ was in the search box. I was with her for two hours and I still can’t drop her time below two minutes.”

I looked at Amy with a smirk that had ‘I told you so’ written all over it. “So Amy, you still think that I was being mean?”

“Well…”

Tired of the hemming and hawing, I looked over to Stacy. “Let’s just see what she has to say about it.”

“Can her!” Stacy is not known to be mean, but those words came out with so little hesitation that I think that she might have actually experienced some sort of joy saying them.

Amy looked at the both of us, shocked. “But she is so nice!”

“She sucks! She sucks a lot! She might be the dumbest person I have ever met in my life! We sat with her for four hours, Amy, four hours, and she hasn’t improved! You really think any manager is gonna take her with her times that high?” I’m never at a loss for words when frustrated.

“No… They won’t.”

“Nice is not competent, Amy, you know that as well as I do. She has had three weeks of training, two days on a fairly simple job, and shown no improvement at all.”

“Ok… I’ll take care of it…”

Amy reluctantly walked over to Sharon’s desk and started to talk to her. It was in inaudible conversation that I didn’t want to witness. I turned back to Stacy, still standing in front of me, aghast.

“Go to break, kid, you look like you need it.”

“I’m gonna go talk to HR.”

A few minutes later, after she had done the dirty deed, Amy came back with a look of relief on her face. Under the shadow of the muffled obscenities coming out of the HR office, we began to chat again.

“We both kind of decided that she was better off somewhere else.”

“So she wasn’t upset?”

“No, I actually think she was expecting it. Well it just goes to show you…”

“Goes to show you what?”

“Like my dad always said, you can’t expect a painter to fly.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“Never mind.”

To this day, I still have no idea what she was talking about.

Tier One

Most everyone I know who works on computers for a living has done it. It is a virtual right of passage for anyone who is an information technology professional. It is the foundation of a techie’s resume, the experience one needs with the certifications they have.

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) by (Company name) version 6.”

“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.”