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The "Glory" Of Tech Support
AFCArchvile writes: "Have you ever wondered just what goes on at your DSL ISP's Tech Support center? East Bay Express Online has an article written by Erika Donald, a staffer at the Pacific Bell Internet Call Center: 'Finally, the customer is transferred to me. "Are you a supervisor?" he demands instantly. Since the beginning of the month, everyone in the call center has been transformed into a supervisor. Brian sleeping at his desk is now a supervisor. Ian with purple hair gelled into points is a supervisor. Ron who begged not to be made a supervisor is a supervisor. I am hoping next month, whoever decided to make us all supervisors will make us CEOs.' This is an almost Orwellian tale that should send a wake-up call to all the DSL ISPs."
> I know that helpdesks are pretty stringent about trying to get the fastest times they can. [snip] > [snip] However, I would > think that they are not quite this strict with helpdesk people. I worked at Stream on the Netscape team from around May of 1995 to April of 1996. Conditions at the beginning were tolerable, & when I left were this bad -- although the training was slightly better than described in this article. And I was perpetually in trouble for long call times -- partly because I never got decent training on Windows 95, partly because I actually tried to solve caller's problems. Calling us ``soldiers" was too kind. Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
On the other hand, you gotta admit, on those occasions where you can solve the customer's problems, when they send your boss a letter of compliment, or gifts (I have a coffee-mug collection), that often makes it all worthwhile.
And as for dealing with idiots - I'll admit, I've been fortunate to do support for a software company that writes primarily business software, you talk to a higher-grade of moron than home/desktop software support does: BUT - you do have to learn some skills about sizing up your customer BEFORE you start making assumptions that he knows what electricity is. The tough part is learning NOT to offend the ones that do know their stuff, but it's easily explained when you do screw that up. Most understand.
The most difficult problems are the ones you are not allowed to solve; the ones that are caused by third-party products, the ones that are caused by your own product, which are obscured by crappy relations with R&D, and the worst ones are problems you KNOW the answer to - problems you told R&D about two years ago, and told them to fix, and they said they fixed it, but in reality, they screwed it up worse by using some lame workaround that was less labor intensive to code or test. Those are the most frustrating for me, and the real reason I hate doing support. Not the irate customers. As a support person, you gotta learn the fine art of making even the most irate customer your friend. It's you and him against the world. It's a psychological game, but it works, and it's really the most honest and satisfying approach.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
either glue, egg whites, or Knox (unflavored gelatin). Just wanted to clear that up.
It's man juice BABY! eeew.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
So if it sucked so bad, why did you work there?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
thats almost exactly what happened at my job as a tech support guy under a contractor. anyways, the whole pacbell dsl service is a certified mess, they are always down, and if you call to ask what happened, most of the time, the tech's will NOT know the answer. I feel sorry for anyone that subscribes to it, as it can be VERY VERY frustrating. I remember my worst case was when a business-man got dsl service from *bell and as a result of the router being down in his area, he was losing thousands of dollars on the hour. I could do nothing to help him out, and all i could do was apologize for teh crappy service. in the story, she makes the second tier of tech support (STAQ - second tier analyst queue) look like people who know more... but at my time there, most of the STAQ agents were simps (didnt know the difference between a router and a server) i also know that pacbell is getting sued and has been sued several times in teh past because of their service, they REALLY need to fix things up alright, end of my rant
For many of us it's not that simple. And heaven knows, I've been tempted to do exactly that at my present job. (Twice, in fact--the two cases involved a not-quite-correct bug report, and a known bug that I'd been specifically ordered not to fix.) But the fact of the matter is that I have other people to worry about--like my wife and son. That means that walking out the door without having secured other employment is not an option.
so, anyway, I guess this just goes to show that not all sucks - every now and then, you find the ray of light.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
I think this kind of stuff can be attributed to ANY inbound call center. If you yourself are at all talented, you quickly realize that you are getting customers who have called others in your call center only to have a terrible experience because your coworkers are by and large average, hence not very good at being excellent.
I do not have a signature
Sometimes, i just put customers on hold, read slashdot for a few minutes, and come back using a different name/voice. Funny how much smarter I seem to them when they think its someone else.
.^
^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
'Share and Enjoy' seems easily replaceable with 'How may I provide you with excellent service.'
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
SO what your saying is that you only work in dial-up support. Sorry man, anyone can do 60 dial-up calls. DSL calls on the other hand are were you get raped. 30 - 45 a day is decent for tier 2. It's really a whole new ball game.
I look forward to seeing more CEO's with Knox spiked purple hair
Why? Any 7th grader can dye their hair w/o parental consent. What does it demonstrate? Bad-assness?
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The prolem with Telco's getting into the ISP business is they try to run it like a telco and it just does not work. The most important thing in a call center is not if you actually helped someone, but how long you had them on the phone for. Call stats are all manglement cares about when it comes to the day to day operations at a call center. I was fortunate to leave the ISP I worked for before the telco that bought them started enforcing their policies.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
We didn't have anything as ominous sounding as "The HotCube" watching over us, just the knowledge that we were being watched and timed for everything tht we did. Our calls were constantly monitered, and our sign-in times were constantly watched.
At first the job was a good one. I got it to pay the bills over the summer between semesters at school. At the time, it was ideal. I would get about 3 to 4 calls an hour, with time to surf the Net in between. Many of the calls were obnoxious, but you could deal with it. The problem did not come about until Bell Atlantic switched over to Verizon.
This caused two things to happen contemporaneously: Verizon put out a major marketing push for their DSL, and at the same time there was a strike. So the problem was that all these people were signing up for DSL all at the same time, and there was NO ONE to hook them up or fix any problems. Sure, there were us mooks in the tech support department, but we could only do so much over the phone. With DSL it is almost always either a line problem, a modem problem, a CO (central Office) problem, or an idiot problem. We could only take care of the idiot problems. There were a few calls where I actually got to troubleshoot something, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
So the strike sucked, but that could be dealt with, and it wasn't too long. It turned out to be the increasing amount of customers that was the real source of the problem. Verizon's network just couldn't handle it, and their support structure was not even half as big as it needed to be. I don't know what sort of equipment they use at Verizon in terms of routers, CO modems, etc., but for whatever reason their stuff goes down more than any other provider. I don't know if I remember a time during that latter part of my stay there where one part of the country or another wasn't down.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues. That was the big problem. Forget the high call volume where there weren't less than 50 people queued up for support in a department of 30 or so (yes, that's fifty, five zero) as a result of constant problems. The real problem is that we couldn't *do* anything. We couldn't even dispatch a tech to the house! We had to submit a ticket to another department that may or may not decide to dispatch the tech. Could we *call* over to that department and talk to them about it? No! Of course not! They were union, and they had their own rules. We couldn't resolve billing problems, we couldn't do line tests, we couldn't do anything.
I even moved up to the Tier 2 level of support, and we were still just as hogtied. We at least got to get rid of most of the idiot factor, but that led to getting a higher percentage of problems that were just out of scope. I eventually quit without even finding another job because I got so sick of it. Luckily for me, I live around 128 outside of Boston, so that wasn't a problem.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
- How did companies manage before call centres were commonplace?
Simple, they had a thing called a helpdesk. The person who answered the damned call helped you. They didn't write down everything you said and hand you off to someone else to explain your problem all over again. They were on the phone with you until your problem was fixed or they had an answer for you. I remember being part of a 4 HOUR call trying to figure out why this guy's modem wouldn't stay connected -- I was even on the phone with two Carolina Telephone (Sprint) techs at two COs trying to figure out who was tearing down the call. (We signed him up with a different ISP.)(For CT's part, that was the first PRI they had ever installed -- EVER. I think they bribed a BellSouth tech to get it setup correctly -- I remember hearing someone laughing histerically in the background shortly before it synced up.)
*brrt* *brrt* *brrt*
Hello, EastBayExpress, how may I direct your call?
Tech support, please!
Thank you, let me transfer you.
EastBayExpress technical support, how may I provide you with excellent service?
Yer site is down!
Pardon? Our what site?
Yer news article about tech support is down!
Down in which way? Yer web server, news article, about how tech support is hell is down!
Oh, what makes you so certain it's not functioning normally?
It was featured on /.!
A public service for testing server fortitude, and some articles of interest, too.
Well, we can send a technician out to your site, but probably not for 48 hours, and there will be a $70 fee for checking your line.
Say, did I get transferred to PacBell?
Yessss... How did you know?
A hunch.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When I was doing this we always talked about having "Wookie night" it would have been great. Also lusers would often not hear my name right and repeat back to me something wrong "Ron" was common the answer was always yes. Ahhh the memories.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I have to agree. Customers automatically calm down when they speak with a "supervisor". They think that the higher you go, the more they know. Unfortunately, as a supervisor, I do administrative work, my techs know alot more than I do... Weird and Wacky!!
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives" Charles William De
Ian's hair doesn't have gell in it. It's either glue, egg whites, or Knox (unflavored gelatin). Just wanted to clear that up. Nobody with mohawks or liberty spikes use gell.
Oh, and first post too.
Enough useless facts?
-NG
as an ex AOL and ISP tech-support guru, i can tell you that the reason tech support is usually shitty is because tech support people are either A)treated like shit, or B)don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Back at AOL (am i violating my NDA here?) we used to fuck around all the time to try to ease the boredom of monotonous "i can't sign on" calls. Sometimes i thought it would be amusing to be irish, maybe indian from time to time. (there's nothing like getting called in by a manager you didn't know was listening in, only to be told "nice accent asshole").
However, most of these people doing tech support are 30 year olds who just can't get a better job. Some are immigrants, some are just slackers. But the only ones who actually know what they're doing (i.e. not reading directly from a big black binder) are the younger ones, and they don't give two shits because they know they should be earning better pay. It wasn't uncommon for those of us who knew our shit to fall asleep on calls or put people on hold to run over and see what our friend was up to. Half of the calls i took, i would forget the problem, come back from chatting 5 minutes later, and tell the customer one of several canned answers i had for that sort of thing. (usually: "you need to delete and reinstall AOL ma'am")
BTW - when you hear the words "that's a good question, let me put you on hold while i check" - it means your tech is tired and he needs to go grab a smoke while you listen to John Denver's Rocky Mountain High as played by the Norman Smithson banjo Quartet..
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Anyone that stresses the fact that they are "Dr." and not "Mr" has serious self confidence problem and are full of arrogance.
Wouldn't everyone in a department made a higher level, remove the people who usually do all the footwork in a department? I mean, the world wouldn't go far if everyone was boss'es and sat on their flat ass? :P
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
As referenced in the alt.tech-support.recovery FAQ (found at http://www.angry.net/atsr/), it was Demon internet. A user called insisting that he was working with Bob, but no one there was named Bob. The customer is always right, though, so they started jokeingly calling each other Bob. It blew out of proportion, then spread to a.t-s.r, and now all support personal can be referred to as Bob.
Eric, ex-Bob.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything you ever read in Dilbert is true, true, true.................
Dirty Pirate Hooker
That is why I despise working for large corperations. I'm currently working for a local ISP that only offers statewide coverage. The ISP is actually one of the largest in the state and is the largest locally owned ISP. We aren't required to say any silly lines other than how may I help you. If the customer cusses us we are allowed to hang up on them (my favorite part :) ) The president of the company hangs out with us and buys us beer after work/pays for vacations to florida and gives us christmas bonuses... It's one of the best jobs I've had and I can attribute that fact to being simply a small successful company. If you don't like comcast quit, find a small successful company and work there. I worked at compusa for 2 years and had the same crap you had at comcast... a 50 cent pay cut isn't bad when the stress levels go from 100 points to -10 :)
One time when I was doing tech support I happened to hear the guy next to me tell some lady whose hard drive had was failing that she was losing data dur to sun spots. He went on with this story for about 2 minutes and told her that everyone was being affected at that time. It sounded like she was satisfied with the story too.
I couldn't disagree more.
Those of use that are clued are very skilled at technical diagnosis. By the time we pick up that phone, we have already invested copious amounts of time in research. We know problem solving skills and by the time we're on the phone, we already have a good idea where the problem is. We don't need someone to walk us through cablage and TCP/IP; we need a like-minded clued individual who can confirm our logic and replace faulty hardware/fix telco issues/etc.
Damned you're helpful to those poor techs.
Jerk.
-- Andreas
Case 1:
We had one guy from Earthlink support apply to work at my company. I posed a VERY common ISP customer scenario, "When I was downloading my e-mail, my computer crashed and now after I reboot and reconnect, my mail program is telling me my password is incorrect". This guy looked at me with a blank stare then said he would ask them customer to retype their password, then check their DNS, then look for proxies, etc. then if that didn't work he would tell the customer to reinstall system software and reinstall the mail client. WRONG!! I asked him if he ever heard of a "popper". Again dumbfounded. At that point I thanked him for his time and kicked him out.
What's a 'popper'? I would think you would just ask the customer to wait 5 minutes and they'd be able to log back on after the POP server hits it's idle time-out....But I might be wrong....but coming at him with jargon like that is a bit much. Who are you trying to hire, experts? I mean, he was probably Tier 1 at Earthlink and you're expecting him to know all. Guess what, that's what training is for.
Case 2: .."Well sir, I need to ping your router to perform some tests and I can't right now" was the response, this after informing him that the whole unit is fried and is not working at all. "I'm sorry sir, I have to test the unit from here".
One of our Flowpoint routers got fried (common occurance with the Flowpoints). I called tech
Guess what, he's right! If a customer called up and said 'my modem is fried' he'd have to run it through tests still...And if you EVER screamed at a tech working for me, or myself working in tech support, there is no way, absolutely no way, I'd be talking to you for much longer. There's a limit for how much crap a tech has to put up with, but screaming is both stupid, immature, and essentially useless...I watched an old manager of mine put a person that was screaming at him on hold for 2 minutes, come back, ask him if he was ready to talk like a normal person...I would tell the next tech to talk to you to do the same.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
That's because TiVo is a closed system in a closed box which runs a single application and only ever has to connect to a single modem service.
The people who support TiVo only have to know how the application works. The questions they get are all of the "how do I tell it to tape Friends?' variety. They don't have to worry about what hardware or software you have in your system or on your network and how it all interacts.
If a TiVo box starts behaving strangely under warranty, you just return it for a new one. If it misbehaves out of warranty, well, that's why warranties have limitations.
It's simply nonsense to compare supporting a TiVo with supporting a Windows NT computer on the Internet. This is like saying that people who fix tricycles are a whole lot friendlier than people who fix automobiles.
Man, this really reminds me of One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich...if you have read that. I would love to see a series of essays on this topic...also remeinds me of user friendly (however with it more realistic and in writing, actually made that cartoon come to life more). It is amazing how much detail you can get out of a single day when the environment/story is so much different from your own life. -corey
Ick. That sounds really bad... We've got it pretty good here in columbus. For most of the front line staff, we're all students. Therefore since we don't work full time, the burn isn't nearly as bad. Also, the knowledge that you're getting closer to your degree helps.
There are days though. When the callers barely speak english. When the calls are 10 seconds apart and all 6 agents are busy. When its 9:45pm on a friday night and you're seeing floating bottles of beer. When that paycheck looks far too small.
And then there are days when we eat a feast provided by the bosses, or that all 8 agents are in an Age of Empires game, with only one alt-tabbed to take a call.
Someone above said learn or burn, and that is absolutely true.
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
Well as of the publishing of that article, its now Erika Donald, former staffer at the Pac Bell Internet call center. You speak out against big brother and you dissapear.
The arsenal of Dart Guns, saliva rings on the screen...sites take hits all day, but not from traffic....
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
-paid for by Citezens for Al Gore.
A person who has worked for years to get that title probably has some right to having it used, although this guy did sound like an ass. There are two doctors and a masters in my family, and that little PhD is very important to them, such that it appears on all business correspondence for the simple reason that it generates respect. However, expecting that respect out of someone you are currently yelling at is idiotic.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson
My favorite was MacOS 7.2.3 I think. .2 worked, .4 worked, .3 is what came default, which did not work. How about Eudora 1.2, egad!
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kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
Nah..
They need to get a job working for government: then they can kick back until they retire..
t_t_b
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I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Tivo tech support are some of the best I have had to work with. You call them up and most of the time you get a human with in a minute. You normally get someone who knows what they are talking about, is very polite and very helpful. You also get an issue number so you can call up on the same issue and not have to repeat the same converation again again. This beats hands down the last road runner tech support person I called who asked me to unplug my cable modem (already done) then reboot my computer (not a chance in hell, my computer can talk to every other machine on my network). I ended up telling him how to release and renew a DHCP ip on NT. Eventually I found a reset button on the web admin page that brought the modem back to life. Congratulations Tivo almost every call I have made to you has been a good one.
I live in an area of the country where $7 an hour is still a good wage. I make slightly more than that, as does my wife, but, even between us, we barely gross 25K a year.
We have two cars, but didn't spend $3,000 for BOTH of them. We pay $355 monthly for rent. We can afford a broadband connection because I work for an ISP.
I have worked in the IT industry for nearly 20 years. I got married young -and I am still married to the same wonderful woman - and we produced two lovely daughters. I have no regrets.
However, statements such as:
In almost all of North America, staying with your employer is *optional.* With the exception of some of the more impoverished rural areas, you can get a job within *days* if you get off your ass and get serious about pounding pavement.
make me angry. They are hurtful, uninformed, and completely wrong.
I spent a decade in the U.S. Air Force, performing highly technical work, but the skills that I learned were worthless when I re-entered the civilian workforce. I am not stupid, uneducated, or lazy. However, I can't afford to live, or work, anyplace else.
I'm not asking for pity: I like my job and where I live. There isn't any amount of money that would make living in L.A. worthwhile, and, yes, I spent many years there, so I know of what I write.
