“my computer won’t turn on!!”
“is it plugged in?”
“hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”
“…”
I spent over an hour on a support call trying to walk an asshole lady through fixing her Adobe Illustrator, for her to stop mid-instructions to say she couldn’t tell me what the status was because her power was out due to a fucking hurricane in her area! 🤦♂️
Side note: that was one of the two times my bosses didn’t get upset at me for telling off a customer.
i actually went to school for computers for a bit, got my A+ and net+, but realized i get fucking outraged at my own computer when it has problems, i couldn’t imagine the murderfest rampage that might ensue if i had to deal with morons and their bullshit computer problems–glad i didn’t pursue it
murderfest rampage
Yep, that’s the correct level of anger, based on empirical evidence. I hate how I fumed at dumb people back in the day.
Please tell us… What was the other one?
You asked the wrong person, you probably meant to place your comment one level higher up.
One of our call metrics was that we were meant to solve one problem per call, because the customer paid for one problem to be solved. But of course we also had to balance customer satisfaction, while also limiting our time spent on calls. Joy.
This one guy had a couple of no-brainer issues that I opted to help him fix, but the laundry list kept growing and growing, as well as the length of the call. After about an hour, and repeated attempts to explain to him that he’s over-extended his stay (so to speak), I finally had to firmly (and as politely as I could muster) tell him he’d have to call back and pay for any further support.
He was livid of course, but I held my ground. Eventually I had to hang up on him. It just so happened that one of the VP’s from HQ was in town and in an adjacent office listening to me on my call. He came racing out of his office and shook my hand, saying that’s how support is done and how I was a rock star. It was wild.
Why are we dicks?
Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can’t say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven’t even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get ‘That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don’t need that.’ Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.
This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.
This should come with a trigger warning and a glass of whisky.
Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
I am constantly surprised at how many people in the tech industry have never seen this show.