I spent months securing my present job, and I pounded the pavement every day. I don't live in a particularly rural area. There are many jobs here, but very few of them pay well, if "well" translates into more than 25K a year.
Don't be so arrogant and sure of yourself.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
All--
I've been a Speakeasy.Net customer for a few months now, and for everybody who wants an ISP with a "Press 2 If You Have A Clue Button"...all those techs appeared to have went there. It's such a disorientingly wonderful thing to be able to converse about firewall rulesets, buggy ARP tables, and routing infrastructure hiccups with your *front line support* ISP provider.
They're not particularly expensive either. For $200/mo, they offer you flat rate 1.1/1.1 SDSL that actually works at full speed. They have, of course, plans with more standard pricing, but ya gotta spend your money on something, eh?
You can always save $10/mo by running a game server. No, I'm not joking.
Among other nice things, they'll actually talk to you when a spurious port scan spamgram appears to come from your host. I just went through what could have been a nightmare with any other provider--and worked with them to debug that nothing actually happened.
So, yeah. If you're tired of burnt out powerless cluebies, go hit Speakeasy.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
IIRC that would be Demon Internet in the UK. I remember reading the web page of one of the last of the original "Bobs" from there about 3 years ago. Some trolling of tech support humor sites would probably dig up more info...
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
I am currently working through the complaint system of the California Public Utilities Commision (PUC). they aren't much better, but I think if evryone started complaining to them, we might get something done. Check out their complaint form to file a complaint.
Hope this helps.
That's DOCTOR EVIL. I didn't spend three years in evil medical school to be called MISTER.
(I couldn't resist.)
No images, just the text, but it works.
http://dotslash.dynodns.net/00/12/05/165241/cover_ 120100.html
I call rarely; usually when it's verifibly down. I figure I'm being a Good Citizen by reporting early. However, I stopped doing this because it's frustrating.
PacBell's diagnostic algorithm assumes the customer is at fault. (I can't blame them--that's probably usually the case.) So before they'll ping my DSL modem (or whatever they do to verify that they are in fact down), they make me go through a song and dance
Reset your computer, they say. I make keyboard clicking noises and say OK. (My BSD box has been running for 9 months and I'm not about to reset it.)
Now, go to the control panel make sure DHCP is checked . I'll humor them by making more keyboard clicking noises in the background for the appropriate length of time. PacBell tech support will always tell me to set the machine for DHCP (it's in their script) even though I pay for and use a static IP address.
Reset your DSL Modem. OK I say! I guess they assume it's sitting on top of my little Macintosh. (It's in the garage! I'm not about to walk out there.)
Finally, they'll run the circuit check and confirm that, yes, there's a problem in my area and it's down! BUT THEY WON'T DO THAT UNTIL I PLAY THAT LITTLE GAME WITH THEM
I used to work as an instrumentation tech at a company that rented Industrial Hygiene and Environmental Remediation instruments. These were things like portable flame ionization detectors and geiger counters. We also rented some big stuff like Gas Chromatographs with Mass Spectrometer detectors.
We had to calibrate, maintain, repair, and ready the instruments for rental. We also had to take support calls for the instruments. Many people rented our stuff after finding out what it costs to have an Industrial Hygienist examine a workplace. Needless to say, this was a nightmare. I once spent 20 minutes trying to explain how to put a windscreen on the microphone of a sound level meter. I've spent over hour talking completely clueless warehouse guys through calibrating gas detectors. If the instrument could be interfaced to a PC to dump logged data then I got to deal with both instrument and serial port problems. Yay!!
It got bad enough that the techs would fight over who had to take the support calls coming in. We would seize on any technicality to stick the guy on the next bench over with it. Of course, I got stuck with all the datalogging instrument calls.....at least they paid me extra to do the "computer stuff".
Working a helpdesk was my idea of hell just because of the talking to stupid people aspect. If I had to deal with an especially abusive management along the ultra regimented environment then I would have to bring an uzi to work. There is no way in hell I would ever take a helpdesk job.
You forgot one:
Blame AOL. AOL has been responsible for so many problems in the past that the customer will accept this excuse, even if they have no AOL software on their computer.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
> What can you do? Put a "Press 1 if you are an idiot, Press 2 if you're l33t." menu tree into the system?
Hahaha. Where I live, there's a stretch of 6-lane freeway headed out of town into the countryside. Almost always, the "fast" lane moves slowest, and the "slow" lane moves fastest, presumably because everyone thinks they belong in the fast lane. I usually drive in the middle lane, and use the "slow" lane for a passing lane.
I've noticed this in other places, too. So much for self selection.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Damn idiot
Oh, horsepucky. That's completely untrue for a technical job, even one like tech support. I could quit my job as a software engineer tomorrow and have a new job within a week, not the 2+ months that your silly formula states.
She quit one job and *chose* to find another. 2-3 interviews A DAY and nearly 3 weeks later she found a job with a 2 hour commute time. Was this in some backwater city? No. Los Angeles.
And what did this person do for a living? If they chose a career in something "soft," finding a job could be tough. But they CHOSE it; somehow, my heart doesn't bleed.
And I've driven in LA; a 2 hour commute could be 20-30 miles away.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I have cable with a local provider. They have EXCELLENT SUPPORT. I have a 2GB/month transfer limit that is not enforced. When there is an outage, I can call them up, give them my name and number, and they will reimburse me for the down time. It is figured out from how much you transfer in a month divided by how much you pay. I get small notes on my bill, like: "SusCom Cable Modem Downtime: 35mins: $.05. Sorry!".
Why couldn't a DSL provider do this? Also, since the switches are fully controlled by computers, why can't they shut the DSL off right away? I got into an argument with an operator, and my local phone service was shut off IN SECONDS. Then, I got on my cell phone, filed a complaint, and had service BACK, IN SECONDS. DSL should be just as simple. The Baby Bells have the funds. Use them. And, with reading this article, treat your employees better. They'll preform better.
The job could actually be a good one if the problems were properly addressed. The problem is when the bean counters get in, they realize that tech support is a LIABILATY, not an ASSET. When that happens, 1984 happens. It's the same for all large support groups (coming from one that I prefer not to mention who bought netscape). Too many calls, not enough techs who know their a$$ from their head, and insufficient compensation to motiviate those techs to actually better themselves as techs, much less to actually stay on and continue to accept customer abuse.
Now as to the bitching about a job... seen what techsupport makes these days... some would consider it not enough to live on. Thing is that to move to a non-support job, everyone wants experience doing non-support things (read systems admin or programming), and I will admit, the last thing I wanted to do when I was working support was go home and touch a computer. I'm shure that at least some, if not the majority of the populous that has worked a bad support job will agree with that. So what do you do... wait at the support job for an opening... I'm sorry.. we're hireing a contactor with more experience for that position. Maybe next time... yeah right. Keep the smoke coming...
I've been lucky. I made it into an admin position from techsupport, of which I'm etermally grateful for. I will say that I agree with everything in this story, and ask one thing:
Everyone has a rant. You do too. Quit BITCHING about hers, and mine.
I was changing carriers
I had previously worked for a fairly large 'gaming' company in the UK. and wanted to leave that and get back into my major (programming). I had prepaired myself to take a year off, and study up. then I got an e-mail from @home saying they needed college educated people to help them out.
i figured .. what the hell .. free cable.
i spent 2 years in their call center, then moved to publishing/writing webpages & backend ASP pages.After that I moved on to another company that offered to pay me what I was worth. (Even with my spelling mistakes .. smarta$$es *grin*
from what friends there tell me .. its actually gotten WORSE :P but the number combination to push you to the top of the call queue still works!
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I would say that the length of time it takes is about 50% dependent on who you know, and 50% on how desperate companies are for your skills. A person on my Clinic project team at Harvey Mudd went for three days of interviews in San Jose after his job that he thought was certain fell through. On the morning of the second day, he was offered a position with a startup, on the spot. The salary negotiation consisted of them asking him to name a figure sufficient for him to cancel the remainder of his interviews and work for them once he left school. He named that figure, the recruiter added some stock options to the offer, and that was that. Now, this is person from a prestigious tech school with a degree in CS, so he's going to be in demand. In any case, by your formula this would have been an 8 week search...
I chose to spend a lot longer on my search (and could afford to, being in school and all), and it ended up taking in the range of time that you're talking about. However, this was to do real research, fly up for a week of interviews, and do protracted salary negotiations (one of the parties was a government contractor).
I'd say that this has a lot to do with the skill set of your average tech support callcenter person.
Walt
Poor little techs... with the puppy dog eyes... we wouldn't want them to do their job now would we?!
Keep in mind that with the amazing leap in the need for tech support people, they take people off the street and give them some basic training and let them loose. Kinda like fast food workers or migrant farm workers.. Except fast food workers don't think that knowing how to use a cash register makes them better than someone who doesn't.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
The problem arises when you type bra instead of bar and you have variables named both bra and bar. Its like mixing up i's and j's in nested for loops, the compiler won't catch it, and the results will just be wrong for no apparent reason.
-- Point? None! Cob.
One of the great lessons in life: People are stupid. A customer rarely understands the product, much less the people behind it. The sheer volume of (I've been told) true stories of "where's the any key" is staggering. Hell, one is too many. =)
Ah well, back to that perty little white room they gave me.
This article came so damn close to home. I work in the dregs of second level support (its great because we don't speak with the customers, but the techs aren't that much smarter). I take, on average, 120-170 calls in a 10 hour day. By the end of the day (after my so far 20 months of employment), I don't even wanna hear a phone, much less talk to anyone.
Usually, between customers who are misinformed, techs who are badly trained, stupid loopholes that customers are thrust trough, the impending doom of big brother listening in, and managment decisions that aren't getting better; you can get quite stressed.
Its all the illusion of support... the CrackerJack version of Piece of Mind protection...
Dijital
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
I have been working front line tech support for 15 months straight now (worked it for summer jobs before this)..I can not wait to get out.
At first it wasn't too bad..."yeah sure I get the occasional irrate caller, and get yelled at all the time...but I get to _help_ people" I thought to myself..
After the past summer I no longer think that way. There were two of us supporting an entire university for four months (summer, but still) right after a major switch in our dial up facilities. We had to support everything under the sun, win 9x, win3.1, macs winNT, win2k,winME, some linux, any app that anyone can find...You'd think that people with PhD's would have at least half a clue...nope.
I can't even express the pain. I'd have to go 4 hours non-stop on the phone...that is hang up the phone, then have it ring, and have to answer it. THen go for a 2o minute lunch and go at it again for another 4 hours.
(people who are on hold for more than 20 minutes get quite irate)
PLease make the pain stop.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
When I got my DSL (Mindspring/Earthlink) up and going I called to cancel the the old dialup account, making BIG notes not to cancel the DSL. Of course, guess what happened anyway. Not only that, but because the request had to be treated the way it carried out, both accounts had to be reactivated to get the DSL back. Plus they charged a reconnect fee ($100). I haven't tried recancelling the dialup, I'll wait until I have time to mess with the (likely) possibility of repeat disservice, so I'm paying for an unused account to protect the other.
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
Call me weird, call me a freak, but doing this kind of stuff would actually be fun for me. it seems pretty strange even to me. I just think that you could learn a lot in this type of career. With internet service you'll get people skills, not just talking to people you know, who are sure that they can fix their problems themselves, but angry raving men! I also love hearing peoples problems, I would laugh inside as their problem is so obvious, but out of reach to them. Confusing them with my techno-blabber would also be a great time. It's all about perspective.
No wonder there's no such thing as clued DSL support. :) Bob-ism has really gone down-hill.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Hehe, I did this recently with my Mac Cube.. I went thru the list of things I did (power cord/supply fiddling, reseating various components, moving cables around, etc as proscribed by the TIL and discussion groups) and the tech on the other end basically said 'well, just hold for your ticket # and wait for your box'..
(I thought it was cool anyway...)
Your Working Boy,
I have had two DSL accounts since January, the first one with flashcom. Once it worked it was pretty good, reliable and such, however, once I tried to move, it took them 6 weeks to enter my request for the move, as it was mis-entered three times, 8 weeks to figure out that they needed to give me an additional phone line, even though I told them when I first asked, and re-iterated every time I called. Then they told me it would be at least another 6 weeks, which was the install time, now they had their shit together. I got DSL from someone else. UUNet. So far UUNet has been exemplary. They cost a little more, but I get 32 statics, and can get a full class C. I have a router, that can do NAT and static addresses _at the same time_. It's excellent. UUNet are in the business. I had all my stuff configured inside 76 hours. DNS, reverse DNS, routing et al.
I have a friend who has a T3 with the former Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). His install date was Oct 8. He finally got it Oct 20. Reverse DNS didnt work until Nov 29, so he couldnt move any major serivces over to it. The first 3 weeks, Bell failed their SLA by 2000%. He has to wait 6 weeks to get packets to route to Verio's backbone. The moral of this story is don't use a Telco if you expect Internet service. He still has to spend 6 minutes getting to Tier 3 support who actualy understand the meaning of the words 'Reverse DNS'. They did at least give him 3 months free. A T3 is some serious cash! He is now getting a T3 from UUNet.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
I was hovering at the -10, -11 range (I can only dream of a negative triple number), but I got two FP in the same day and WHAM!!! Your account has been disabled, thanks for playing now wait a week. I think the key is to slowly score negative numbers over time. The bitch slap comes when you get moderated down 5 times in 24 hours, getting negative 100 karma is the most difficult sustained endurance test known to man, next to soccer.
Lemme tell you guys somthing about tech support. The writer of the article may have moved from general /tech support/ to /supervisor/, but because of the lack of decent equipment here in Florida, I have been moved from WebDesign and linux sysadmining to tech support. We just dont have the staffing for the ammount of calls we get because Sprint decides to go from a 12 port card to a 24 port card that has incompatability issues with other Lucent-Approved equipment. *sigh*
.ph0x
If that isn't enough than think about this, some of us get to... ahem get to take tech support calls at home too... It's a good thing we are salaried emplyees eh?
Of, course, it is impossible to get them both in the same room at the same time.
Mind you I have also worked for some horrible call centers. I worked for GTE/Verizon for a while on Out-source ISP help. We had four accounts and (literally) no training. They would sit you in with someone like me for a day and expect you to start hitting the numbers the next day. I would sleep and answer the calls we got in at the same time (no joke.) I quit when we got a canadian MLM scheme internet provider. I couldnt stand to hear "Why isnt the internet working. What is this aboot eh! I wont tu speek to your soopervisor eh!"
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Ever spend 4 hours poring over code and suddenly realize youre wearing a bra? I hate it when my roommates play tricks on me
Amen to that. If I tell anyone that I'm studying computer science, the immediate response is "I hear you can make a lot of money doing that." It makes me batty, especially because the people I see excelling in the degree mostly do computer sceince because they like it, not because they know they'll get paid a lot. (Pay is a nice benefit, however.)
To anyone who might be reading this: Please, please, please don't go into computer science unless you like it. You'll make yourself miserable and there's a good chance you won't be very good at it.
While I have sympathy for tech support people, I have *none* whatsoever for the people at PacBell. This is the worst phone monoply I've ever dealt with. After being dicked over by them repeatedly, all I hope is that all the people who work for PacBell get rounded up and shot in the stomach.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
You do have a good point...tech support is not that hellaciously difficult of a job, especially when you think about third world children working jobs that ruin their health.
But on the other hand, if tech support should be so easy for the technicians on the floor, and they shouldn't complain about having to do so much, why does the management and contracters and what not find it so hard to hold up their end of the bargain? I am sure that if most techs were asked, they would say that being lied to by management is worse then the treatment they recieve from customers.
For example, when I worked tech support, this was the incident that caused me to quit my job: I was in the middle of a call, and my headset begin fading in and out...so I put the customer on hold and grabbed a headset off a desk next to mine. (I didn't have a regular cubicle...most of us didn't. We sat where there was an open seat.)And went back on the call. I finished it off, and then went on to the next call. Of course, the man who was sitting next to me came back and wasn't too happy about me taking his headset. After going through the process of requisitioing a new headset, I asked management what I should have done for a failed headset while on the phone...and I was told I should have put the customer on hold while I went and requistioned a new headset.
If technical support is so easy, why is it so hard for the management to even give techs the tools they need to do their jobs?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
What a troll. I used to work in a tech support call center, and I was good at my job, blah blah blah. It's still a shit job, and it is still stressful and dehumanizing. Just because you mastered the system, it doesn't change the fact that it's a shit job. Nothing to be proud of.
Your boast of 40-50 calls a day leads me to believe that you were able to keep your call times down because you saw the same problems over and over, and thus could answer them quickly and efficiently. Again, nothing to be proud of. Sounds pretty boring to me, in fact. Real problems sometimes take a few more minutes to solve, and there's nothing wrong with that.
There's also a newly filmed version of the sketch that has just been released, available here.
I once called because their end was having a problem. After 30 mins with the help desk and being passed around from help desker to help desker, I finally made it through to their NOC. These guys are supposed to know this shit right? Here's a paraphrased transcript of me talking to their NOC: me: yes, the problem is on your end them: how do you know? me: traceroute them: how do you know about traceroute? me: I'm a linux and unix sysadmin them: Really? Cool! I need some help. how do I get my computer at home to run X...yadda.... Yeah, that was fun. I call to get my service fixed and ended up trying to explain how to fix X for this shmuck. --Dave
That means that walking out the door without having secured other employment is not an option.
;)
Dude, two words: Long Lunch...
(My last 3 job interviews were during longish lunch breaks
Your Working Boy,
I do Teir I tech support at a large company (30,000+ users), and we don't have problems like that. We have a clear chain of responsiblity we use to hand off unresolvable issues.
I have worked Teir II as well, and Teir I is not any easier, just less mobile. I've had to troubleshoot programs I've never ever heard of, but at least I can ask other people around me via ICQ (Groupware beta that sucks, but that's another story), and I resolve 70%-100% of my supported software calls.
What it may take for a situation like that is a coalition of employees that go directly to the manager of the division (not their supervisior!) with a list of complaints and a list of how to fix them (from a front-line perspective). If they don't get addressed...hey, YOU'VE GOT EVERY SINGLE USERS EMAIL ADDRESS! Use it as a parting shot, maybe you can cause a major disruption in income, and possibly a lawsuit against them if the ISP has actually violated any terms of service.
If your evil, you can suggest to the user that they carefully look over their contract and, if it's violated, take it to a lawyer.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
The ideal question would be:
"what seems to be the problem"
The clueful answer would be:
"I can ping my IP, can ping DNS, and can ping any $isp server, but I can't ping Microsoft, yahoo, or Google."
an optimal, but unclueful andswer would be: "th' internet is broke. You need to reboot it."
Unfortunately, you run the risk of hearing:
"I started connecting to the internet in December and everything was fine until My nephew Kevin used my computer. He's a Hacker. I could tell because he looked at www.hackers.com. Well, anyway, he changed everything on my computer. It used to be this really pretty blue color, but now it's just black and says lilo:. He gave me instructions, and I follow them. I type in "loosur" as my user name and "diebitchdie"
as my password. He said its inportant to give out this password to whoever I talk to. Anyway, I used to like Windows 95 but now I don't anymore because now when I load it - he said I could load it by typing startx - it gives me this big, ugly picture of a foot and I really don't like feet that much will you help me get rid of the foot? And also, I hate typing startx every day when I start my computer and can you help me get rid of the user name and password too because well, I can live with looser, but diebitchdie has got to go because its really vulgar and I think he deserves a spanking for using such language and I'm embarassed that I have to say my password is diebitchdie when my computer used to be so friendly. And also, what is a kernel? Also, Why do I have to take cookies when I don't want them and what is a static route? And don't you think he deserves a spanking? and how can I lock hackers like my nephew out of my computer and WHY AM I BEING CHARGED $19.99 A MONTH WHEN I HAVEN"T BEEN CONNECTING FOR 6 WEEKS?"
Now we get their progeny...
LT Winmodem
Rockwell HCF Winmodem
HSP Micromodem
and damn the soul who starts the call with
"Just bought this e-machine..."
Dijital
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
Agreed, but with a monopoly like that, you are stuck with satilite or cable... I'll let you know how the Satilite thing works out..
SysAdmining to pure Bob-dom? Yikes!
I feel your pain with tech support calls at home. I do SysAdmin & support. I am now required to carry a cell-phone & pager and am expected to support users anywhere I go. But it is a dual edged sword when I'm called with a tech question whilst intoxicated on the weekends. :)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
And here I thought I had it bad at Stream. Now I fondly look back at the luxurious 30 minutes of idle I had to spread throughout my day as I wished, and the way I never had to get on the phones when I was on break. (Of course, in an average day, I spent at least 15 minutes in idle researching something for a callback...)
Another thing that I notice that was different at Stream was the fact that virtually all performance was measured over periods of weeks or longer, not on a call-by-call basis. (This is probably because they didn't have enough managers, not because they thought it worked better that way.) For that matter, we were supposed to maintain a 9-minute call average, and they didn't get on our case for a single call until it went over half an hour.
I can't believe how incredibly lucky I feel.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
First, no one will sign that NDA. I never signed mine at the CP&L owned Interpath Communications -- Capitol Broadcasting never asked us to sign one. (They tried to sneek it into the employee handbook, but I refused to sign that either.) I wasn't the only one who refused to sign it.
As for everyone being a supervisor, they are just giving their customers what they want. They always ask to speek to a supervisor, so just make everyone a supervisor.
I did it for 2 years and it was the most nervewrecking job. I did ISP support so it wasn't as bad as DSL because there are hundreds of reasons DSL isn't working and no one knows. (4 months to get dsl at one of our offices, 3 months at another). The worst tech support job was for AT&T WorldNET. It was just like the Pacbell guy explained it, the way they treated you, but it wasn't as bad handling the calls. They had good help desk information databases. Tier2, Tier3 techs that actually knew something. But the supervisors were dicks. When I worked at Sprint we got like 2 calls a day (literaly), so that was beautiful. We just sat around talking and surfing. Next I worked at Oltronics. I was the only tech support guy. All the calls would come to me and I would get messages from people. Who I would have to call long distance and troubleshoot. At this point I did dialup support in my sleep, I knew it all in my head. Last place I worked at was MPInet. I got caught playing quake and they deleted it. And my supervisor was a dick. They had us clean the building (mop, change toilet paper, trash, etc) which was really stupid. I loved the other techs there, but eventually they started making us work Saturdays and Sundays, and then to 35 hours. And I went to school so I quit. Now i'm a systems administrator at a small non profit. I'm basically my own boss (I have a boss but she isn't on my back). I handle all the computer issues at the company. I have no stress and I make my own schedule. And I get paid a lot. :)
At all costs don't work tech support. Unless you need some type of computer experience to move to the next level. Do it, become a manager and then go find a good job.
Deepak
When I did OA Tech Support for a (Big Three Engineering dept) we had a WinXX client/NT Server arrangment for file/print...
Two greatest sources of headaches:
Users dont understand they need to log in the network to print or use network resources (because of former slack admin).
Users endlessly saying "I need the 'g' drive", "Can I have access to the 'L' Drive?" - I spent untold hours trying to explain how drive mapping worked, and that the label was meaningless.. after giving a 10minute talk 560123^12 times I gave up trying to explain it... I made them 'go see another person who has the drive you want and follow this script (start, run, command,net use).
Finding a job is never that simple. *NEVER*. The last time I checked the rule of thumb was 1 week for every 10k you earn. So the person in question here would have looked for 2.5 weeks, over one pay period, looking for a job. Then they have to wait one more pay period before they get paid. When I was working for 25k I was living paycheck to paycheck. A 1 month interruption was not acceptable. I doubt it is for this person, either.
In fact, I had to support my roommate for the month she didn't have a paycheck. She quit one job and *chose* to find another. 2-3 interviews A DAY and nearly 3 weeks later she found a job with a 2 hour commute time. Was this in some backwater city? No. Los Angeles.
Days? Bull. Weeks? Yes. Even then that is the first available job, not a preferred job. Sure the person you're badmouthing could choose to go get another job and choose to take the first offered once his money runs out and be in the exact same position.
Get some perspective.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
I used to do tech support for a certain sound card manufacturer (hint: they liked to sue aureal alot). Now while they weren't anywhere near as draconian as pac bell sounds, there were certainly several situation that made me extremely angry about the company in general. I worked in email support, and as a result had some autonomy. We were expected to experiment with our hardware, to understand whats going on. Well, a new set of NT drivers are release. So we test it out on our NT machines. Install, watch BSOD appear. It wont even boot now. We try with several other machines, same thing. We run over to test lab to show them, and they have no idea whats causing it. In fact they never figured it out. Instead, they pull the drivers, and leave me to explain to all the NT customers that we cant help them unless they have their emergency repair disks. The company also had a tuition reimbursement program, however getting HR to get you on the program. After 2 years of working for $7.00 an hour on the hope that I could get them to pay for some of my computer science classes, I burned out. False benefits, and poorly tested products are no way to keep competent tech support.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I needed to hear that I'm not alone. I spent some 15 months at a large ISP. And you hit that feeling I used to get dead streight on.
.however, don't actually do that, talk to me first (actually said to me)".
It's not just the idiot customers. After time the idiot customers are more of a comic relief then anything else. It's when the customers are screaming at you, your powerless to do anything about it, and they are having problems because somebody up the ladder makes it impossible for you to fix it.
After I was there a few months, we were told flat out: Your job is not tech support; your job is customer service. Your job is the make the customer happy, not fix his problem. Then later, 'We get 2,000 resumes a week from people begging to do your job. If you don't think your replaceable, think again'.
The way call centers are run is so old fashioned and innefficent, it's a wonder customers ultimatly put up with them. You have a tech, who can do nothing but try to help and talk nice. You have the supervisor, who is being yelled at by the floor manager to shorten his/her 'teams' call time, then you have that guys boss yelling at the floor manager... and so on up the line.
And the insulting thing, which every employee sees through is how they deal with discontented workers. They tell us about all the ways they are making it really a great place to work.
Examples:
We have great health care--to a staff with an average age of 22.
"The president's of the companys office is right over there. He keeps an open door policy, so if you ever want to talk to him, go ahead and do it. .
"We are offering free training for MCSEs and other items you can do during your work time, as long as it doesn't interfere with your calls"--meaning never.
In the meantime, every second of every day is logged on the clock. The rows and rows of cubicals are patrolled with armed guards (for our own security... they tell us).
So, why don't you just quit? Now that I'm no longer working there, I wonder about that. And I realize, it's because that call center, and presumably most of them out there foster such an envrionment that really, really dehumanizes their workers in such a way that they just can't. After a few months of taking abuse from callers and your employers, with no advocates, no place to vent except to your equally disinchanted co-workers, you just don't have enough self worth to go out there and get another job.
(On a side note, shortly after leaving that ISP, joy returned to my life. To all of those still drudging away... quit now, you have so much to live for).
The Internet is generally stupid
You're right. Telling them that you know what you're doing only helps when you've got second level or higher on the line. First level is usually reading from a script and wouldn't know how to 'shorten' it in a useful way without getting lost anyway.
My typical call to @home goes something like "My config hasn't changed in months and it was working fine 10 minutes ago. I can ping *my* side of *your* router and about 5 other nodes on my loop. Can you ping me? No? Ok. I'll hold for second level. Thanks." It's getting to the point where I know their scripts as well as they do.
I really hate that. I've spent way too much time wondering why my perl script won't work, only to find the variable spelled wrong. Arrrggggh.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like strict typechecking, I like working without a net. It just smarts more when you fall.
That's what I had four years ago when I took BASIC in high school. QBASIC, actually. The woman was a librarian and drama coach, not a bloody computer instructor. I ran around helping out people, hardly able to get my own work done, trying to get 15 incompetent 15-year-olds to figure out that
:)
REM this program sucks
and
REM ***This Program Sucks***
are REALLY NOT DIFFERENT. The woman gave me a C in the class because I "didn't put forth enough effort".
Geeze. I like my C++ prof now that I'm in college. The man knows his stuff. He used to work for DEC; he's programmed his way in and out of just about every program that's out there, and he lets people telnet/ssh to linux boxen and use gcc because he really detests the Microsoft Visual C++ that the college has put into standard usage. Dr. Kruse, if you're reading this, cheers!
Anyway, back to reality.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Sooo, with all due respect... What's that combination we should ask our rep. to type in when calling? ;)
Finally, they gave the IT people the respect they deserve with a good posision. Now if only they'd lighten off the workload!
Careful: I know how to MetaMod!
SIG: HUP
__________________
The real question is how people can sell a service/product that is so inherently flawed that it requires this much support...
I'm stating the obvious and this is most likely explained better in other posts, but people with a clue usually find work elsewhere.
Java software engineers and QA engineers? Did you even read the fucking article? You have apparently never worked tech support in a call center; this isn't something that you do as an aspiration, its what you do because its the best paying job that you can get without a college degree or an assload of certs in the tech industry. Every fucking day I'd love to just say fuck it and never go into work, because it sucks the high, hard one, but what else am I going to do? Java software engineer?!? Get the fuck out of here; if I qualified for that position, I'd be long gone from call center support.
This is the McDonald's of the tech industry; its the place where those of us who can't afford to go to or haven't yet completed a college degree go to work because we're too fucking stupid to get over the computer addiction and find a halfway decent job outside of the industry. But fate cursed my stupid ass to be a computer geek instead so I deal with the whiny dickheads who drop three grand on a piece of equipment with more options than a DC-10 that they know jack shit about and expect to work like HAL 9000 while I beg, scrimp and steal any little piece of info from those on high that might help me and my fellow techs solve the myriad mysterious issues that always crop up with no reasonably obtained solutions.
That article was so right on that I damn near started crying when I saw my life written out in black and white like that. So I continue to go, day after shitty day, waiting for the day that my wife gets her degree so that she can go to work and make good money while I go to school and take care of my daughter. No offense to you, TWR, as you apparently aren't aware of just who is staffing the call centers, but seeing your disdain towards call center techs not being to find work and then saying how easy it is to find a job as an engineer was just patently ridiculous. Not all techies are six figure programmers; some of us are still making $20,000 a year doing support work and hoping for something better before we burn out.
Deo
Terradot.org: Growing Awareness
Word has it that the CWA and another union are organizing Amazon.com employees, which I think is a step in the right direction. Amazon, for it's part, is doing everything it can to discourage workers from organinzing on their own behalf, according to rumor.
When I worked at Dell, I thought about unions all the time. Unfortunately, in Texas an employer can fire an employee pretty for any reason.
For 1.5 yrs.... And, I wrote a little story. Everything in the story is true, as far as what you hear, only instead of the Fine Microsoft product, it's silverware support. Read it if you wish: www.squirm.net/silver.htm It's not too long.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
This is an almost Orwellian tale that should send a wake-up call to all the DSL
ISPs.
Yeah, and that wake-up call will say: All call center employees must sign strict NDAs that forbid them from discussing what goes on at work.
If anyone in authority sees this, the thing they'll be most concerned about is revealing that everyone's a supervisor. They're just trying to cover their own asses; they can't save anyone else, even if they wanted to.
-jon
This is true of tech support too -- if you have some experience in tech support, you can easily find another job doing tech support. But what's the point of that? You haven't gained anything by changing jobs if you've changed into something similarly bad. If you want to get a better job than the job you had, you'll have a hard time, because you won't have experience and people won't pay attention to you or give you a chance.
Finding a good job, a better job than the one you have, is still hard. If you have any ambition, you'll have to struggle to get the job that helps you in that ambition.
And recruiters filling up your answering machine means nothing -- recruiters are full of shit. They try to bring lots of people into their pool of potential employees, then skim a few people with the right resumes that employers are having a hard time finding. Half the time I don't even think the jobs they advertise exist.
When it was still Javanet, we would provision accounts with a wonderfully stripped down program (whose name escapes me), invested something like 100 mil in a new system which didn't work. This had us resorting to paper applications for both account creation and cancelation. They'd frequently get shuffled or lost, resulting in people cancelling but still getting billed. The customer would call back and ask why they were still getting charged, the tech would tell them a credit would be issued and send them on their way. The customer would call back three months later and ask why they're still getting billed. The reply we were instructed to give? "Sorry, we have no record of you calling, you're stuck with the $19.99 x n weeks bill, have a nice day."
The founder of Javanet quit not too long after RCN made a screaming wreck out of his company's name.
Yes, there were a few individuals who took some perverse pleasure in sticking it to the customers (think "Clerks"), but the vast majority didn't. one quit, simply telling a boss that he was sick of lying to people. We received an email saying "you shouldn't lie to customers." It was darkly comical.
Then you have your assorted thugs, the only type of people who can truly rise to management in close proximity of this bullshit. We had one guy - John Boynton - who everyone alternately feared (because he truly loved screaming at people like a 4-year-old) and felt sorry for (because he so desparately needed to be sodomized). Still does from what I hear. Scream, not get sodomized, that is. What can you say about a guy who irons his underwear?
Finally, we once recieved gift boxes - all of us - with some sort of appreciation gift inside. Turned out to be a styofoam oversized puzzle piece with the words "you're part of the solution" (or something) on a laminated side. One intrepid individual boxed them all up, sent them back to corporate with a letter asking for a working mailserver instead. Oh, and the pieces didn't fit. We thought that was foreboding.
But I doubt there is a large contingent of Slashdot readers that often calls tech support. If you're one of them, realize that those in power are quite well insulated from you. The best thing you can do if you're getting fucked by one of these mindless corporations (don't you just love RCN's WWII advertising chic?) is to buy a single stock and then you have the right as a stockholder to include your experience in their offical meeting notes. Of course it's not entirely nessesary to go through that hassle, but finding out the name of the third or fifth person from the top (as opposed to the bottom) and letting them know your intent doe makes a big difference.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
At least you worked for DirecTV - I worked for DirecPC. Talk about supporting a product that never worked in the first place. Thankfully the call center moved and I got laid off - best day of my life!!
Have you never heard of a UNION ? This is what they are for...
I found it too much of a stretch to put in my original post, but to mention another matter like this...I'm in a C++ class at my high school. At the beginning of the semester, the teacher had us all give a speech on a career of our choice. Naturally, half the class chose computer programmer, and all of them liked to focus on the salary part of the presentation...$50K starting out! A Godsend!
;)
Now, as the semester is almost over, I'd say more than three-quarters of those gave up that idea REAL quick. It just proved too much of a stretch for their AOLified computer minds to handle. The class of 30 only has 3 or 4 students that are still keeping up, with only 2 that are hard-core about it (myself included - coding a text battleship game as we speak...er, type
Anyway, I wish that every high school had a class like mine, where wannabe CS majors could cut their teeth, and realize that it's not all easy stuff before they decide on a path that will eventually lead them astray.
"...are a convenient solution for companies who don't want to talk with their customers anymore."
Quote from an article in a German magazine about American service.
The main argument of that article's author was that while Americans pride themselves for their corporate culture of total customer service, the reality is often worse than in Europe, the place that Americans love to joke about in reference to bad service. The author also joked about the sales-droids who are ordered to say "Hi, my name is Suzy, how may I help you", smiling, yet leave no doubt that they really think "please, go away, don't ask any questions".
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You may like my a cappella music
i did get out of it. i work for a good company, doing what i love. I never bitched about my job openly, and i never slacked - if i wanted better, i would have gotten it. i was just trying to elucidate the many facets of tech-support life to the ill-informed (i would think this includes yourself).
the problem: most people just don't get it. they think that tech support is supposed to be some paradigm of customer service. It's not. It's a bunch of people sitting in a call center getting yelled at by the customer (through no fault of their own), then getting yelled at by their boss for not ending the call quickly enough, or ending it too quickly. Catch-22.
your problem: you've got the "those damned kids" attitude. Well, welcome to it because your elders said the same thing about you, and we'll say the same thing about our kids. And all you can really do is sit back and wait to get modded up to (+3, insightful).
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Nothing at all like the "good old days" of tech
support back in '95-96 or so. I started as the first tech support guy they hired, and ended up being Assistant Sysadmin before I left, at ioNET (now part of PSI) in Oklahoma City. Techs nowdays are too dependent on web browsers and such; our guys could do their job with a dumb ascii terminal and a telephone. Back then, nobody cared about call times or averages, etc - our job was to solve people's problems, and thats what we did (altho the "hey dude, you're my supervisor" trick has been around for ages...)
The best sysadmins are the people who have moved up from the ranks of phone tech support. I'm a burned out bitter tech support person who has been a sysadmin for about four years now. I'll never go back to the phones.
Want a horrible flashback? Try these:
Trumpet Winsock
IBM MWave modems
PACKARD BELL
8-)
I come from a long line of underacheivers. Most of the people in my family have worked their asses off at minimum wage jobs where they could be easily replaced, with management who didn't like them, doing jobs that were aging their bodies twice as fast as nature would. Think "meat plant" "roofing" "line manufacturing".
That stuff sucks ass, I even did some of it when I was a teenager. I had a job in a bacon factory where I took big slabs of back from a rack and threw it into a machine. I then pressed 2 levers on the machine to make it compress the meat. It was 30 degrees in the factory and constantly wet. The bellies weighed between 30 to 50 lbs and I had to maintin a high rate of speed because I supplied 2 production lines. There were no unscheduled breaks, if I left my position then that means 2 lines of people (around 20 or so total) would be standing around waiting on me. Now -that- job sucked. Tech support isn't roses, but it is a far cry from "The worst job.". Yes, I do tech support now. I have a frame of reference.
The people in my family are thrilled that I get paid to sit behind a computer screen and talk to people on the phone. Beats the shit out of packing meat.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Thank you very much
XML causes global warming.
Earthlink Tech support must hire McDonalds drop outs, I'm telling you. I've yet to speak with someone with a three digit IQ over there. Most of them don't even know how to use their computer or even know how to read.
Case
We had one guy from Earthlink support apply to work at my company. I posed a VERY common ISP customer scenario, "When I was downloading my e-mail, my computer crashed and now after I reboot and reconnect, my mail program is telling me my password is incorrect". This guy looked at me with a blank stare then said he would ask them customer to retype their password, then check their DNS, then look for proxies, etc. then if that didn't work he would tell the customer to reinstall system software and reinstall the mail client. WRONG!! I asked him if he ever heard of a "popper". Again dumbfounded. At that point I thanked him for his time and kicked him out.
Case
One of our Flowpoint routers got fried (common occurance with the Flowpoints). I called tech support and told them about it. At the time the DSLAM was down and the "tech" said he couldn't help me because of the DSLAM. I said my problem had nothing to do with the DSLAM. "Well sir, I need to ping your router to perform some tests and I can't right now" was the response, this after informing him that the whole unit is fried and is not working at all. "I'm sorry sir, I have to test the unit from here". Ok so I gave up and waited until the DSLAM was back up. This time I call and the new "tech" says I have to turn the unit on because he can't ping it. "No shit, its dead, and by the way the switch is in the on position". "Is the unit plugged in sir?". Nothing sank in. After bout 15 minutes of this the guy finnaly believed me. He said he would schedule a truck roll for me but could not tell me when. I'd get an e-mail from Covad with the time. A day or two later with no e-mails from Covad I called back. "They'll be out tomorrow between 8:00 and 12:00". I wasn't all that pleased because I don't usually get in until 10 but at least someone was comming out. Next day at 12:01, no one shows. I called back and the "tech" tells me there was no order and they don't know why the last idiot told me there was. Then whole thing started again. "Is the unit plugged in? I can't ping it". After screaming I get transfered to the "supervisor". He assures me that he just scheduled a truckroll for two days from now but can't give me a time and said I should call back tomorrow for a time" Next day I call. "Sorry dir I don't see a record of any order, Is the unit plugged in?" More screaming and yet another supervisor pass and now I have yet another appointment for 3 days from now. Third time was the charm because the guy showed and told me that this was the fifth flowpoint he's replaced today and its a know issue that that particular model has problems. This whole farce took two weeks.
Case
I dont know what I was thinking but I ordered Earthlink DSL for my home. I ordered on October 2nd, got a welcome pack three weeks later and then heard nothing. Two weeks ago, I called and they said that PacBell had to come out and fiddle with something and to call back by Novemeber 27th if nothing happened. On the 27th I called and got some dimwit who didn't have a clue as to how to use their computer and admited it, I told them the Burgerking was hiring then hung up and tried again. The second "tech" wasn't that much better. She was able to use her computer, she found my account but said that there was no order open at all. She gave me the main corporate number and told me to call them. Of course they routed me right back into tech support but it was the wrong desk. The "tech" there fould my account and found my order but would NOT help me because I "dialed" the wrong number. Third time I called back the first number got another idiot who was able to find my account and order but told me that she couldn't tell me when they'd come out. Now supposedly they'll be out next Wednesday between 8 and 12. I can't wait to see the "tech" that comes out then.
I did 'helldesk' double duty during my sysadmin stint from 1996 to 1999. The only thing that kept me sane was that our dial-up access package included a free course in browsing and using e-mail. That took care of maybe 40% of the lusers, and as it turned out the Win95 FAQ I maintained helped another 40% (based on 80/20).
Of course the remaining 20% made me wish I didn't have to go in to work some days.
All this was before DSL of course, but even our backbone ISP's tech support was about as helpful as most of these 'DSL tech support' guys were. Flame away if you must, but we were treated as second class customers solely because we used NT Server as our platform. Their tech support LOATHED us because we had the audacity to run a mission critical and stable business without a *ix platform.
Feh. We assimilated one smaller ISP after two years, and we sold the business a year later at a PROFIT. Our techs, myself included, stayed sane. Our customers stayed with us and renewed again and again. I can't say the same for most ISPs regardless of platform or policy.
I have no sympathy for tech support droids who treat their customers as id10ts, manglement droids who treat their techs as id10ts, nor for the real id10ts who have no business being on the 'net without formal training.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
Of course another thing that grates is when the web site is down or broken and their hold tape informs you that you can use their site for all your needs!
I work tech support and thought it was strange that I have 9 supervisors. Guess it's not that weird.
Goat sex, please mod down. URL does not match link.
Of everyone I've ever talked to, from Microsoft to @Home to various OEMs to NSI etc, Nomonthlyfees.com, the web hosting service has the absolute best support I've seen.
On the phone you're on hold only a few minutes, and not one of the techs flinched on my questions.
Email support is even good. It took only 30 minutes to get a response... at 10pm on a Sunday Night!
For all of the support services that suck, these guys truly shine. (and aside from having a website hosted by them, I have no other affiliation).
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
sounds way too familiar...except much better than the place I worked:
"Stay on a call longer than thirty minutes and your name goes into a log." We got 6 minutes for tier one, 10 for tier two by the time I quit.
"Sit in Wrap (the time between calls) for longer than three minutes, your name goes in a log." Three minutes? We got three seconds.
"Take a Health break for longer than five minutes, your name goes in a log." What's a health break?
"One of an incoming class of about 25. Twenty months later I look around at the hundred or so faces, and I don't recognize anyone from my class. " I was in a class of 30, I think 6 made it to the floor. I was one of the last still working there when I quit after four months.
"When the crew thins out, a new crop of agents is recruited and given two weeks basic training (Monday-Windows, Tuesday-Mac,Thursday-NT) and off they go." We got one week of training, then off we go.
The second page of the article wouldn't load, but I imagine it would have sounded familiar as well. Tech support is THE worst job I've ever had. If all companies are as poorly run as the one I work for, no wonder service is so bad. At least when I have to call for tech support for my ISP I understand what they're doing and how much it sucks. And I never say that I used to do tech support (here's a hint: we don't care or it pisses us off - most people who said the were tech people knew very little. I had a guy call in once who said he was a sys admin but didn't know he had to be connected to the internet to check his email). "Glory" of tech support? ha.
"Truth is like a tragedy" -Coal Chamber
The work environment described reminds me less of Orwell's world and more of Victorian England as described by Charles Dickens. Work conditions are extremely harsh, and everyone is treated as, and expected to work like, an automaton. The squeaky wheel doesn't get greased, it gets replaced. The only sense of loyalty breeds from fear.
There's got to be a better way for out-sourced support firms to draw up their contracts; an economic formula to foster problem solving rather than call churn.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Chances are I probably worked with you and I fully concur with your statement... I remember when one of those satellites burnt up in the atmosphere.. those were the days :) 100+ calls hit in under a minute... awesome! It's like watching the ending of Apocalypse Now.
Frankly, you're an ass.
"Just to piss them off"? You ever wonder why you get bad customer service from tech support? Look in the mirror. Those guys deal with enough crap every hour without your snide attitude. Do you want help, or do you want to be a jerk? Sounds like you just want to be a jerk.
And like it or not, over 90% of all desktop computers run Windows. There has to be a limit to what can be supported, and that stops at the status quo. Not everyone knows Linux/Unix. And there isnt much point in humoring you when they can be fired for doing so. If you can't read the website and the terms of service and limits of tech support, you deserve all the lousy service you get.
Oh by the way, if you know sooo much more than the support guys, what the hell are doing calling a support line? Perhaps you should apply for a job there?
Former bitter tech support grunt,
Derek
I worked at MicroAge (microwage) where they had a contract for Apple back in ~ 1995-1996. I believe this was their first forray into call center work. At first, all was good, and we were really allowed to help the customer - i.e. spend as much time as was needed with them, track down new bugs, etc etc. The customers were generally very nice, and we got issues really solved.
Then, the contract negotiation weenies went back to the table with Apple and we had new, interesting policies. Here are a few:
1. We were forced to come into work 15 minutes early to read our email, because "reading email on the clock is wasting company time." Did I mention we weren't allowed to be on the clock while reading email? Also, new tech issues were distributed in email, but we were to read those during lunch, and before/after work off the clock. Can you say, labor violation?
2. We had to ask permission to go to the bathroom. This was probably one of the more demeaning policies. They even had a special key programmed into the phone so that they could track your time away from taking calls for different reasons.
3. Supervisors routinely attempted to violate state law and make us forgo our breaks and lunches.
4. Our 'set goal' was to be on the phone with the customer no more than 2 minutes! We were also highly encouraged to get the customer to hang up by making them write down instructions and try it offline - thereby forcing them to call back if the fix didn't work or the problem persisted. Why? Because MicroAge got $3.50 per call from Apple!
5. Dan Ader (manager of the call center) brought in a permanent temporary staffing agency on the premises to help keep us 'stocked' with people. I can only assume he enjoyed our attrition rate, because it was well known that some management were getting kickbacks from the temp agency. Mysteriously, once your three months were up with the temp agency and MicroAge had to either hire you or began paying you more - they fired people less than a week before that date.
6. They began hiring absolute dolts for the positions. All the really good techs left for other jobs. Some of these guys had actually never seen a Mac before, and were told to 'train on their lunch hour'. A good friend of mine 'solved' issues with customers by having them copy the cdrom to the hard drive. I got some of his return calls - they weren't pretty. This basically did nothing for the customer (even worse he was simply agravating issues), but his call stats sure were great!!
7. The call center was the proverbial 'kiss of death' to a career at that company. If you were in the call center and never got to be a manager, you were simply stuck there for good. Most of the management was transferred over to the call centers from different areas in MicroAge anyway.
8. Employee morale was nonexistant. We were powerless to really assist the customer without getting screamed at by management, who rewarded you on sheer numbers of calls, instead of the quality. Don't get me wrong - we had quality feedback and they recorded our conversations, but it was a joke. If you made ~ 100 calls a day, you were there for good.
9. Apple had a terrible 4D database called, "CR". It was slow and simply painful to use. We were supposed to log calls in CR, and theoretically Apple would review and escalate the really important issues and make fixes. Needless to say, we never heard back. I had cases in CR that were open for then entire length of time I was there which never got answered. This was in addition to the fact we had over TEN different home-grown tools in house that we had to use to figure out a possible fix for a problem. Some were HyperCard based, others in 4D, some in shells, etc. If you didn't have a good memory in that call center, you could waste a LOT of time searching for resolutions.
All I can say to you call center people out there is this: get out of it. Phone support is a dead end, and will never help your career. It took me a while applying for other jobs before employers would look at me seriously and NOT mention "do you want to help in call center support - we see you have great skills there."
Best of luck.
-Legion
My strategy with the more inept tech support operations is to record my calls with them. I start each call by saying "This call is being monitored for quality control purposes", and ask the support person to identify themselves. This may or may not work, but at least I get to play back the previous call for the "supervisor".
If you get overbilled, don't pay the overbilled part, and use the formal "dispute the bill" procedure with the Public Utilities Commission. That bumps the issue up to somebody who can cancel charges, even if they can't actually fix the problem.
So then I got a job taking calls for DirecTV..
;)
HA! Now I know you're BS'ing...anyone who has ever tried to call DirecTV customer service KNOWS that no actual humans work there, only an absurdly recursive phone-menu-and-light-jazz system...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
in another life! Wow.. I had the very same experience while working at AOL. I took over 1100 irate phone calls in my last couple months working there. We called it the "happy phone". I was everyone's supervisor! Oh well... now I do tech in a small company and it's much better. http://www.cafepress.com/microhack -- Amuse your friends with your outerwear!
James, who sits down the hall and runs the whole East Bay Express website on his iPAQ.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I called up the Micron tech support guys once, and after a few minutes of shooting the shit about a failing hard drive, I hear this banging and screaming in the background. I asked the tech support guy what was going on and he replied "Sorry, we're in the process of beating each other with broom-handles." Man, I never called tech support again after that.
--
--
The teacher was totally incompetent. She was a math teacher who had taken the equivalent course at the community college (failed it the first time) and the next course. Somewhere in there, the idea of compiling multiple source files into a single executable had totally passed her by, among other things.
But, yes, I agree that people really need to take a course in programming early to find out if they want to go into CS.
Don't these idiots realize that you have all of their personal information at your fingertips? I'd have fun working tech support; "Dr." so-and-so would be receiving about 50 pizzas and several crates full of animal porn (bought with a generated cc number to ensure police interest) within the month.
But that's just me. Imagine the people who snap and have access to large-caliber weapons. This is why I'm always polite to tech support people when I do have to call them.
-Legion
Now I'm with speakeasy - service has been fine, they know *BSD and encourage free software, they gave me a static IP and no restrictions on running servers. And when there's a line problem they seem to know who to talk to inside PacBell to get things up again.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Ok.. by the time this is posted, the story will be old, and there will be hundreds of stories like this, but i feel obliged to give my POV..
3 years ago i worked for a callcenter. Not technical support for an ISP, but we delt with some of the most highly irate people you can imagine - truck drivers. These people for the most part are easily fired up, and hard to calm down. They have the biggest case of road rage you've ever imagined. And they're talking to you because they have no money. And you are the person they blame.
Now with the background out of the way, let me tell you what irritates me. 99.95% of the time, there was no way we could help this person. WHen we tried, we were repremanded by our manager for nto going "by the book".. teh book was written, of course, by someone who had never ran a single transaction or tried to help a single person. All they cared about was our talk times. Incredibly draconian. A person is not a number. My philosophy was i will help this person. I will do everything in my power. I will turn as many problems as i can into something resembling a solution. I got repremanded for this course of action.
Bottom line, if anyone is listening. Empower your tech support people to help. Make sure they know what they are doing. Verse them in the technology they are supporting. I am so sick of calling @home and getting some halfwit who does not know the difference between a switch and a hub walking me through checking my TCP/IP stack when i've already established by very good evidince and correlation between other customers and myself that the problem is that their DNS server has stopped responding to queries, or there is a router down. Thats another thing.. Do not treat all customers like they are children. Some of us would like technical details - such as "Our service is interrupted in nashville due to a router outage. Our network administrators are working to correct the issue, and we expect a resolution within the next hour." I know that this may not ever happen, and i can even think of some arguments against it (i.e. it may force them to at one time admit that they have some incompetent sysadmins, somewhere, or use flawed technology) - but as long as im still paying for that time, i want to know why i can't check my e-mail, or monitor my servers at work, or.. you get the idea. And a simple "oh, theres a problem, and it will be resolved sometime in the next year" simply doesnt do it for me. If i could get DSL, i would.. sigh.. but i figure the same tech support issues exist everywhere. I am not a child. I am not a number. I do not enjoy being treated as such.
Once there was $19.95 for unlimited access, everything else went into the crapper. All of the US (people outside the US, please comment) wants price, price, price. They never figure customer service or support into the equation.
Want cheap health insurance? Fine, you get to deal with those friendly HMO's.
Want a cheap airline ticket? Risk getting bumped (or better yet, some of the lovely routes produced by Priceline)
Want cheap internet access? Don't count on having tech support.
It doesn't even seem to be an option to get good tech support. At home, I'll be cheap, but I'd pay an extra 10% at work for tech support from someone who knows more than I do. (FWIW, fsck internetconnect. There NOC is staffed by the most clueless morons in the biz. Where else will you be told that log files cannot be changed or manipulated?)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Which is why those of us who are not completely without a clue have to spend such an interminable time wading through this crap to get to talk to someone who knows more than the windows menu sequence by rote.
Please, Please, Please -- there has got to be some way to determine if the person calling you is not your avreage 'where is the "any" key' idiot and quickly get them talk to somebody who understands them -- I swear, when US West fubared our DSL I must have talked to a dozen different 'script followers' before getting to Mr. Clue who fixed the problem in a minute.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
It explains a lot of previously misterious behaviour, ie, customer support or the Royal Family.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
*Sigh* Funny visual - crowd of nerds, moping in public, suddenly, in the distance, one shouts "Hey! Over Here!!", and as a man, the group homes in on the voice, uttering the strange sounds that Popeye used to make in the earliest epsiodes - Hup Hup Hup... and then the group continues moping at the new location. And so on, ad nausem. This is a physical equivalent to what happens when a new article is posted here on slashdot!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Much of that is how I imagined it would be, although it is much different to the call centre I sit near (we mix IT with non-IT types).
The "Hotcube" is made to sound very Big Brotheresque, and it may well be that way. I don't like that things are run that way, although I can understand the need to pro-actively manage call centre staff (don't tell the guys I work near that I said that though!
More worrying is their "health break" - law in the UK (Health and Safety in the workplace) says that people using CRTs (probably extended to any monitor by now) must be allowed to take a ten minute break every hour - which is four times as much as given to the guys at PacBell. I mean, I've probably averaged 12 hours a day every day of my life for the last 9 years using a CPU, and I take a break more than 5 minutes every 2 hours to rest my eyes - and I'm used to it and I get a lot of flexibility about posture, etc.
How did companies manage before call centres were commonplace? Did you have to write in and wait weeks for issues to be resolved?
All in all, it's a shitty job - I'm glad I have a job that lets me be flexible in my approach to the working day, that I don't scurry towards the door to get away from after 8 hours, that doesn't fill me with dread each morning, and that I actually enjoy.
~Cederic
Actually, I thought of George Saunders (CivilWarLand In Bad Decline) more than I thought of either Orwell or Dickens. The capitalization of things like "Health" and "Wrap" seemed particularly pomo in that weird sad Saunders way.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Bah, it's not that bad. I'm going into my 20th month of tech support now. Granted I have it a hell of a lot easier than the article narrator. I've worked my way to "tech level 2" now, which in a company of 5 people means I'm 3rd in line. Plus my boss has no problem with me hanging up on irate customers that insult me.
Furthermore, jobs for people in tech support in the 707 and 415 area codes (San Francisco and points North in California) are abundant. Try this URL from DICE:
http://jobsearch.dice.com/jobsearch/jobresults.cgi ?sr=1&hp=10&cf=0a.3c117840&brief=0&banner=1
195 hits. One search engine, a few seconds. Enjoy.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
In a similar vein, my Pascal teacher in college didn't know what he was doing, even though he had written the textbook for the course. I would go to him with compilation errors, he would point out my mistake, I would fix it and get more errors than I had the first time around, and his response was, "I don't know why you're getting the errors." This was before the explosion of the web, so looking up tutorials myself wasn't an option, although if I had been a bit less lazy, I suppose I could have checked usenet or spent some time in the library. Ah, the good old days.
-Legion
I'm sorry sir, I'll talk slower
http://www.dice.com/jobsearch/metro/siliconvalley. html
Type in "tech support" into the search box, and select 707 and 415 for area codes. You'll get over 190 hits.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Your position in the company depends on your political / social skills. Anyone who's devoted enough time to learn something technical has sacrificed enough of their social development to put them "behind the eight ball" when it comes to promotion and social climbing. The end result is that most organisations are controlled by idiots who are never going to promote anyone smarter than them.
That's completely untrue for a technical job, even one like tech support. I could quit my job as a software engineer tomorrow and have a new job within a week, not the 2+ months that your silly formula states.
Oh, really?
I did tech support part-time for two years in a rural area. When I moved to Boston, I thought finding a full-time support job would be easy. I temped for a few months (no tech support, surprisingly enough), then left to job-hunt full time.
Almost four months later, I found my current jobs (one at a coffee shop, one at a delivery service) .
What happened? I don't know. But the arrogance in that statement is appalling.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
Since we are on the subject, check the Original Series
I've also used PacBell DSL for a year. Last month I moved to a new city and had PacBell come out to install the DSL. THe guy who came was great (as was the guy who installed the 1st time). He installed the hardware and software and checked to make sure everything worked and then left.
1 hour later, the lights on the DSL modem go out and I've lost connection. I do all the right things to try and reconnect, but no dice - this modem is dead. What starts from there is 5.5 hours of telephone hell. I don't blame the dsl techs themselves, rather, I blame PacBell. I talked to 7 different people, non of whom knew how to get someone out to replace the box.
Finally, after asking to speak with a supervisor and being on hold with him for over an hour (while he is on hold with someone else who eventually helped him), he gives what I want - the number of person who schedules visits.
I call this person, and the same guy come back to my house, confirms the box is dead, replaces it and is gone is 10 minutes.
The moral of this is that the people of Pac Bell tech support are, for the most part, very nice and helpful, but they don't have the tools to do their job. But the company itself has no clue. No way should I have to talk to 7 people and wait over 5 hours to get this service.
The supervisor I talked to was actually the 2nd that day. The first one hung up on me casue I didn't return his hello" fast enough. I would have killed that guy at the moment if I could have. Hell, I still want to. I spent (at that time) 4 hours of hold, this guy gives me 5 seconds to say "hello", and then hangs up (I had my cell phone to my other ear trying to explain to my boss why the dsl was taking longer than expected).
My feeling is that Pac Bell DSL rocks when it works, but that it's not worth they hassle the few times it doesn't. It's too bad, cause I've always felt their telephone support was top notch.
Oh, and the last time the install guy comes to my house, he gives me his pager number. I hope he stays with PacBell for a *long* time.
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
It also (the -1 post "bonus") occures if your karma gets too low... :-)
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
The article was a fairly decent description, but (like the article in the MSF newsletter) it leaves out a crucial part of the picture: how do people overcome the tactics of division and discipline in these places?
The intensification of work in call centres is part of a long and dishonourable tradition. In Henry Ford's factories, for instance, the imposition of the assembly line (designed to regulate the pace of work of the workforce) was combined with barracks style accomodation for workers, and a rule which forbade conversation while on the line.
A feature of factory work in the 1950s and 1960s was the struggle over intensity of work - an example of such a struggle can be found in 'Counter Planning on the Shopfloor' by Bill Watson. 'Autonomists' have examined these struggles, not just as a study in being disgruntled, but as examples of a way beyond control, domination, and the endless imposition of work.
In contrast to unions, who want 'more humane' working conditions in this shitholes, some 'autonomists' (like the people from Undercurrent in Brighton, UK) have been examining how the 'refusal of work' operates in 'call centres'.
As Watson's essay shows, the 'refusal of work' is a collective process, a process of people covering for each other and building an alternative way of operating. It also gives those of us who are call centre users as handle on the process - it poses the challenge of how to link our own struggle against the imposition of work (a process which is hardly critiqued, and often embraced by IT workers) with theirs. In a sense, the origins of the open source movement - in programmers who would rather use code they create and control, and who would rather spend time coding a creative solution (an activity considering 'innefficient' by management) - are an aspect of the 'refusal of work' in IT.
Lets not pretend that call centres are an exception here - a minor 'blemish' whose inhabitants are too stupid or too different from us non-call centre types in some way. They're just the 'best of breed' example of how to impose work on IT workers.
Fuck that! Never work! Monkey-wrench your network today! :)
Kind of reminds me of being a teacher.
Oh yes, but there they don't fire you, they just keep you at low pay unless you're a good teacher, in which case they'll fast-track you to administration.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
After switching to Speakeasy DSL from Verizon (formerly BellAtlantic), I can verify that the difference between the two is like night and day. My experience with Verizon/BellAtlantic was absolutely, positively the worst customer service nightmare I've ever had (and it continues to be because they are still billing me for the service even though I cancelled at the end of August and have called multiple times to verify my cancellation). Avoid Verizon/BellAtlantic if at all possible. Speakeasy, on the other hand, has been a truly pleasant experience for me. I suspect that the horror story that the original article described was due to the fact that the person worked at a baby bell. All the baby bells seem to have very poor customer service across the board (if only I could switch my phone service from Verizon now).
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
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E2 IN2 IE?
This article absolutely hits the spot. As someone who spent two years on the support desks this reminded me of exactly why I got out. Call centers are nothing more than electronic sweatshops. I have even been in a situation where we couldn't take our headsets off, and calls were automatically bussed through. Not even the dignity of answering a phone for yourself any more. The whole setup is geared towards maximising profits, and workers are thus exploited to the maximum. The only answer to it is unionisation. Call center workers have enormous potential power. It's time they realised it.
If this job sucks so bad, get another one... it's not like there aren't tons of them out there
people have the right to decent work environment - the answer is not 'move along'! People need to demand to be treated better - and form Unions to defend themselves against bosses who dont give a damn about anything except $$$. The article makes my stomach turn - those people need a Union like ive never heard before.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
(posting as AC for real good reason)
Wrap mode? You must have worked at Decision 1. Health break? DEFINITELY Decision 1.
I jumped ship before D1 imposed those draconian measures. I did tech support for Ameritech's ISP(dsl and dialup), and was there for so long(we had such a huge employee turnaround) I got to be a "supervisor" with no increase in pay. Basically, I got to sit around and not take calls, baby sitting all the other coworkers(and I know I'm gonna take hell for this).
The day I quit I made an "why ameritech.net sucks" web page, and wrote the URL on the whiteboard, and even posted it to the local ameritech.net newsgroups. Needless to say, the top 2 D1/Ameritech people god wind of this. I was very proud of myself!
"Sit in Wrap (the time between calls) for longer than three minutes, your name goes in a log." Three minutes? We got three seconds.
Anyone who ever has to do with users should take a read through:
http://techtales.com/
Funny as hell, and you can submit your own stories.
Have fun,
Jason
I've just lost all compassion for our customers, they're in heaven compared to that ;)
-- Andreas
...than in todays economy, with unemployment at an all time low and employers begging for workers, than reading someone bitch about how shitty their job is.
They must be a real idiot of they don't realize they can get another one pretty much at will.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Here's a mirror of the text.. formatted a little better. *grin*
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I can agree with the "hiring losers" part. I worked at a small ISP (600-700 customers) from 10th grade to this past summer, and I suppose I was good, because they didn't fire me at any point. Here recently, I had an @home cable modem installed (the other provider sucked, no flames ;) at my house. The techs were great at doing what they were trained to do...they got up on the cable line, ran cable to my house, through my wall, set up my computer, and all.
Then it didn't work.
When I started to load up simple programs such as winipcfg and did a couple pings, not only were they "amazed" at "dis kid's typuhn" (50-60 wpm), but asked what I was doing. After a couple minutes, I had the problem fixed (a computer on the HUB didn't like the cable modem) by tweaking some drivers...something they were boggled by.
It makes me wonder how many people are entering the "computer industry" because of the lure of supposed fortune.
This is more like listening to a cop bitch about having to work weekends and wear blue polyester. It's part of the job, fer chrissakes.
... serving a company, rather than a call centre. It was my first real job, and overall was no problem whatsoever. I sat in help desk in a manufacturing plant in my hometown, helping users with whatever problems they had. I also did some low-skills IT work (setting up workstations, replacing toner, etc).
There were about four of us serving over 400 employees, but we got to know the employees and knew what level of experience each had. There was no push to get them off the phone and answer the next call. Instead, the push was to fix the problem and get them productive again. Plus, it felt really great to get a thanks from them in person when you ran into them in the lunch room.
Over time, as I was exposed to more of the network, servers, etc, my duties expanded to use these new skills as well. I was also greatful for the wide range of questions asked, keeping me learning and interested. It was everything from "I can't close this window" to "I need something which will scan these two columns for numbers which are in one, but not the other". If you ask me, this is a much better way to build skills, and apparently a much better work environment.
Caveat - there will be many fewer positions, of course. However, with some call centre experience, I'd say that this type of position would be the next logical step up.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I work in a call center environment for a large PC corporation. When I was going through my OJT (Which, by the way, was pointless) Two of the others in my class had just started using PC's 2 *days* ago. I now wind up finishing off the training from what the newbies miss in their OJT. Ah well, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Yeah.. it's true.. and part of the reason our call times are so high is because our remedy applications are so godamn slow.. do you guys intentionally cause us this hell to amuse yourselves?
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Funny thing is, I never noticed such a phenominon when I lived in OR, where the highways are mostly 1 and 2 lane. In fact, before I went to CA, the biggest highway I drove on was mostly 3 with a small patch of 4 lane in Portland. Maybe this is limited to highways that are 4 lane and bigger?
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
High-school student here.
Painfully true, although Mr. Cobb, who taught us Pascal last year, actually taught us well enough that the brighter students in the class (myself, a few others) were able to make the langauge dance for us. This year, our teacher is (surprise!) a MATH teacher.
Two things bug me:
1. We're using Borland Turbo {Pascal, C++} for DOS. In the year 2000. And we're not allowed to use telnet to work with gcc on a linux box.
2. I've had to learn to do multiple-source executables on my own.
--BS
No, a customer called asking to speak to "Bob", who had failed to fix his problem earlier. There was no Bob working at the time, but 'The Customer Is Always Right', so *everyone* was renamed Bob, just to be on the safe side.
It was a tech support department then too, most emphatically *not* a call centre.
Regards,
Tim.
When I interviewed for a programmer position at Microport Systems (then the vendor of SystemV/AT, Unix for the 286), I was asked by company president Chuck Hickey what was the best way to implement strcpy.
Well, even though I had been a manager (really a team leader) of a bunch of student programmers who wrote a Common LISP interpreter on the 8086 running DOS, it had been a few months and, well, I forgot.
Ol Chuck said "this is the kind of question that separates the men from the boys" and then he let me know I wasn't one of the men.
So I got tech support.
At least it was unix system administration tech support, and I got to learn a lot of stuff while I was there, and the engineers were friendly and helpful.
But there was some crazy shit like advertising new version numbers to match The Santa Cruz Operation's Xenix version number so we could compete (shades of Slackware anyone?) and then not telling the techs, so we all told the customers for a while that it must be a printing error, there was no such version.
And then there was the full page ad that said we'd have Berkeley Job Control in some upcoming version, and the customers all started calling and saying "Control-Z doesn't work, where's the job control?" and I'd ask the engineers, and the engineers said we had no intention of ever getting job control. When I told this to our marketing guy, he just said "Oh, OK", and took it out of the future ads.
What really killed me was the guy who staked his whole company on the FORTRAN compiler in our product. We had one, but it was buggy. After he'd delivered product to customers, it turned out it wasn't working right. Engineering kept promising they'd build a new one from source. But they were busy and never got around to it. So finally this guy told me he didn't hold it against me personally, but he was going out of business because he'd chosen to use Microport for his solution.
Well, I quit and went back to school again. But I was never very happy with school and eventually I got a programming and sysadmin job, a pretty low-level one where I'd take a whole month to write a 300 line image processing program. But I struggled, and eventually I did better for myself.
Now I have my own incorporated consulting business. Have a look at my resume too and scroll all the way down to where you see Microport and then look at all the stuff above it.
If you're working on tech support there's a few things I want you to do:
While you're with the company, use every opportunity you can to learn new skills, knowledge of new technologies, applications and operating systems.
On nights and weekends, study programming languages, or at least study system and network administration.
If you're going to do tech support for a while, then job-hop. You'll pick up a wide variety of skills at your different employers, even if it all has to be tech support.
And most of all, don't stay in tech support. It's a miserable existence. But it can be a good start on a much better career.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Cheaper suppliers will undercut _good_ suppliers- and put them out of business!. It's that simple- straight capitalism uncut- and the person who compared it to Dickens was right on the money. It's such a curious notion when people start to whine, "no-one is holding a gun to your head" (who are they defending, exactly?). Clue time, brainiac- what people are saying in this thread is that they are ALL that way. And that's disconcerting, though hardly unexpected.
The logical solution is of course to outsource all the work to South America or India or Vietnam or just anywhere really- doesn't matter if they don't speak English once the allowed time drops under a few seconds. You can hang up a phone in any language. Because it will be impossible to compete with this if you have to spend money on _real_ techs the good companies will die off, and we can have a world in which nothing works- but by God is it free! Everything will go straight to the cheapest possible provider regardless of concepts like consumer protection (read: commie socialist union people), and the world can have an economy that is hugely impressive so long as you are OK with all the labor coming from uneducated children in sweatshops- or lower-income Americans subjected to workplace conditions just one stage removed from sweatshops. If they don't like it they can damned well move to Guatemala- the job is!
In all seriousness- haven't we learned _anything_? Must society continually race for the gutter? The person who invented the corporation has a lot to answer for- but the social dynamic in question is far older. We are effectively looking at a slave class being formed- let's not be so sure that the other jobs are by definition OK. How long until Wal Mart shelf stockers etc. are forced to wear electronic tracker bracelets, _their_ every second counted as well?
I think that in some places, if you treated a dog the way these employees are treated, the dog would be taken away from you and you'd be fined for animal abuse. I don't see how the human 'glorious right to choose' is significantly different from that of a dog. It's a lot of mystical bullsh*t made up to serve the needs of the wielders of the whip (real, abstract, economic or psychological). There are strong parallels between the underlying psychological aspects of this story, and the psychological aspects of brainwashing or 'breaking' prisoners of war- except that this tech support stuff is ubitiquous.
Maybe they should outlaw tech support. Think about it :)
I couldn't improve on it if I tried....
really
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I know that helpdesks are pretty stringent about trying to get the fastest times they can. I develop applications with some software that is used primarily with helpdesks (Remedy.) However, I would think that they are not quite this strict with helpdesk people. It is a stark contrast to my job: I am highly paid, there is so much beaurocracy I can barely do work, I play a lot of ping pong and pool in the game room, I work on Solaris and perl scripting on my sparcstation at my desk, read slashdot, and when a new request comes for me to fix a bug, I get it in 15 minutes or so, then it has to wait a month to be tested and put into production. Only when I work on new projects, which can sometimes take a couple months, give me something interesting to do. I know the helpdesks have a high turnover rate, but I would have expected at least a little bit of concern about the quality of their work and support. The same managers that tell these people to keep their call times down are the same ones that come to me and look for ways to better track problems and how they were solved with the phone support. Is the industry that screwed up that everyone is basically doing useless work? Also, why do these people have their time scrutinized down to the minutes, when I can come and go as I please, and go play ping pong with my manager? I bet these helpdesk people think that something stinks in Shitsville...and their management is the mayor.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Wow. This sounds painfully familiar. I had a problem with my email server that certail random emails would freeze the pop3 connections in the middle of transfering the email. It would show this when I telneted to the pop3 port and manually grabbed the 1.5k mail. It would do this from my University account, my home machine, any machine in the world. And I simply could not get the tech support person to focus past "did you try to re-install Netscape?" (this was the solution they thought would help).
Eventually the problem seemed to go away on its own, but it left me with the feeling that if I ever have another problem with my Pacbell account, I'll probably be on my own.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
I worked in tech support for 3 years at a fairly decent sized ISP, 15,000 people or so. And most of the time, I was alone in the call center (actually where I started reading slashdot) At any rate, one customer called up and left the following voice mail "...hello? Where are you guys? I seem to have be having some problems with my modem and *screeching like a girl* YOU GUYS JUST AREN'T THERE TO HELP ME! THIS IS THE MOST SH**TY SERVICE I'VE EVER HAD AND IF YOU GUYS WERE HERE I'D BEAT THE **** OUT OF YOU YOU B@$TARD @$$HOLES! TURN IT ON NOW!!!*/screeching*"
Well, I have to call him back :) Unfortunately, he wasn't available when I called him back (Had taken some time to write up the entire message and email it to the office manager, as well as record a copy just for personal reference).
His wife answered the phone and I explained to her that they hadn't paid their bill in the past couple months so their account had been locked.."WELL" she says, "Do we have to take you to small claims court to get our money back now??"
"I'll have my husband call you back!"
oh goodie
So, the guy calls back, and I'm just livid "So, you won't turn our account on, huh?" "That's right sir, and you're lucky I don't report you to the RCMP. I'm not paid enough to deal with jerks like you and your wife and I should never have to deal with it. so, the only way you'll EVER get service from us again is if you mail in a letter of apology to the office staff, pay your account, and never ever call us again" "Ok"
Thank you sir, and have a nice day
My point, through that entertaining anecdote, is that, no, no ones paid enough to deal with stuff like that, and if management can't seem to deal with that fact, then you're better off at a new job where "Respect in the workforce" is not just a poster phrase
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
I mean come on...I've worked tech support, my friends have all worked tech support. When we did, all we did is sit there, read a little /. and look for stupid ways to amuse ourselves...btw. Nerf Rules
I look forward to seeing more CEO's with Knox spiked purple hair
-A.Z.
Here's the distilled wisdom I've gained from my two job-hunting experiences (as if anyone in the world cared). .
- Look people in the eye (though not obsessively so), speak in complete sentences, and remember to say "please" and "thank you."
- More than half the time the on-site interview is really only to decide whether you'll get along with their gang, so don't sweat technical matters unless they ask. If they do ask technical questions, be honest about what you don't know; it goes over better, and moreover, anybody who thinks that reference material is for wusses is not somebody for whom you want to be working.
- A sense of humor can take you a long way in any interview, but only if you have one.
- Don't look for a new job unless you're willing to relocate or live someplace where you probably won't have to do so.
- Be honest about your goals and salary expectations in the phone interview, so you won't waste a day off on a useless on-site interview.
- If you don't get an offer or a promise of one at the on-site, you didn't get the job.
Finally, don't be afraid to blow a little of whatever nest-egg you've managed to build on a nice vacation between jobs. If you live in the USA, taking six weeks off is only practical when you're self-employed or unemployed, so go ahead and take advantage if you can. It's said that life is uncertain, so one should eat dessert first. This is doubly true of time off work, IMHO. Good luck with your search!I mean, dealing with the numbers they do.. that's the thing.
The mojority of customers are happy as long as tehy don't have to sit on hold. If they get a person right away, but are told 'sorry, we don't know', that's acceptable.
It's the minority that get pissed at idiots.
I was supporting brokers, using NT. I needed the guy to do something with Explorer, but that was blocked on his system. So, I had him go into Internet Explorer, and bring up the view of cached files. My manager then screamed at me for letting the guy no "too much". I think she was just angry in that I knew more than she did, and that terrified her.
Have you read my journal today?
you bad-ass you. does your groin get aroused when you share your Glory?
putz.
I am going through many of the same sorts of troubles with @home. If you would be willing to help out with getting through their policies so that they could service my connect by answering some of my questions, I would hold thisfavour in the highest regard.
Please reply to my E-Mail address if this is so. I would have mailed yours, but I did nothing much but smirk when I saw what it was.
If it is a real problem, and you can reproduce it - that is what callbacks are for. Don't keep a person on the line just so you can tell them you don't know. If I was your lead I would have fired your ass for having a customer on the line and you not knowing the solution.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I know what the problem is, yet they dont even understand when I tell them what the routing problem is. It's not like it's a hard problem.. Most of these people dont even understand what a router is, I know this because I was told that "Windows is a great router!" the other day, and then the same lady asked, "How does your Eww-nucks" (funniest mispronounciation) work for you?
Case in point, most tech support people are stupid because they think it's an easy job. The good people have to pick up the flack from the idiots, and also the irate customers who just had to deal with one of the idiot support people.
The same tech support building I worked at also had Apple tech support (about 400 people in that center) - if the queue times reached over 1 hour most of the people would wait for 3 minutes of silence (if the customer didn't hang up) then release. Because it "cleared the queue" -- those who stayed on the lines had to deal with people yelling about being cut off an hour ago.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Oh by the way, if you know sooo much more than the support guys, what the hell are doing calling a support line? Perhaps you should apply for a job there?
I never said that... don't put words in my mouth. I don't really know how the hell a cable modem works. I don't know how they have their network set up. I know how my computer works, in a general sense, and I know how my computer talks to the cable modem. I also don't know if a server just went down somewhere, and if I can't get on the net to visit their status web-page, you've got to call to find out. Duh.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
My first job after high school was a minimum wage job pumping gas at a full service Shell gas station and car wash.
Average employee turnover was about a week. I stayed for six weeks, so it didn't take long to get seniority.
My manager said "Anybody gives you any trouble, you send them to me." so that's what I did.
And what would he do? He shook his fist at them and told them to get the fuck off his gas station or he'd pummel them.
Took care of irate customers pretty quick. We were grossing $20,000 per day, so losing a $10/day customer wasn't a big deal compared to losing a trained - and, more important - competent employee who'd already lasted longer than a week.
Now that's morale boosting!
And I didn't quit because of the low pay or working conditions or anything. I told the manager I had to leave to study astronomy at CalTech. He suggested he put me back on swing shift and I could bring my telescope to the gas lot (which was in the middle of the city!)
I explained this wasn't really how one did professional astronomy these days... at CalTech I ended up getting to observe with the 60" and 200" telescopes at Palomar Mountain.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
> Maybe this is limited to highways that are 4 lane and bigger?
Actually, when I said "6-lane" I meant three each way. I've never noticed it on a road with 2 lanes each way, though, so I'd propose 3 as the lower bound.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I bow before you.
I love my Netdoor account and have had no problems what so ever with the service.
So First they were looking for Friendly geeks, but they cost to much.
Then they were looking for friendly geeks with out a lot of experaince, but they tend to leave the company because they get badly mismanaged by management.
Then they start to look for people with any computer experaince, and then train them.
This becomes truly misinterpreted over time, and they hire a lot of losers who just don't get it.
Then they decide to hire people at a higher wage, hiring them at a higher wage then some people with a year or more in the company.
This causes many of their best to leave the company.
Then Service is so bad, that the Tech leads who take Supervisor calls have to add regular Techs to the tech lead line.
And Now the Tech lead line is so overwelmed due to incompetence that they make everyone a supervisor, to take the supervisor calls.
Does any one else see a trend here?
Why is it stupid people get to make the rules that smart people are suppose to follow?
BTW: after working in it for over 3 years I am now considered over qualifed for most of the help desks in my area.
TeTalon
UNIX is "user-friendly", it's just particular about who it's friends are....
"I see stupid people they're everywhere, they walk around like everyone else they don't even know that they're dumb."
TeTalon
You are either a part of the problem, or a part of the solution, which are you.
TeTalon
You are either a part of the problem, or a part of the solution, which are you.
> Have you never heard of a UNION ? This is what they are for...
Tech workers, with the exception of telcos, are not unionized. In some areas (defense industry tech workers for example) they are *prohibited* by law from unionizing. Look, it doesn't matter what you think of unions, they just aren't available in this circumstance.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
...then you know they are REALLY fucking stupid.
The people who don't know a single thing about computers are easy to deal with, it's the know it alls that cause problems because 9 times out of 10 they know nothing.
- Toby
having been former tech support (for @home even) i have always been constantly amazed at the hoops that both the customers , and the employees are made to jump through.
For example, in Comcast's division of @home .. if you score less than 90% on a random montitered call's QA (quality assurance) you are immediatly disqualified from ANY bonus pay that month. So, if you forget to ask "is there anything else I can help you with today?" EVEN if the customer (who has been screaming at you for the last 5 mins about how he is going to get a lawyer becuase his cable service just shut off when his wife backed into the green box outside - dont laugh .. true story) hangs up .. you are expected to say those words .. just in case.
call center people were written up for being 30 seconds late to work. And also penalized if they stayed more than 5 mins overtime. (it was more benificial to hang up the phone (and then say "is there anything else I can help you with today?" ) and log out on time . .than to actually FIX a problem and wind up going over.
We were expected (for less than 25k a year) to trouble shoot everything from ipstacks and regestry problems- to router errors, all the way down the line to .. 'no mam ..please use the RIGHT button on the mouse .. its the one furthest away from your thumb if your using your RIGHT hand.) All the while trying to calm down pissed off customers (sometiems rightly so , sometimes ONLY becuase they had $$.
and then there is the idiot factor. People are written up for the most assassine reasons .. just to make an example. I was always in the top 5 (of 120+ people) for sales/tech assistance. yet one day I myself was written up becuase i refused to call a customer Dr.So-and-so. (the only reason i refuesed is because he had stated to me that he would report me to my supervisor if i didnt stop calling him *MR* so-and-so. I figured anyone THAT irrational, wasnt going to listen to my suggestions anyways, gimmi an old lady over a DR anytime .. at least the old ladys are willing to read manuals, and TRY.)
man .. just thinking about those poor souls still stuck in tech support reminds me why i NEVER bother them with my problems. I would rather learn it myself, then force them to read the canned scripts they are told to use in place of 'I don't know'
There is SOO much more i could say .. but i *like* my job now .. so im gonna get back to it ;P
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Upon reading this article, my first comment was, "You know, if only there were a little more rotting meat, this would be The Jungle."
It's true that we've come a long way since the bad old days, but stories like this prove that corporations will take as much rope as we'll give them--and they're hanging us with it. We're skilled workers who are proud of our knowledge and abilities, and we can't afford to be treated like this.
The solution: unionization. While it's usually not associated with high-tech employment, it's helped countless workers reclaim their rights and is currently making inroads into the field. In fact, in the Bay Area, one is already set up.
It won't be easy, but that's just more evidence that you're going down the right path. No union is perfect, but they're fatal to labor practices like this. If businesses like this unionized, employment, it would be a great step towards making the industry a better place to work.
I, too, have had the experience of leaning over to the tech in the next cube and saying, "Hey, Gus... You wanna be a supervisor today?". I have the (quite painful) experience of working a graveyard shift by myself, and watching those call queue times creep up and up, until they finally hit the 15-minute mark and start flashing, the timing just right that if you glance quickly at the screen, then blink at exactly the right second, you can't see any calls in queue. Then time keeps going, and all the flashing red things start populating the call monitor again.
I even have the truly distasteful memories of actually being a supervisor, and having one of the new tier-one techs coming up to me, so that I can talk to a user who thinks a supervisor can solve the problem better than any tier-two technician. Granted, I was one of the best upper-tier technicians before I got promoted to "management" (if you can really call that place managed), so nine times out of ten, I could solve the user's problem faster and/or better than the tier-two (or even tier-three) technicians. But most of the time, I really just wanted to stop talking to the user, who was wasting my time with a problem that even a semi-literate chimpanzee could read about online and fix, and get back to my actual duties (being the Network and System Administrator).
But, alas, I was "forced" to leave that job and get one where I didn't have to talk to screaming users 200 or more times a day, didn't have to keep track of my call times (3-minute averages aren't good enough for you?), and could even wear a suit to work (on the weird off-days where I just wanted to) without every single upper-management type person panicking because I looked like I was on my way to an interview.
So remember, some of the best, some of the most mediocre, and even some of the worst people in "the world" have been through that hell that is internet tech support, and having lived through it, have vowed to never again inflict our own painful memories on those unlucky enough to still be answering the phones, "Thank you for calling tech support, how can I solve your problem?"
In general, this wasn't received with enthusiasm ;-> but you'd be suprised how much support it got.
The particular thing that drove me to advocate this was that when I was Product Development Manager at Working Software, it was such a small company that at times we had no dedicated tech support, so I fielded anything that couldn't be handled by the nontechnical clerical staff, or when we were doing enough business to hire a support tech, we were also moving enough products I had to back her up because of the increased call volume.
The result was that I got immediate feedback on product quality and useabilty problems. If I shipped a product with a serious bug or that had some weird UI that the users didn't understand, about 200 people would call me up and let me know personally that I screwed up.
This did a lot for product quality, and although it was difficult to bear at times, I found it very rewarding that many customers would say "You're Michael Crawford? The guy in the about box?" and I'd say "Yeah." and they'd get all amazed.
Sometimes for kicks I'd have a user open the about box and say, "You see the guy's name there? That's me."
But when I was at Apple, I was one of perhaps 500 engineers involved in system software, and there were thousands of engineers, and our the closest customer service was in a different city, and most of it was in Texas (Apple is headquartered in Cupertino, California).
The closest that we came to contact with a real user was the occasional contact with a third party developer we had, but even that was usually handled by developer tech support.
Now I'm sure Apple felt they didn't want their expensive engineers devoting their time to customers problems - they have much cheaper staff for that, and probably better trained too. But what few people seemed to realize, until they heard my arguments on this point, was that Apple's OS Engineering staff, the whole engineering staff, needed this contact with the end user in order to be able to do their jobs well.
That's one of the reasons small companies are often able to come in and steal the market away from larger, well-established companies with deep pockets - a real awareness of user needs and user reactions to the product. (Also smaller companies have the ability to adapt more quickly to changing market conditions)
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
"Hi, I've got a problem."
"What's your username?"
The poor sap tells me. I write it down on my big clipboard -- you know the one.
"No worries." *clickety click*
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Listen, I ran a desk a little more humane than this. However, I have to say this is a very important article because it reflects how help desk's are run. I have had the speech on call boundaries and such. I hated it and that is why I got out.
Anyway, everyone should read and realize the reality of this article.
Techs are paid crap money so if your real lucky you will get the guy who loves computers but never took a computer science class so he is using this job as a stepping stone into IT. Otherwise you are dealing with a customer service person that knows what an OS is and is savvy enough to run the ping command. This is an entry-level position in every organization in the world.
One bit of advice. If they don't know what to do right away just let them off the phone because they are useless. If they don't know right away they might send you to second-level support who all think they are tech gods because they can make a macro in Excel and relish the opportunity to make the end luser feel like an idiot and piss on the first level guys for not knowing the answer. Yes, the bar for most 2nd level folks are that small and promotion is by survival unless the supervisor hates you.
If you are on a help desk for more than a year and have not made it to second-level support, quit. The supervisor or manager hates you and you will never get promoted.
BTW, even if your problem is about connectivity and has nothing to do with the OS never mention you are using Linux or you will not get anything out of these people. They don't support the *nixes and this is a favorite call boundary used to get rid of users quickly.
ACK
But I digress - I didn't ask for your inane, immature banter - I'm just trying to share similar experiences within the topic. If I've come off as a "glory hound", then I apologize, it is not the intention. Besides, why the hell should I care what you think - at least I'm trying to be constructive...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
What the hell is wrong with lynx the page is going all wonky about half way down the page.
*shrug*
Luser: Cute monitor toy. What's it called?
Me: Annoying user.
I'm tempted to find a Clerks script and do a whole re-write. You wouldn't happen to know where one could be found?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
thought crossed my mind ;)
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
even when my cable modem has been out for days. I tend to not care since I'm rarely ever home. It was once out for 2 weeks because the modem got disabled and I didn't need it for those 2 weeks. One annoying thing is they HAVE to go through their standard checklist, even if you told them you had already done everything on the list. When I got the cable modem, it came with a whole sheet of things to check when the Ready light on the cable modem was blinking (no connection). The very last thing is call tech support. The only times I ever called tech support was to get them to send a signal to enable my modem. It can get frustrating if you happen to call when their tech support center was closed since it forwards you to a national 1-800 tech support center where they cannot do anything at all to help you besides take down your information and forward it to your local provider. I've never had a job as tech support, but many people are constantly asking me for help with their computers. I get extremely frustrated and end up just going over to fix the problem myself, explain to them why they had it, and how to avoid it in the future. I've gotten so tired of this, that half the time my response is to go find someone else. Especially if the question they are asking is extremely simple, but requires alot of work to explain and go through. Sometimes I wish I never mentioned I was good with computers to some people. It is made quite obvious whenever I play around on someone's machine though. Anyways, I have to feel sorry for tech support people. I do my part by trying to avoid calling unless it is absolutely necessary.
And I didn't say Diablo II (I said "Quake II and Diablo) ;)
I agree with you, John. For the most part... most of the techies were undertrained which left people like you and me (among a few others) to pick up the slack for them and take on what they couldn't solve.
Whether or not I was going to be asked to leave or not, I already had this job in Chicago before the beginning of the year... I would have left on my own accord anyway... :)
I didnt hit on the receptionist, I hit on the HR (consequenly the sister of the receptionist :) I flat out told her because she asked me, otherwise i would have never said anything. She was hot though, even you can't deny that :)
Sarcasm is the recourse of a weak mind...
--
It was related to me that in a certain call center they got bored one night and decided that everybody would be named "Bob".
[/Quoted]
Weren't there dozens of guys all called Bob in the Demon network support team around the early 90s?
I like hitting on chicks dammit, and what's wrong with that? Ha - HA You got modded down too!!!!
This is exactly the kind of thing we went through at Dell. When will companies learn that putting this kind of pressure on techs increase their turnover rate. When i left Dell, their turnover rate was 40% and the call center had been opened in TN less than 8 months. I heard when after I left they took measures to chain people to their phones to improve productivity instead of taking steps to make the work environment more conducive to productivity. I work internal support for a company now and it is SOOOOO much better because we get treated like adults by the company and the callers. There are 8 of us that left Dell to come over here within a 4 month span. I guess all help desks that deal with the general public are the same because most people still don't understand that a computer problem cannot usually be fixed by throwing a switch or typing an obscure command. I hope as the population gets more computer literate (opening your email is not computer literate) they will start to understand that computers are complex machines with complex problems.
I worked for PBI also in early 1998, the presure that the techs have us unbelievable.. Hotcube makes you feel like a prisoner. There was a time where working at PBI as a tech was cool, then SBC came in.
The cell phone thing is where a few of us are at work. I too feel the call of alcohol on the weekends so I just pray every time that a few t1's don't go down or someones DSL is 'slow'. Come on people no where does it say /guarenteed/ 640x640... does it? I know i've never seen that. And even if I had I would never admit to it.
;) haha
.ph0x
But seriously folks...
My last job was was providing internal support for an ASP that happened to be a major web hosting company. In our building we had internal support, ASP support, and then the call center for the web hsoting company.
Those of us who worked with internal or ASP customers had it easy. As long as we clocked our 40 hours, we could come and go as we pleased. There was a game room (right next to the call center, no less) with couches and TV's and ping-pong, free soft drinks, etc. All we had to do was get the job done.
The folks in the call center had it considerably more rough. They all had strictly assigned shifts to ensure the proper coverage during peak hours. They were strictly monitored with regards to break and lunch times. Call times were strictly monitored, abondonment rates, etc. They were pretty much chained to their desks, though they could see us playing ping-pong in the game room.
I think that it just comes down to pure numbers. It's very easy to log and report on call center numbers. The phone system makes it a snap to monitor call times, available times, and all the other statistics that are needed to ensure that the job is getting done (or more to the point, exactly what the analyst is doing all the time).
Those of us who are at a higher tier of support can't be so easily measured. The basic measurement is almost a "did anything break today? If so, did they fix it" kind of thing. I mean, sure there are some metrics for measuring what developers and sysadmins are up to, but nothing nearly so cut and dried as call center logs.
It was interesting seeing two completely different environments depending on which area of the company that you worked in.
It would be one thing if the conversation was at a professional level and topic (i.e. matters within the realm of the 'Dr'). It is another thing entirely when it is something obviously outside an academic or medical venue. To use the 'Dr' title was to (attempt) to assert authority by means of society's respect given to the title - and diminished it in doing so.
I've been a 'Dr.' (of the Ph.D. variety) for some six years. I do have that I'm a Ph.D. on my business cards, but even there I don't have the 'Dr.' in front of my name. It would be pretentious and inappropriate, given that I'm no longer working in the field in which I earned that degree.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
When I started in Tech Support, 8 years ago, I was told:
"You either learn out, or you burn out."
He was talking about front-line support. I still to this day don't understand people who can survive more than 6 months in a front-line position without losing it and gunning folks down. I learned out. The rest of my career has been as a 2nd line, 3rd line, or QA.
I can say one thing about this PacBell story. First of all, you've got to make your customers happy. If some guy's got a problem, and it's not YOUR problem, you tell him, right away. If your contract with the Telco won't permit it, then that's bullshit. If it's their problem, then they should be taking the heat. And the calls. #1, tell the customer the truth. If you give them a lie about what the problem is, then they're going to get more and more irate, and as they get more irate, they become more EXPENSIVE (make more support calls, go higher and higher up the chain of authority, etc.).
If your company has made a deal with a third party where their problem is not one you can fix, but you can't send the customer to them, then it's fiscally a bad deal - your company is expected to bear the expense of taking calls on problems that are beyond the "support boundry"? That's major suckage. The management chain, if they're worth anything, will come to recogize the problem, and ask their seniors to resolve it. You can make a clear-cut loss analysis based on it; "these types of calls account for X dollars of our budget." If the managers can't or wont do this, they're worthless.
For the front line guys who are treated like the ones in this story, I feel very sorry for you. When I was on front line, we weren't watched that closely. We did our jobs, we were treated like adults. The people in this story are being treated like prison inmates. The lesson to the managers should be: employee turnover is bad. Treat employees like dirt, and you'll have high turnover - man, especially in a labor environment like the bay area. People will walk, and go somewhere where they can get paid twice that and be treated like a human being. Maybe they're not qualified for that at the time you hired them - but they will in six months. You can mitigate that by hiring lower quality people, but in the end, it will translate to dissatisfied customers.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues. If some guy has no service for two weeks, then the support guy should be able to credit the guy's account. Otherwise why bother, you're just wasting time answering the customer's call. Of course with my PacBell DSL problem, I was out for two weeks, phone line problems which ultimately were a combination of CO wiring problems, and problems INSIDE my house. The tech they sent to my house found that my phone lines were distributed too much - so what we did was use the black/yellow pair for the DSL signal and put a filter on the red/green pair at the NID. Black/yellow were connected to my primary line ahead of the filter, so there was a straight signal run to my office that was connected to the black/yellow pair, and the rest of the phones in my house were on red/green, and didn't need the little filters, because of the filter at the NID. They credited my account for two weeks because the service was down due to the CO switching problem. Now it works great.
Why was my service down for two weeks? Support hold-times were very high (1-2 hours), so I couldn't get through, and when I did, nobody could figure out what the problem was (I tried not to involve them in my individual computer setup, because it had nothing to do with the problem, I was sure. I have Macs, and I know Macs scare people - but Macs had nothing to do with it, because I was using a LinkSys router - it was the modem that failed to connect.) but the big time waster was, waiting for a tech to be assigned to come out. Actually, originally getting set up took 2 months to schedule, after many phone calls and emails asking them to set it up, nobody could tell me if I was in the 11k' radius of the CO or not.
The bottom line is - it sounds like PacBell has a product with a high demand, so they and their partners who provide the service have little incentive to provide good service, because the alternative is the Cable monopoly, and they have no competition either. So basically, at a high level, nobody gives a shit if you sign up for DSL or not. So they hire idiots to man the phones, provide them with no tools or pathways to do their jobs, and audit the labor so tightly that it looks good on paper.
I don't see any of this changing any time soon.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Wonderful. Copyright violation. Just what Slashdot needs more of. Are you out to get them sued?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...is Tech Support.
I can't say I have first-hand experience with it, however, I know enough people who worked (or are still working) in it. And it's bad.
They're always telling jokes about the dumb people calling in. Everybody know the "pack your computer you're too dumb to use one" story, which is pretty much the height of stupidity in customers. But there are also countless others which are a lot worse. Blown monitors, trashed hdds and fried mbs...
And who'se fault is it? Of course, the tech support guy is all to blame. And if he says there's nothing he can do about it, it's the supervisor's fault. And so on. Now really, how far up the ladder does anybody have to go before they realise that the company they're calling can/will do nothing to help them?
I'm not saying there aren't awfull tech-support people out there. But anybody working such a job are doing it because they need to make a living, doing work that more often than not is just a hassle.
In conclusion, I hope everybody at Pacific Bell Internet becomes a CEO. They deserve it!
I am in charge of UNIX Systems Admin & Assorted other stuff where I work (a large international ISP). However back when we were just 40 people I used to do some tech support when needed. I interviewed a bunch of the people who now do helpdesk before the helpdesk manager (who I also interviewed) was hired. I emailed her the link to this article and said that if helpdesk @ my company ever gets like this, I'll quit on general principal.
We won many contracts with other users of the products we sold on my skills alone. I was even flown overseas to fix broken systems that even the manufacturers couldn't resolve.
Later things started to go bad. Sales decided we could act as a 'one-stop shop', giving support on software other than the products we had supplied, and passing hardware calls onto a 3rd party. I took calls on 8 year old DOS applications I'd never seen, never mind used. I even had a support call on an obscure installation issue with an even more obscure OS no-one in our company had ever used. I also had 50 faulty printers and monitors logged by one company on the same day, and I had to log each one in turn with the relevant hardware maintainer. Yuck!
The real fun started in 1997, soon after a merger with a Netware reseller. The new head of my department (who was about as technically knowledgeable as my mother's cat) decided we could support major networks remotely via Managewise (ick!) over a single ISDN line. We signed up 3 or 4 customers for this, including a major 500+ user network spread across 3 sites in the same city. Needless to say it didn't work, and we ended up being no-more than a call centre for these comapanies. I stuck it out for a year and left the place in disgust, particularly after the non-Netwarae products I had dealt with since 1990 was on its way out.
IMHO Technical Support used to be a decent job, back in the days when the customer's themselves had some intelligence. Now it isn't worthwhile, as there are few gifted individuals left in that field.
Cr33py.
I think I'm to blame for PB Internet Call Center's change. I was going to ask them about a problem with some wiring, but I accidentally yelled "First Post." I heard someone in the background saying: "Troll ... -1 his ass." Then I got put on hold, but since I was at the bottom of the list, no one at their tech support ever read my query.
---
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
You can't; karma is now capped at max +50. People with more than that didn't lose any, but they can't gain any more.
--
The guy that wrote this article has some damn fine writing skills. Someone should recruit him to come work for /.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Our two biggest competitors aren't unionized. They start their entry-level employees at $18 an hour with great health benefits, compared to our $11/hour (but with great health benefits). Even with the union here, many people are on forced OT, with sometimes as much as 21 days going by before a day off. And we have one of the largest, most powerful unions in America "representing" us.
I'll say it again: Unions are fucking useless. They force people with skills into a lower pay scale to match up with the people who don't have a clue. Yep, those of us who DO have a clue are jumping ship.
-Legion
I worked in second level tech support for roughly two and a half years. I saw all the problems which the helpdesk for one reason or another could not resolve. Yes, this was internal technical support, but there were still people who did not know how to use a mouse... just far less of them.
I don't for a second envy what the helpdesk had to do. I didn't even care if they just gave up on a difficult user and said "I've passed the ticket along, somebody will give you a call in roughly an hour." And by difficult user I mean those "call me doctor" fellows. It is much easier to deal with people like that in person anyways.
I would even defend the reputation of the helpdesk because of the difficulty of their jobs.
But what would drive me absolutely insane are the few people who get in there who are simply incompetant. End users who go in with no problem (litterally, the network is down, DHCP is down, something like that) and after hours of "troubleshooting" come out with a toasted protocol stack.
I think the main culprit of this kind of thing is the application of metrics to individuals. If you're told that you have to meet 80% resolution, and you're encouraged to make it as high as you can, then you wind up with five customers who spent four hours... DHCP came back and their protocol stack was rebuilt at about the same time... and had thier 'problem' resolved. And your failure to resolve drops.
What's really fun is calling first level support and to have them lead you through a script, while you're telling them that the DHCP server is down and the Network team is working on it.
I guess my point is, just like there are stupid users, there are stupid techs... and in the case of those misinformed of corporate structure... stupid managers.
Yes, I've told management about this already.
No call center but you get the SAME problems from the SAME people over and over and they know where you work and march down to your veal pen and camp there until you address their problem.
I ran tech support for a $2 billion health insurance company with 2400 users. One day one of the techs crazy glued my phone to the desk because I used to throw it against the wall. Try 10 straight work days where the same person has left a half dozen voicemails before 7am everyday on the SAME 2 problems which were: trying to log on to something like a dozen sessions and messing up the terminal, or, the printer doesn't because they sent something like 500 jobs to the queue.
Ok...I want to let you in on a secret. Do you know what Remedy is? Do you know how to log in? If you can answer at least "maybe" to both of these questions, then you are more qualified than over half of the Remedy developers out there. Personally I think I do a good job with it, but that's because I started out with "real" programming and eventually went to Remedy. The problem is that there are less than 200 people in the world qualified to work with Remedy. I'd say even less, around 100 even have half of a brain.
Anyways, to help troubleshoot your problems, ask your Remedy Administrator (if this same person is also known as "The Remedy Person" you are already screwed, it takes a team of people to work on it.) Often it is slow because of the network sucking. I've had times where Remedy works really fast and others where it's slow. Any halfway intelligent Remedy administrator will set up the servers properly so that they have a good number of threads and such, as well as the dba doing similar optimizations to the database. After that, of course you need a lot of memory and to a lesser extent cpu, because it is a memory hog in the older versions.
The newer version of Remedy, 4.51 is supposed to be much better for the administrator, and also faster than 4.0.3 or whatever older version you are probably using. However, I am not going to lie. Remedy is a bandwidth and memory hog. And, if your developers are idiots and use a lot of things called "escalations" (basically like putting a script in cron) then the server will be much slower. Another thing that I do to help make things a little better is to use perl scripts with Remedy. Certain things are accomplished much better through scripting, and you can even just use DBI rather than the ARSperl api.
Oh, and one more thing. You see those menus you have on character fields? Depending on how you have your client set up, those things can cache their info from the server upon each time you open that form, or each time you open the menu. If I were you, I'd set that to be each time you open the form. While good programmers (like myself) will have those menus being data driven from another table, most of the morons out there have static menus so there's no point in loading it each time you use the menu. Also, don't use that notifier program. If you want to bog things down even more than you thought possible, you would use that. The notifier sucks. Hmmm...the only other thing I can think to suggest is that you don't really want to ever delete *.arf and *.arv in your HOME directory unless you are having a problem seeing a field. It's the cache of Remedy so if you delete those, it has to recache everything in those forms again. Oh yeah, and if you are using the java version of Remedy...no wonder it's so damn slow. Get the user tool. I use both the win32 4.0.3 version and the Solaris 4.51 version and they work fine.
If your developers are idiots and their management is looking for someone intelligent be sure to send me an email with their contact info. I won't work for less than $85 an hour but I could probably speed up your process (unless it is just that your network sucks major ass, although I've used Remedy over a 56K modem before.)
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
"And I'll send you a Wendy's job application so you can put your skills to good use."
-Legion
Also, for a MASSIVE collection of true tech tales from the trenches, try Computer Stupidities.
"I see, sir. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. This man's name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
(I couldn't resist a good Fight Club reference here.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
After working on helpdesk for the past 11 months I have learned that clients will ask for anything and everything. Including 1 month of free service for 30secs of downtime on a dialup account. I am the Support Supervisor the the ISP for about 5 months now. I get all the "fun" calls. Everything from my ADSL is broken to give me my money back. The best calls are, your DNS server is broken because I can't see my domain outside your network. A quick check of the whois on the domain and you see that the "luser" hasn't renewed it, then you think "should I renew it' or let him know.
Of course I get to handle thirteen other techs, plus the entire ADSL Administration as well as most of the DNS administration and all of the domain web hosting clients. Gotta love Tier II, especially when your last job was in fast food and you got thrown out of University.
I don't get paid what I am worth but I love it when "lusers" call saying "I have this picture on my desktop and I can't get rid of it. Oh ya my wife is going to be home in five mins can you help me?" You want to say "sorry but that isn't internet related please contact your vendor!"
Another of my favorite tasks is disabling accounts for non-payment. You'd be surprised how fast a client calls when he/she can't get their precious porn or warez.
The really cool thing is that, my boss is twice my age but excepts my opinion and uses my advice, especially when hiring and firing staff. All in all, I don't understand why most would hate tech support, so it is stressful, doesn't pay much and makes you wish the phone was never invented. But come on, who would love to hear 40 year old's who can't use a mouse but their kids can crack into your bank and give you a million dollars.
Just my $0.02.....
Yittrix
My boss at Winstar had been in the same position for over 2 years... They got people to work there by promising them that after time they would be hired on a full employees and would have a chance to expand their horizons by working in NOC instead of phone support... When I talked to my ex-boss and told him how I felt, he said that he didnt care and that he was happy with his $0.50 raise every 6 months and that he didnt want to do anything else except sit at his desk and play Quake 2 and Diablo all freaking day... He didn't know anything, he was useless... If there was anything wrong, he would just answer "Use the Internet Connection Wizard" (AND WE ALL KNOW THAT FIXES ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS!!! YEAH RIGHT!!!) It was always the lame stupid guys that didnt know anything that were moved up in the ranks... First and foremost, other supervisors won't feel as threatened of losing their jobs and second those lame stupid guys would do anything to kiss ass because they didn't know any better... Anyway, my rant is complete, and I feel your guy's pain...
Sarcasm is the recourse of a weak mind...
--
Unions are fucking useless, and I say this from the experience of someone who has worked truly shitty jobs without representation
Unions are weak if members dont stand up to bosses together.
If it weren't for the union, we'd be getting pay commensurate with what other telecom companies give where I work.
So the bosses have told you "we'd pay you more out of the goodness of our *cough*black*cough* hearts if you didn't have a Union, we'd pay you as much as these people, we promise... but since you have that nasty-anti-American Union you have to suffer while these non-unionized employees get treated better". And you believe that?
I live in a Auto Union Town in Southern Ontario, and let me tell you, the CAW helps assure half the population of this city has decent wages, security, benefits in a safe and reasonable work environment. As long as other regions of the world promise to work harder, under worse conditions, for less money, we are all at jeopardy. Letting corporatists play one city/region against another in a race to the bottom (in terms of work standards/compensation) is NOT what we want to do.
It is more and more important now that the corporatists are mounting their 'globalization' assault on the people of the planet that we WISEN UP! and realize that workers do not have to compete against one another for standard labour jobs... why promise yourself at an ever lower standard? You only force the standards down... think of the future!
Workers of the WORLD UNITE!
Sorry - your problem is your shop has a weak union. What does your union Rep do with his/her time?
They force people with skills into a lower pay scale to match up with the people who don't have a clue
This is a horrible idea, do you want people to have to participate in ultra-capatalism, ever competing with one another - with no bargaining power against the bosses?
What you would rather see is thousands of 'cluefull' potential employees beg, scratch and claw for the 'opportunity' to have some crappy job - all the while the bosses sit back laughing smoking cigars...
Surely you agree with what Im saying 'in the big picture'? Your specific shop may have a weak union - but abandoning it is not the answer. My suggestion is to unionize the other two shops, band together, and bargain with more power. People are going to get the royal screw in a competition between the bosses and workers - unless you have a means to stick up for yourselves... think about it.
Why do you think your shop is so weak?
#23, gets modded as redundant for posting a mirror. Damn, I love slashdot sometimes.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
...and the corresponding
alt.sysadmin.recovery
alt.sysadmin.bofh
Then do a google search for the BOFH story archives. There are rarely apocryphal tales in the tech support industry. Technology reduces people to Neanderthalic states of intelligence (wait, that's too much credit).
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Last year I worked at a call center in downtown Tampa for a major telecom corp that recently changed it's name. The call center was a subsidiary that was up for sale, so call volume and stats were of paramount importance to entice prospective buyers. We supported broken real-estate software and remote access on a broken NT network using broken tools and it was a living nightmare. The customers were pushy real-estate agents who for the most part weren't even remotely computer literate. We had to keep call times under 10 mins (impossible in most cases, given what crap we were supporting and the level of incompetence of the end-users). During the last few weeks I was there we actually got training in how to "punt" calls (also called "kicking them to the curb", I swear to God, that's what the management called it!!) in order to get them off the phone. Give the customer the barest fix and wait for them to call again. This kept volume up and call time down. We also had a Hotcube, only we called it the Pit, and I got to sit right across from it and watch the stats as they came in. It was very ugly. The place was in a constant state of crash-and-burn with some support techs taking 70-80 calls per day without actually providing any meaningful support. The few who actually did help the customer were rewarded with a pink slip. I and most of the other techs were temps and would be given another assignment by our agency when the place finally folded,so we weren't too worried, but the full-timers were in a constant state of panic waiting for the axe to fall. I finally found a full-time position as a Novell network support tech (no more phone work...yayyy!!!) before the place was sold, so I never got to see the place go under, but I have gruesomely vivid ideas of what it must have been like at the end. I've sworn off of phone support for life. Shit, I'll go back to working construction before I ever do that again!!
I've had several phone-whoring jobs.. the first was national directory assistance for a couple years.. every few months the rules got stricter and stricter, soon we had a limit of 12 seconds per call, taking almost 700 calls a day.. if we took any longer than that, and if we did more than one search on the database (which worked half the time), the company was losing money, and a lot of people got fired because they couldn't do it. "I'm sorry, there is no listing, thank you for calling." *click* Of course, for the last couple of months, they got rid of the "thank you for calling" part to save time.
Then they shut down that department and shoved most of us into third-party verification. This job stunk. Our clients were all phone slammers who would call us with clients because they needed our verification (by law) to change their phone service. They would tell the customers to say yes to everything we asked before they called us. "What is your first name?" "Yes"
I quit there becuause they had a huge lull in business where I personally took 1 or 2 calls a day (if I didn't get sent home) for a few months, and my next raise was coming up (10 cents, whee!)
So then I got a job taking calls for DirecTV.. customer service.. this job was so horrible. We had the same limitations as in the article, but more strict. The customers were all idiots. My strategy consisted of "Can you please hold for two minutes?".. then I'd try to find a solution for them on the web-based help system, but then on most calls I just sat there wasting time with them on hold, and then just hit release, because I had no idea what to tell the customer, and there was nobody there to tell me what to do.
That job was so stressful and scarring.. I eventually got fired because I stopped showing up.. I've had a few jobs after that, but I can't even remember the names of the places.. because I can't keep a job for more than a week now. I'm studying computer programming, but I constantly worry that I'll never be able to work again.
there is "Welcome to the Internet Help Desk" by Three dead Trolls in a Baggie.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
These tech support workers are overworked, underpaid, undertrained, and a step away from the funny farm. They write a story about it and you DOS their website.
MMm, I love the smell of sympathy in the morning.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
It was related to me that in a certain call center they got bored one night and decided that everybody would be named "Bob". I wasn't there when it happened, but it was part of the lore, and it seemed just as plausible as anything else.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
*kinda off topic dont neg my karma* ;)
i couldnt find your email address so,
drop me a line email me or hit my icq,
10473330
.ph0x
As a former grunt tech and tech lead, I've drawn callers into three categories: The first, and my favorite, is the person who totally knows what s/he is doing and just needs that one critical piece of information. The second-my second favorite-is the person that's scared to death of the computer, and won't do anything that you don't explicitly tell them to. The third, and worst, is the person who knows just enough to be dangerous and you have to keep reined in constantly to keep them on task.
The ratio between types 1, 2, and 3 is about 10%/30%/60%. That should clue in anyone reading on why support folk (especially front-line folk) go insane. Why we don't have more and bloodier murders as a result is inexplicable to me.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
I'm a 6 year vet but I have been out of the trenches for 5 years. I still have flash backs. My call center was never as bad as PA Bell but I can't see how he would have lastest 20 months in an environment like that. Over heard in the call center. We us RISC free processors in our printers. Note: The spelling is correct, we used Reduced Instructiong Set processors. The agent was assuring the customer that the printer was very reliable. A customer was so pissed at one of our printers that he literally threw the printer out the window. He took pictures and sent them in to back up his claim.
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
MCSE = Must Consult Someone Experienced ;->
Get yer KDE-logo goodies at
http://www.cafepress.com/kde
Yes, I know this may be offtopic, but I don't see many comments like this. I usually see "what stupid writer!" or ""He/She Sucks!"
I don't know if anyone else noticed this but... damn Erika Donald is a good writer. I am just finishing an advanced writing course and notice these things now. Erika usd such great detail in her descriptions.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I've worked tech support at a DSL provider, and seeing that there are telcos as well as DSL carriers involved for us (the carrier is suposed to work WITH the telco...), there is a great amount of fingerpointing from one place to another. That's what i think the worst part of it was.
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
It's also damn funny to tell them every time that I run linux, just to hear the same BS speech on how they can only support Win9x and MacOS - which they also always assume you "sheep" it and buy the latest version of every OS. It just cracks me up - particularly when I will openly admit that I am NOT a true "hacker", I'm just a "hack" that likes to play with computers - and I usually know more about the freakin' network stuff than the tech support people do.
Once, I actually got through to "level 3" tech support, and they had a clue - but good god do you have to pull teeth to talk to them. Mind you, the level 3 guys are the ones that actually go out in the field and fix stuff - not the stereotypical phone-jockeys.
Anyway, enought rambling and ranting... I've things to see, people to do - or something like that...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Anyone who has ever worked a call center knows that callers asking for "supervisors" never really get supervisors. Callers actually get people who have been there a little longer and given slight raises who are trained to handle irate customers. This is an attempt to get customers to think they are getting customer service and knowledgeable people. Its rare that customers get a real supervisor, ie the people who evaluate the call center employees. However its only matter before people get wise to this practice.
This isn't Dilbert; Dilbert is funny, this is frightening. Now that the technology is available, certain areas of industry are monitoring their employees' every move. A few years ago, I read an article on a growing cult movement that did something like this. They required members to write down everything they did, from what they ate to how long they spent in the restroom. Sound familiar?
I just wonder how long it will take for this to hit the rest of us. Support centers have an excuse to monitor their employees, but then again, doesn't everyone? Perhaps if they treated their employees better, they wouldn't have such a huge turnover rate. Then, they could afford to be more selective in their hiring process, and hire people they could trust.
These people need a union.
http://www.globalonline.net/tech/humor
/. effect to ease up. Has some audio of tech support shennanigans.
To entertain you while you wait for the
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
To all the people who work in tech support and put up with people screaming at them, I salute you.
You deal with more bullcrap than a farmer. I could never do it....
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Reading your subject just makes me think of how SysAdminning & Tech-support are very much like the movie "Clerks". Sometimes a good "Randall" attitude is needed. Maybe Kevin Smith should ponder a film about tech-support.
Just because they support you doesn't mean they like you.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
So true that is my friend.
..and then go off on a 'StarWars' tangent ;p
.ph0x
'Position does not dictate action... If it did I would not have just told that guy to return his computer..'
Seriously.. I know we're getting off on more of a rant about customers but hey.. gotta get it out somehow eh?
hah.
Of course I never worked for "the man". But even indie ISP's have this stuff. It's a little more friendly and you can actually have 15 minute breaks.
The rules of tech support
1. Always assume the customer is lying.
2. Always assume your company lies to you.
3. Never test for more then one variable at a time.
4. Learn to smoke. The deeper and raspier your voice is the better. Nobody fucks with you when they think you're 35 and 6'4".
5. Never show fear.
6. The customers is stupid. If he knew anything he wouldn't need to talk to you. Never deviate from this stance.
7. MCSE ALWAYS need to be smacked.
8. Some people want help, some want to abuse you. Don't take it personally.
9. You won't last more then 18 months. Keep the resume updated.
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
No Text (in body of message). Usually this is typed in the subject, so the person will know that clicking on a link to get the body of the message will do them no good.
--
That is an average of 15 minutes per call with 2 15 minute breaks in an 8 hour day. I'm sorry, but come on and get real. I never had to worry about my stress levels or take health breaks. It's an easy job, you sit at your chair and talk to stupid people. Most of the time the call is Tech support is not for people who can't handle being yelled at though. But, that's in the job description. Those people who have to complain and cry over it should go be florists or something.
I was average 40-50 calls a day, in an 8 hour time period. I had very high scores on success rates and was promoted into being the lead tech, and every person under me was the same because I told them the same thing I said above. Those who didn't like it got transferred or quit. Dont work in tech support if you can't handle it, but dont expect sympathy. That is like a police officer getting pissed off about having to write tickets because it makes him feel bad.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
The part about Brian being gone and the new techie never hearing about him is very similar to that part of 1984 when Winston's partner at work disappears and his replacement never heard of him---in fact he never existed.
What an aweful-sounding place to work!
I knew it, down deep in my bones, I knew that was exactly what I was dealing with everytime I've had to call Tech Support. At least twice, I've been on the phone with my provider and been the one to figure the problem out.
Can I bum a sig?
Is there a number I can call to complain that the like is not working?
Because I used to work in their call center. Fits the description to an almost absolute T. I would go so far as to say that DirecPC is a worse service than PacBell DSL because it has no potential for doing what is is purported to do. We were explicitly instructed to lie to customers and tell them that the reason their bandwidth was so low was a "problem with IRQs" or anything else under the sun other than that we were intentionally restricting their bandwidth. We even had a page on which we could enter the customer's account information and it would tell us that they were, in fact, having their bandwidth massively throttled. This was to let us know when to stop troubleshooting and when to start lying. I absolutely kid you not. Anyone out there who ever considers DirecPC as an option please, please don't do it. It deserves to die.
This story is heartwrenchingly true. I've lived it -- I used to do tech support for Netscape, and you can imagine how bad *that* was, back in the days when adding new features was more important than making sure the existing features worked. (Are we still in those days?)
Earlier this year, however, I got a chance to turn the tables and be on the customer side of the support phonecall. I had purchased an Apple Cinema Display, one of those sexy 1600x1024 models... and it wouldn't play widescreen DVD's full-screen as advertised. When I tried to play any DVD movie, the DVD player software would limit the movie's width to 1280, and then it would letterbox a widescreen movie inside that width, so 16x9 movies were played at 1280x720 (or, under some circumstances, stretched to 1600x720) rather than at 1600x900. The software simply didn't know how to understand a monitor that wasn't 4x3.
So, seeing as how this was a clear-cut problem and a high-end product, and also seeing as how I found a whole bunch of other unresolved reports of this problem on various bulletin boards, I called Apple to make sure this issue was in their bug database so it might one day be fixed.
Thus began several weeks of tech support tango. I had support reps tell me that a computer monitor isn't capable of displaying a 16x9 image, or that 1600x900 isn't a 16x9 ratio, or that a 16x9 movie can't physically be played any larger than 12 inches wide, or that computer monitors always need to letterbox everything on all four sides because they don't overscan. I had support reps commit to calling me back at specific dates and times, then I never heard from them again. I had support reps tell me "I don't have the equipment here to try to reproduce your problem, but I really don't think it would work that way, so I'm going to close your call." I repeatedly asked to speak to supervisors and managers and was told "no." No one would just say the magic words "we've logged this as a bug."
It turned into something of an obsession for me, I'll admit, because I *never* would have been allowed to treat a customer like any one of these people had treated me. Never once did I raise my voice or become angry, despite getting yelled at and hung up on by a tech support rep for 'wasting his time' because nobody else out there has a Cinema Display. The longer the issue dragged on, the more appalled I became... until finally I just decided to give up, which is exactly what they wanted me to do. A manager was scheduled to call me back sometime in late April, and he never did, and that was the end of that.
The lesson I took away from this is that if you know more than the support reps do -- and this is easy to determine in one phonecall -- then it's useless to bother them with a question. Give me a FAQ and a web search engine, give me a company's knowledge base, give me a way to submit bugs directly to a company's developers, and I'll never need to call any company's Tech Support again.
Oh, and not that it matters because I don't watch DVD's on my computer monitor anyway, but... the bug wasn't ever fixed.
Check this glory hole out: http://www.techiescripts.com
Check out this for some insite into how your intenet help desk really works:
/ de fault.asp?HelpDesk=Open
http://cramsession.brainbuzz.com/video/helpdesk
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
I really amazes me that companies will spend that much money on the ILLUSION of tech support. Just think, everytime you call a baby bell you're being timed/monitored/and logged. Your tech is also being timed monitored and logged. Of course you can't expect real tech support if the technicians are only allowed x amount of time on the phone. How can you exaust all posibilities for a problem on an old slow computer that has to be rebooted every time you change something in the network properties (damn windows) in 15 minutes?
Then we cuss these people, call them idiots, refuse to listen to suggestions and are just down right horrid to them and all they get paid is what ever the company can scrape from the piggy bank? We call them idiots, when we are to stupid to figure it out ourselves. It's usually not even their fault, the may know the solution, but the Hot Cube is disconnecting the to move on to the next call.
We pay for support and we should get REAL support. Not a gracious 15 min. time limit and a "reboot and call me back thank you drive through please... would you like fries with that?"
I'm sure many of us have worked tech support, i'm sure many of us have had to call tech support. I hope everyone can remember how bad it can get. Remember just because you've "learned out" doesn't give you the right to act like a total snob on the phone with the technician. I can't tell you how many times i've heard "I'm and MCSE, I KNOW TO RIGHT CLICK!!!" or "I'm running linux, it's not a configuration problem!!!". Sorry, but the other 99% that call me aren't as blessed with computer literacy as you, so I'd rather be to remedial than have someone misunderstand me. It doesn't mean I'm talking down to you. Just because you can install linux doesn't make you an admin or guru, maybe the support rep can offer a conf suggestion or two... why else would you call? don't you think they would be swamped and would know if a router or what not went down, usually they check by request, and if it's not on their end it must be on yours. So maybe a little support from the company and the customers would be nice for a change. Keep that in mind next time you have to call someone
Oh.... urp.... omg.... I think.. I think I need to go throw up... you're a sick, sick perverted freak.
A CD from iTunes: $10 A Song from iTunes: $0.99 Not paying a cent to Microsoft: Priceless
I have to do tech support for my mother all the time. ALL the time.
"Frank, what does this illegal operation thing mean, and why does it keep destroying my work!"
She should use linux, but even the idea of logging in scares her for some reason.
Anyway, to all those who do tech support, THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH for dealing with these poor, underinformed people.
Note: this applies to contracted support for proivate clients, so is not at all like an ISP_ helpdesk...
I have users who "demand" to speak with my "manager" when they are unhappy with our service. I tell them my manager knows almost nothing about the account I work on, the clients I support, or how I support them; he just "manages" our team. Then I ask what I can do to help them resolve their problem, 'cause there ain't anybody else who can. Once they understand that, we are usualy okay. If they are really unhappy, I have them complain to their management. Usually its in cases where we will not do what the client wants us to due to policy.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning