ISP's Slapping Techs For Lending A Hand

Mike writes "Broadband Reports is running a story about how several large ISP's have reprimanded, even fired techs who offer support in BBR's forums in their free time. BellSouth is the latest ISP to forbid any official tech support representation. Instead of sculpting PR guidelines for techs to follow, they're scaring them into submission."

Comments

Truly horrible

[ekrout]

With war and hatred so predominant these days, it's hard to believe that during the Holiday season, people are actually discouraging kindness.

Re:Truly horrible

[Mattsson]

Those bastards where helping the customers!
Of course they should be fired.
Can't have serviceminded employees. That would be good for company reputation.

Re:Truly horrible

[Shalome]

Kindness is one thing, good business practice is another.

For example: a licensed tech provides off-time support in a relatively unofficial capacity, which causes the user to do something that royally screws his connection/hardware/software/downloaded pr0n/etc. User calls official tech support and demands retribution, seeing as how one of the company's techs told user to do something that "broke his stuff."

I've been in this situation before, and it ain't pretty for anyone involved, no matter how good the tech's intentions were.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for kindness and helping others. But I also understand the corporate position of "no unofficial tech support by official tech supporters."

Re:Truly horrible

[NerdSlayer]

With war and hatred so predominant these days, it's hard to believe that during the Holiday season, people are actually discouraging kindness.

Okay, let's take a step back for a minute. First of all, this is DSL, not saving the whales. The terrorists haven't won just because these guys can't post.

The truth is, running a company is hard. Wouldn't you rather have your job for the "Holiday season" that some free webboard tech support?

Part of the problem here is that it can be dangerous to have your employees posting as a representative of your company without any standard of what can or cannot be communicated safely.

It appears from this article that that some companies are setting up a policy that forbids this sort action by their employees. In a large company, this can be necessary. How well do the managers know their employees? Are they just spouting off about how much they hate their employers? Are managers going to scour the web for these people's posts?

It's true, it would be nice if this were allowed to continue, but I certainly understand why for liability's sake most companies don't want to be involved. This certainly doesn't warrant front page slashdot news. I know we all hate corporations, but often times companies get big because their the best at what they do, or at least good at making money while doing it.

Some day you kids will go off to college, and then, you might even have to get a job at a corporation, too.

Jesus, people. This isn't microsoft sacrificing babies in the parking lot every morning.

Re:Truly horrible

[The Madpostal Worker]

Employees volunteering time falls under a very gray(well actually not that gray) area of the Fair Flabor Standards Act(FLSA). The general consensus is that empolyees cannot volunteer time to their employer: almost always this falls under the definition of Hours Worked. The ISP is most likely worried that some point down the road their Tech (who was originally doing this of their own free will) will demand compensation ( and the requisite overtime) for their "voluneered" hours.

You know if I was the employer, I would do the same thing.

The Department of Labor Elaws has some easy to understand interpretations of various FLSA previsions.

Re:Truly horrible

[Oculus Habent]

It would be bad for the company reputation. Imagine, your support is so worthless that the few good technicians have to give advice to people while not at work because they can't on the job?

This is essentially what it's saying to the people in charge. Whether it's true or not is what they should be worried about.

It also a liability issue. What if a less-than-stellar tech goes online and starts spewing bad information - then people are angry at your company, and you've done nothing wrong.

As a former Prodigy Internet tech (it was acquired by Bell South...) I recall this was an issue for our call center. Tech support is practically a scripted job and while it attracts a variety of intelligent people, it gets plenty of random ones, too. We had plenty of people who would spin wild tales for people as to why they couldn't connect, and believe them themselves.

Re:Truly horrible

[Squideye]

Couldn't there be some kind of forum review by the workers' supervisors? Couldn't there be "licenses" or some kind of authorization for people to post on forums as "forum people"?

I worked as Tech Support for a while, and people from my division actually rotated duties including E-mail, phones, and newsgroup. It was a very good way to keep in touch with our user base. But unless there was official policy about how support was done, things got chaotic from time to time.

So we had guidelines for forum work. Is that so hard to figure out? Techs shouldn't be giving out "rogue advice" so to speak, they should keep in touch with their employers, but they also shouldn't be absolutely, expressly forbidden from helping people out when they get the chance!

Re:Truly horrible

[tshak]

They could just pay them salary and not have that problem. Microsoft tech guys are always in the newsgroups and I know many who particiapte in their own time.

Re:Truly horrible

[kcbrown]

It would be bad for the company reputation. Imagine, your support is so worthless that the few good technicians have to give advice to people while not at work because they can't on the job?

If your support is that worthless, then forbidding your employees from helping others in their spare time won't help. The only way to fix that problem is to fix your official support.

It also a liability issue. What if a less-than-stellar tech goes online and starts spewing bad information - then people are angry at your company, and you've done nothing wrong.

What makes you think this isn't going to happen while the tech is on the job? If a tech does that then they deserve to be reprimanded. While reprimanding an employee for what they say while not on the job treads dangerously on First Amendment rights, employers can probably get away with it these days.

Regardless, techs should be reprimanded for doing things that are bad for the company, not things that merely could be.

"Liability" has become the ubiquitous excuse for far too many of the evils in the world today.

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in support for a large internet equipment manufacturer, and here is my take:

When on the job, I can represent myself as a technical support representative from my company, and when I am not on the job I cannot make that claim. Its that simple.

I can still offer support, assistance and advice, but there is no way I'd support anything outside of my work structure and still represent myself as doing official work (i.e. claiming I'm a support rep).

I don't do this for my company's sake, I do it for mine -- its called CYA... coverying your ass.

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

And there's a point people often over look. Being sued. America is a culture in which easy money is paramount..particularly when it comes to the Internet. If one of those employees gives some advice that gets their machine hacked, causes stability problems or otherwise, and learns that an employee of their ISP gave them this information, you can be pretty damn sure they'll try and squeeze whatever money they can out of the company. Not much different than those people who get in a fender bender, then go out and try to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in "ow, my neck hurts" and "emotional distress" lawsuits.

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine, then get the employee to sign a form to say
he will not ask for money for doing things in his
own time! Agree a position on this and then move
on.

Re:Truly horrible

[timmyf2371]

The company I work for has a little of a reputation, and was getting bad press from nthellworld.com with regard to our broadband service. So instead of getting the site shut down, ntl bought it and kept it in the same format, while publishing guidelines for employees wishing to post, and employed the gentleman responsible for the site in a consulting post.

Tim

Re:Truly horrible

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Not to nickpick. but your arguments are inconsistent.

The quality of tech support was not in question, it is a matter of when an employee clocks out at the end of the day and acts as a private citizen X does the company get to govern his/her actions.

No one was saying these individuals were trying to act as agents of the company. All liability arguments are moot. This is simply a matter of control.

Re:Truly horrible

[The Madpostal Worker]

Again a possilbe gray area. Generally a salaried employee is still eligible for overtime unless they fit the "White Collar Exemption"(Here are more common overtime exemptions).

The two best fits in the whitecollar exemption are(from http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs17 .htm:

"Administrative Exemption

Applicable to employees who perform office or non-manual work which is directly related to the management policies or general business operations of their employer or their employer's customers, or perform such functions in the administration of an educational establishment; who regularly exercise discretion and judgment in their work; who either assist a proprietor or executive, perform specialized or technical work, or execute special assignments; who receive a salary which meets the requirements of the exemption; and who do not devote more than 20% of their time to work other than that described above (40% in retail and service establishments).

Professional Exemption

Applicable to employees who perform work requiring advanced knowledge and education, work in an artistic field which is original and creative, work as a teacher, or work as a computer system analyst, programmer, software engineer, or similarly skilled worker in the computer software field; who regularly exercise discretion and judgment; who perform work which is intellectual and varied in character, the accomplishment of which cannot be standardized as to time; who receive a salary which meets the requirements of the exemption (except doctors, lawyers, teachers and certain computer occupations); and who do not devote more than 20% of their time to work other than that described above."

Now IANAL, but there is a great deal of room for interpretation in there. A front-line (or even higher up) tech support person most likely doesn't meet the adminsitrative exemption (beacuse they won't be seetting management policy) and possibly the professional exemption

The FLSA is a big complex mess designed to stop employers from screwing employees. Sometimes in the process they limit worker's choices too. People run into this same issue in other areas too. Volunteer firefights in many counties have to resign from their volunteering position if they take a within the Fire/Rescue department of that county (even if there is no overlap between jobs). The problem is that in general many "volunteered" hours to companies aren't voluntary.

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

IF techs are providing free support it probably means they aren't being properly stimulated by their work.

Workers that are growing and developing and interested in what they are doing, don't have time to surf forums and post questions cause they are always busy reading manuals.

Most techs don't post advice just so they can help people, they do it to learn and to advance their knowledge and talk to other like minded people.

I think the business people are also overlooking the group activity of the forum and the benefits it could have with their techs encounter new problems and seeing new things and trends the customers are having way before bellsouth as a company will get to see what their customers want or need.

Any company is stupid not to let their techs provide tech support in a limited fashion in order for them to increase their troubleshooting skills.

But everyone knows alot of big companies are fuckin stupid...bottom line is once a company has mad a certain amount of fame or profit. It can do alot of wrong things for years until all its profits just dissapear and it sinks into nothing.
Companies like Bell have so many cash cow type services it really doesn't matter what they do as long as they keep their service up and running.

I personally think bellsouth dsl sucks quite a bit, its always disconnecting and fuckin up and the speed is not as consistant as it should be.

Re:Truly horrible

[dsoltesz]

Actually, the article says these tech support folks were identifying themselves as company employees, and assumably, agents of the company.

In one case, the company was also claiming the employees were divulging confidential information, which one cannot do on or off the clock if there's a policy concerning confidential information and/or the employee has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you mean those know-nothing MVP's?

They aren't paid. And generally, their ignorant.

Just my 0.02. Any MVP's care to chime in?

Re:Truly horrible

[jonadab]

> The problem is that in general many "volunteered" hours to
> companies aren't voluntary.

This is true in almost all fields. Despite the Department of Labor's
anality (and it is that in some cases), employers find ways to
pressure employees into doing things off the clock. Fast food
workers work through their breaks, or parts thereof -- unoffically,
of course -- at least a third of the time in many establishments.

I work at a public library, and every year we have a Volunteer
Recognition Banquet (to recognise the work of volunteers); attendance
is mandatory for all staff, but it is considered volunteer time. I
would no way EVER choose of my own volition to attend such an event;
I'm a computer geek and an ochlophobe, and my tastes in food tend
toward things cooked by human beings in real kitchens; high-class
catered food is, IMO, just barely edible, on a good day; eating it
together with a group of people I barely know is torture. On top
of that, almost all of these volunteers are from a social class
about three tax brackets higher than mine (or so it seems), so
casual conversation is basically impossible between me and one of
them even on an individual basis; dealing with a mingling group of
them is sheer terror, and I am required to pretend I'm enjoying
myself; such a banquet is very close to my personal idea of hell.
(To complete my idea of hell, heat the room to about 100F, play
country music at odd moments, and make me wear ill-fitting burlap.)
Each year I go, but I vow to find another job before the next one
rolls around. In most other respects, I like my job very much.
But I have to do this mandatory thing voluntarily, as part of my
job. (Please don't think I'm whining; the rest of my job is
fairly cushy, and this is a once-a-year thing. But it is a good
example of my point.)

The DOL may have a hard time pinning down specific infractions,
but they are well aware of this general problem, I'm quite sure.
So yes, employers have to be creatively careful about it.

And yes, as others have pointed out, there's the stupid liability
thing. Which is dumb, but that's what we get for trying to
entrust justice to juries made of random people off the street.
(But that's another thread for another day.)

The techs in question should have used their brains and done their
off-the-clock volunteering under an alias. The employer doesn't
mind that people are being helped, and it doesn't mind that they
are getting their help from someone other than on-the-clock
employees; what they don't like is that it is visibly coming from
off-the-clock employees. If they'd just been discreet, nobody
would have ever cared. Certainly the employer would not have
audited the employees' personal time to see whether they might
also have secret lives as some of the helpful users in the fora.

Re:Truly horrible

[jonadab]

> This isn't microsoft sacrificing babies in the parking lot
> every morning.

Jeez, I knew Microsoft was bad, but _every morning_? I had no idea
they sacrificed babies in the parking lot so _often_!

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. This is one of the best laid-out posts I've seen here in ages. The only thing which would make me marginally happier would have been if these guys had known what an ochlophobe was.

Re:Truly horrible

[La.swamprat]

Lets say the tech has identified himself as an employee of the company. He then gives advice on how to fix the problem but it is misunderstood by the person having the problem and the problem gets worse. Its not the tech's fault but the perception may be that the company doesn't know what there doing. Then he tells two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on.

Re:Truly horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't there be some kind of forum review by the workers' supervisors? Couldn't there be "licenses" or some kind of authorization for people to post on forums as "forum people"?

Why should the company waste time and money by having every employee's supervisor searching for reviewing the posts their chargees have made. Please tell me how they will identify those posts? Does the employee have to submit a list of forums and posts each morning for the supervisor to review? What happens if he fails to submit a post? Should he then be fired? Maybe you have that kind of free time at your job but I bet most don't.

Re:Truly horrible

[dafunn]

The guys from Bellsouth weren't just working the newsgroups on the side, posting responses in their free time. This was their job, customer interaction in several facets. One of those exposure points was DSLR.

And they weren't reprimanded, told to stop posting, whatever - these guys are no longer posting, as Andy Houtz said in one of the links, because of organizational changes. Bellsouth has gone through a lot of organizational changes lately (check the news) - TSG, the group handling the forum support, was apparently just one of the casualties.

Opinions, ideas expressed above are all mine - not my employer's.

Re:Truly horrible

[Mattsson]

On the other hand, I can go online i a forum, claim to be an, say, AT&T techie and say some really stupid stuff.
Most people can't/won't check if what I'm claiming is true or not.
Just as most people doesn't verify the accuracy of information they dig up on the internet.

But I can agree with you to some extent.
Back when I was working as a technician for a broadband-company, I would gladly help people out but I would never say that I worked for that company though.
In part because I'm not actually representing my employer when I'm not working and therefore has no business saying that "I'm a company X techie".
In part because if people know I'm from that company, I will get targeted with complaints about their service and stupid questions that I'm not allowed to answer.
(Like: What equipment do you use, what servers, what security, etc. Only idiots and fools would answer that kind of questions. Especially if they've been boosting about where they work.)

But as long as I don't say where I work or tell people stuff that I shouldn't reveal, I see no reason for my employer to forbid me to help or fire me for it.

Re:Truly horrible

[jonadab]

> The only thing which would make me marginally happier would have
> been if these guys had known what an ochlophobe was.

From the Greek words "ochlos" (crowd) and phobeomai (I fear; you
are familiar with "phobia" no doubt, from more common conditions
such as arachnophobia). I'm very bothered by unordered or chaotic
groups of people, especially large groups, especially of people I
don't know very well. Mingling in a social setting with more than
half a dozen people or so makes me physically uncomfortable.

My higher cognitive functions know that at the end of the event I
will be just fine, that no horrific things are going to happen to
me, but my higher cognitive functions only have control of small
parts of my brain, since most of the rest of it is busy planning
escape routes.

Re:Truly horrible

[samdu]

You said this:

"No one was saying these individuals were trying to act as agents of the company."

But apparently didn't read this:

"BellSouth is the latest ISP to forbid any official tech support representation."

Re:Truly horrible

[NerdSlayer]

Jeez, I knew Microsoft was bad, but _every morning_? I had no idea
they sacrificed babies in the parking lot so _often_!

My joke was funnier. Your shitty attempt at Chandler Bing - level sarcasm has added nothing to this thread.

Re:Truly horrible

[jonadab]

> My joke was funnier.

So mod me down as -1 Not Funny.

Sounds about right to me

[I Am The Owl]

It seems perfectly reasonable to me. If these techs start offering tech support in their "free" time, they're pretty likely to start demanding that it be included in their "paid" time.

That would make the companies liable to make up for their employee's overtime wages that they never even asked for, imposing financial hardship upon them. So it only makes sense that they would root out the troublemakers in such a fashion.

Re:Sounds about right to me

[FuzzzyLogik]

Bah, this is rediculous, they aren't on the clock, they aren't getting paid for it, they know this. So now anyone who works on open source software in their free time they're going to demand pay as well? No, i think not. If someone likes helping people, or writing software or solving problems (which is usually the case) they can do that in their free time and not get paid for it, why would they think that?

Kyle

Re:Sounds about right to me

[Anonymous Coward]

If these techs start offering tech support in their "free" time, they're pretty likely to start demanding that it be included in their "paid" time.

Many people understand the distinction between "free time" and "work time". Why not try this solution?

1) Inform employees that responding to inquiries via public forums does not count toward work hours.
2) Having stated that, allow employees to respond.

Employees want to complain? Be my guest. Please see point 1.

FYI, if you read the article, it has more to do with legal actions and public image than employee compensation.

Re:Sounds about right to me

[futuresheep]

It seems perfectly reasonable to me. If these techs start offering tech support in their "free" time, they're pretty likely to start demanding that it be included in their "paid" time.

The key part you're missing is that these techs ARE doing this in their free time. It's not that they're being asked to visit these forums while off the clock. The only reason the company caught up to them, is because they identified themselves on a public forum as company employees. The company is worried about being asked for a paycheck, it simply doesn't fit along the company line of using answers to technical questions that have been reviewed and OK'd by management.

Re:Sounds about right to me

[futuresheep]

Oops, I meant the company ISN'T worried about being asked for a paycheck.

See what not having my replies passing management review does?

Re:Sounds about right to me

[Rebel Patriot]

You remind me of my uncle. When he was 15, he needed a job, so he went to a construction sight, grabbed some tools, and got to work. This was completely on his free time. Later, he expected to get paid for it. Guess what happened! You're right! He didn't get paid for that time he worked there, but he was hired on the spot.

Re:Sounds about right to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, I meant the company ISN'T worried about being asked for a paycheck. See what not having my replies passing management review does?

I would have commented on it, but company policy prohibits that on a public forum...

Re:Sounds about right to me

[zcat_NZ]

That might have been OK 40 years ago, but not any more. There's safety regulations and things like public liability to worry about. If an 'informal' worker hurts themselves or another worker, or damages property (EG digs up fiber) that can cost the company millions. The company will be held responsible, but won't be covered by ACC or public liability insurance or whatever you have in your country.

The same applies to some extent for technical support. If I say I work for xyzzy (even if I don't!) then people are going to assume I know what I'm talking about at least as far as xyzzy's service is concerned, even if I explicitly say I'm not currently answering in an official capacity. I'm exploiting (and if I screw up, damaging..) xyzzy's reputation.

The simple answer (at least for web forums) is to log on under a pseudonym and don't say who you work for. Build your own reputation. The company won't know who you are so they can't gag you. The customer has no idea who you are IRL or who you work for, so they can't sue anyone. Everyone's happy.

Re:Sounds about right to me

[homer_ca]

I think that's it. It's about control and preventing confidential or embarassing info from being spread to the public. In a public forum like a newsgroup or message board all statements from a representative of a company are scrutinized to a degree that won't happen in a one-to-one support call. Any big corporation is like that. All communications with the public goes through PR talking heads. Anything else is against policy.

breach of personal privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything they do in theyre spare time in theyre lives is theyre business, outside work outs its outside the contract, sue them. If that is the USA attatude towards towards its employees, then dont work in the US, take your brain elsewhere.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[FuzzzyLogik]

the fact that you're an anonymous coward makes me not want to say anything here but i will anyway. This isn't the United States attitude. I think the companies are just ticked they aren't getting the free service, and for some reason they think they might be held reliable in some way. Other than those excuses, i don't see why this is happening. Certain companies are just companies, they think with their wallets than with their brains. I am curious if they could sue though. Then again, i'd just take my expertise elsewhere, where it will be appreciated rather than take advantage of or questioned.

Kyle

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Work where you are protected under law then. Move to the EU or elsewhere. THey have very good laws for human rights and also workers. Not to mention other good things like healthcare, transport, comms :D

Re:breach of personal privacy

[chaidawg]

The things they do in their spare time are not their own business if they do it in the name of the company they work for. By identifying themeselves as employees of said company, they are no longer acting as private individuals, but as representative agents of a corporation.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Guppy06]

"Anything they do in theyre spare time in theyre lives is theyre business,"

RTFA. The main complaint of these ISPs is that these people (in their free time) say "I'm a tech support person for XYZ ISP and..." Their free time doesn't seem so free any more if they seem to be acting in their official capability as XYZ tech support. And if the information is harmful, does the poster get blamed or the employer they all but claim to represent?

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Lasalas]

It's not a name, it's a status. Posting anonymously automatically gives your posts less credibility. and status

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yes, Mr. I-created-a-600000+-troll-ID a minute ago, that makes all the difference.

~~~

Re:breach of personal privacy

[drpatt]

This comment was "insightful??"

A lot of companies stipulate in their employee contracts that employees can't moonlight in the same line of work that their employers pay them to do. I doubt the US is unique in that.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[PhoenixFlare]

I hate to burst your rosy-colored bubble, but packing up and moving out of the country isn't something most people can do, especially recent graduates.

And "outside work outs its outside the contract, sue them."? Yeah, that's just what we need....more frivilous lawsuits.

From your tone, it sounds like you don't live in the US(forgive me if i'm wrong), and again- Skipping the country on a moment's(or even a large) notice isn't exactly easy, and simply abandoning the problem won't solve anything anyway.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[The Monster]

they do it in the name of the company they work for

DISCLAIMER: Any opinions or advice expressed by me in this forum are mine personally, and are not expressed within the context of my employment; therefore they should not be construed to be representative of, authorized by, or an any way connected with my employer.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything they do in theyre spare time in theyre lives is theyre business

Anything they do in "they are" spare time in "they are" lives is "they are" business? People on Slashdot should really learn some basic grammar. It's not that difficult.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything they do in theyre spare time in theyre lives is theyre business, outside work outs its outside the contract, sue them. If that is the USA attatude towards towards its employees, then dont work in the US, take your brain elsewhere.

Oh, good. I should take my brain up my ass like you did. Good solution.

Re:breach of personal privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

DISCLAIMER: Any opinions or advice expressed by me in this forum are mine personally, and are not expressed within the context of my employment; therefore they should not be construed to be representative of, authorized by, or an any way connected with my employer.

And make no mistake -- I am in no way associated with the people I claim to represent.

You stupid troll

[krog]

Information, like free time, should be free. If these techies offer support in their free time, anyone who'd get in their way is subclassing Hitler.

Re:You stupid troll

[SlamMan]

As long as they aren't representing themselves as employees of the company while doing it, sure.

There saving company time and money

[GaLupo]

By helping out ppl they save them selves time on repetitve questions and they help reduce the amount of tiem adn moeny spent by comapnies on tech support

Re:There saving company time and money

[Shalome]

And apparently, the above post is what happens when our communities save money on things like "teachers" and "textbooks."

Re:There saving company time and money

[Anonymous Coward]

Te he. I think you'll find the post *is* a teacher!

In related news (*wink*)

[ekrout]

In related news, Linus Torvalds, head honcho of the Linux kernel hackers, recently fired a half-dozen developers for going above and beyond normal code writing. Linus found them in multiple IRC channels offering computing support in their free time, which was a clear violation of the Linux team's No Assistance or Help (NAH) policy that was adopted in the mid-1990s.

Re:In related news (*wink*)

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had a mod point, you'd get it!

Whats funny is that many companys have NDAs....

Re:In related news (*wink*)

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Shouldn't it really be the RTFM policy, not the NAH policy?

Re:In related news (*wink*)

[jonadab]

> Shouldn't it really be the RTFM policy, not the NAH policy?

The NAH policy is more holistic; besides RTFM, it also covers RTFS,
DIY, and a general prohibition against writing HOWTO documents that
cover a portion of code to which you have contributed, as well as
some applications of LART. Of these, RTFS is widely considered to
be the most important aspect of the policy.

Thats the reason I was fired

[dcstimm]

I worked for a dial up ISP, I did techsupport, I would aways go way out for the customer and I would help fix all the problems they were having with out service. ALot of times I got offers to go to their house and fix their computer, but I always told them I couldnt. But I also Build and fixed computers on the side and I recommended this ISP to alot of people. So one time on the phone I was talking to someone I build a computer for and I guess the manager heard me talking about the computer I built for them over the phone, and word got to the owner and I was fired. They also got mad at me for telling people they needed a new HARDWARE based modem. I had alot of calls that people complained about disconnections and slow connection rates. SO I would recommened them to buy a USR hardware based modem, for some reason the ISP I worked for didnt like this so I would always get in trouble. Im glad I dont work for that company any more, they were more into making a profit then helping their customers.

Oh well..

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

The USA has no laws to protect workers?

I suggest you move to work in the EU as they have very strict laws protecting people.

Its called Brain drain.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[FuzzzyLogik]

This is sad, because it's exactly what i did, though i didn't do it on any company time. It's a good recommendation. I used to have random disconnects with a software modem, normally while playing games and such. The cpu just couldn't feed the modem with the information and disconnected me. So i bought a hardware modem fromo USR and never had a problem since. I also did this for other people and it fixed their problems. I don't think it's much of a problem any more with newer computers, but it was a problem on my p166. I just keep moving my USR from new computer to new computer :) and i keep it around in case my cable goes out (good ol comcast)... I too would be glad to not work for that ISP anymore.

Kyle

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[slipgun]

I suggest you move to work in the EU as they have very strict laws protecting people.

Many would say too strict.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[HD Webdev]

SO I would recommened them to buy a USR hardware based modem, for some reason the ISP I worked for didnt like this so I would always get in trouble

Probably bean counters were the problem. After all, you were increasing customer's bandwidth use by x%.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[swb]

Maybe management didn't want you mixing your side business with your day job.

Generally speaking, most places dislike their employees generating business from their customers or doing business on their time.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you hear the people complaing? No, just whiners in the USA and companies.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Lumpy]

this is the "radio shack" syndrome... companies run by idiots that know nothing about their own business.. and WANTING employees that also know nothing about what they sell or support.

it's very typical, and what we need to do is call the kettle black.. we all need to start publically humiliating CEO's, CFO's and espically CTO's at companies that do this kind of crap... call up and leave messages to these "leader" as to how stupid they are, be sure to spread the word about any company that does this, you'd be really suprised how a little of warning via word of mouth is more effective than $2,000,000.00 in advertising.

Basically.... WARN everyone you know about companies like what you worked for. fill them in, and let them know that XYZ isp is not what you want to use...

Hell I know cable guys that reccomend to people "can you get DSL?? I'd switch to that first and avoid cablemodem service unless you have no other choice. hell I also know cable guys that reccomend to their friends and relatives to get a dish instead of cable service in their town.

the way to flush these "morons with money" (tm) is to spread the word to everyone you know... it will put them out of business.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[shepd]

>I had alot of calls that people complained about disconnections and slow connection rates. SO I would recommened them to buy a USR hardware based modem

Not that this is a bad idea or anything, but after living in the country, I can tell you the majority of those calls are, in fact, the ISP's/Telco's fault. Most all dial-up boxes are purposely misconfigured by the ISP to ensure they drop the connection at the sound of a pin drop. I've been told so by the person at said ISP who has had an opportunity to view the config of these boxes.

Oh well. It's cheaper to drop dial-up customers than to keep them, for a lot of ISPs. I wish I could find an ISP that costs twice as much but actually puts some effort in. :-(

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you weren't some fuck who helped old ladies when their printer didn't work, or helped a moron figure out how to navigate different websites. I had a coworker that did that all the time. I would get calls from people screaming in my ear that that guy fucked up their computer by telling them to remove *everything* from device manager in Windows and reboot, and have everything redetect. And this was to fix their soundcard, or video capture card, or whatever. The guy was a fucking moron. He also made all of the customers expect that the phone support was there to solve every problem you may have. I had a jolly time explaining to customers that that guy is an idiot and we aren't supposed to help with other stuff. Of course, they just kept calling back until they got him.

I hate that guy so much. He did get fired eventually, but for a different reason. He also worked for another ISP and tried to get commissions by selling DSL service for the other company to customers who were having problems connecting.

He is also a white trash loser who showed up on Jerry Springer on a show about "Wives that spend too much time online" or something like that. Apparently his wife put up a site online about her masturbating without telling him.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, 90% of technicians are really clueless, and basically have a bullshit recipie book of crap like running Defrag, Regcleaner, or deleting various crap, most of which don't do anything to improve the situation and often makes it worse.

Of course, when the shit hits the fan, it's always Microsoft's fault.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[dcstimm]

well, considering the servers were 3com/USR total control boxes, and the customers modems were HSP 56 win modems, I knew the modem would fix their problems. I wasnt about to disable all their start up programs so they could have more resources. (that breaks alot of things)

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you hear the people complaing? No, just whiners in the USA and companies.

Mainly because these laws have only been around for a few years (I'm talking about England specifically here, since I know much less about other countries' culture), and the world economy (not to mention the British economy) hasn't really hit recession yet.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact I do hear people complaining. The ones left unemployed in the overly-rigid labour markets.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[uptownguy]

What sort of nonsense are you going off about here?

Companies have the right to run their companies the way management sees fit. I for one could made a good argument for the liability of random tech support people speaking for the company in off-hours being too risky. The point is they HAVE made this choice. And, what, because you DISAGREE with their BUSINESS DECISIONS, you are going to boycott their product? Oh, wait, not even a boycott, no, some sort of uber-hip guerillia marketing terrorism directed at the person who meets with his or her vice presidents on a regular basis? PLEASE.

(1) Find worthy problems to get your undies in a bunch over.

(2) Grow up before you suggest "solutions"

(3) Figure out who the "them" is you are attacking...

Just my opinion...

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been there, on the call center floor, working beside people just like you, buddy.

The truth is, your answer and your attitude are a cop-out. The solution of "go buy a h/w modem" is valid for only a small percentage of problems. And, as a previous poster pointed out, is almost not ever a problem at all, since the original Pentium has been replaced by faster CPU's.

But the answer makes you seem superior, the customers on the other end tell you you must be smart, and soon you are using that solution for everything from no-dial-tone to slow web-page loading.

My guess is you needed to be fired.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Phroggy]

And having worked at four different ISPs, I can tell you this is nonsense. Sure, if the ISP's admins don't know what they're doing, something may be misconfigured, but at most larger ISPs, the admins are quite competent. You would be amazed at what kinds of things can disrupt a dialup connection. Did you know that many people get different connection rates depending on the weather? Some people can't connect at all after a storm, even though their voice phone service seems to work fine. Copper POTS lines were never intended to carry data.

I've seen connections improve by replacing the phone jack in the wall. Moisture builds up and the contacts become corroded. It's not some lame excuse tech support made up to get you off the phone - it might not be the answer to your problem, but it's a known issue that can't be ruled out yet.

How do you explain it when a thousand other customers can all connect just fine, and you're the only one having problems, but you're connecting to the exact same equipment as everyone else is? Is that the ISP's fault?

You can dial your friend's ISP and get better speeds, so you assume your ISP is to blame. Take your computer to a friend's house, and plug into his phone line. Your connection speed vastly improves. Whose fault is it now?

And then there's 56k. First of all, did you know it's impossible to make a 56k connection if there's more than one conversion between analog and digital anywhere on the connection? Your analog line is converted to a digital signal at your phone company's central office - that's one conversion. If it converts back to analog at the other end, 56k is impossible.

Secondly, there are four protocols for 56k: X2, k56flex, v.90, and v.92. v.92 is pretty new and not widely supported, so I'm not familiar with it, and it's basically just an improvement over v.90. The other three, however, are all quite different. Now, everybody supports v.90, but that wasn't the case a few years ago. USR supports X2, Diamond and Lucent support k56flex. When v.90 came out, all the modem manufacturers released firmware updates to make X2 or k56flex modems support v.90 as well. However, early implementations of v.90 were astoundingly buggy. ISPs were applying firmware patches to their terminal servers as well. Picture this: X2 modems connect to the ISP at 56k. k56flex modems connect to the ISP at 33.6 (they drop down to v.34), because the ISP doesn't support v.90. The ISP updates to support v.90. The customers update to support v.90. X2 modems try to connect with v.90 and fail half the time. Enter an init string to make them use X2 instead, and they work fine again. k56flex users can now connect with v.90, and maybe they have better success. The ISP does another update, and now all those X2 modems can connect properly with v.90, so that's great - but now some k56flex modems can't connect at all anymore. Enter an init string to force them to drop down to v.34 (and the particular init string required to do this is different for each manufacturer, and they're usually cryptic, like "+MS=11,1"). Now they can get online, and go download a firmware update, and now v.90 works again (after changing the init string to re-enable v.90). A new firmware patch for the terminal servers is released, and the ISP tests it - it fixes a lot of problems. They roll it out, and it works great, until a modem manufacturer releases a firmware update that isn't compatible with the ISP's new firmware. So, the ISP splits their modem pool, and gives different dialup numbers to people with different brands of modems.

I don't do dialup support anymore, so I can't say how much of this is still an issue. I would imagine most of these kinds of incompatibilities have been resolved, now that v.90 has had a few years to mature. Still, don't assume the ISP is always responsible for your problems.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[meatcycle]

I think he was pretty clear in his post that this was one of his own customers for whome he had built a computer. He then recommended the ISP (his daytime employer) to his client. Seems silly to fire someone who sends you extra business that you may never have had.

Maybe his company has a policy against moonlighting, in which case I can see why they would fire him (not that I think such a policy is good).

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[octalgirl]

If that's true then mangement doesn't understand the business very well. I can't think of any tech people I know that don't do things on the side, whether for $$ or not, on behalf of their company or not. Even if it's just for family. Does a doctor just walk by an injured person on the street? Does a teacher sit silent when someone nearby asks a question they know the answer too? When you are skilled in an area, it's just human nature to present that side of yourself in your day-to-day life. A good manager would understand that and incorporate it into their business model. (And I also wonder if said management that goes so far as to fire tech ppl for helping has never asked for personal/home computing help from some of their hired tech people?)

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[shepd]

>Sure, if the ISP's admins don't know what they're doing, something may be misconfigured, but at most larger ISPs, the admins are quite competent.

True. The problem is that most ISPs larger than a handful of customers rely on telco equipment (or at least they do in Ontario, Canada). The telco configures the dialup boxes, and getting things changed on them is like pulling teeth. I'm told the defaults on a Cisco dialup box tend to be rather conservative in what they will accept in line noise.

>You would be amazed at what kinds of things can disrupt a dialup connection. Did you know that many people get different connection rates depending on the weather?

Yes. I actually live in an area that varies between 19.2k and 31.2k depending on your luck of the draw. However, the fact remains that v.32 connections are supposed to be able to retrain to another speed upon line noise. All the ISPs I've tried in my area simply drop the connection flat. I can get a stable connection at 14.4k, though, which goes to show it's very much a factor of their boxes refusing to renegotiate the connection (or at least that's the best explanation I've ever seen). I've tried about 10 different modems, varying from cheap-ass SM56s to expensive external USRs. All the same.

>I've seen connections improve by replacing the phone jack in the wall. Moisture builds up and the contacts become corroded. It's not some lame excuse tech support made up to get you off the phone - it might not be the answer to your problem, but it's a known issue that can't be ruled out yet.

Been there, done that. Here we have a demarc jack at the point the line enters the house. Same results when connected to that.

>How do you explain it when a thousand other customers can all connect just fine, and you're the only one having problems, but you're connecting to the exact same equipment as everyone else is? Is that the ISP's fault?

The other thousand customers don't stay on the net for an hour long? Your logs should show that... Of course, the logs are already tainted with errors resulting from purposely misconfigured dialup boxes (which, BTW, shows the admins are competent -- these boxes don't misconfigure themselves -- so don't feel I think people at ISPs are stupid).

>You can dial your friend's ISP and get better speeds, so you assume your ISP is to blame. Take your computer to a friend's house, and plug into his phone line. Your connection speed vastly improves. Whose fault is it now?

Been there, done that, for over a decade. In a "good" area that gets a decent connection, no drops. In a "bad" area (like mine) I have to manually force the modems to connect at a lower rate to keep a stable connection.

This is proof that there's a problem with the ISPs boxes. And, as I've said, I've used more than a few ISPs around here.

>And then there's 56k. First of all, did you know it's impossible to make a 56k connection if there's more than one conversion between analog and digital anywhere on the connection? Your analog line is converted to a digital signal at your phone company's central office - that's one conversion. If it converts back to analog at the other end, 56k is impossible.

Yup. That's why I don't get 56k. Not because of the digital problem, though, it's because of the other fact you sort of missed -- cheap telcos strip the high-bit of the connection, giving them 12.5% more through the same line.

>Secondly, there are four protocols for 56k: X2, k56flex, v.90, and v.92. v.92 is pretty new and not widely supported...

I don't get any connections anywhere near that speed. Doesn't matter what equipment I use, or what flash the ROMs have. Same steaming crappy internet everywhere. And it isn't just limited to my town... I've seen the same problem anywhere where the lines aren't 100%.

>(and the particular init string required to do this is different for each manufacturer, and they're usually cryptic, like "+MS=11,1")

I _love_ modems like this! Try the ones where you have to set the S registers... Ugggggghhhhh...

>I don't do dialup support anymore, so I can't say how much of this is still an issue. I would imagine most of these kinds of incompatibilities have been resolved, now that v.90 has had a few years to mature. Still, don't assume the ISP is always responsible for your problems.

I didn't. I just suspected it until I did a little prodding of people who I know as sysadmins...

I'm sure your ISP is decent if you've checked it and they don't do this sort of crap. If you have service in the Ontario, Canada area let me know and I'll direct customers there. :-)

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Uller-RM]

Never worked much in the service industries, have you? Boycotts don't do much, you're right. Word of mouth is EVERYTHING though. This is very much true of ISPs, also -- I've seen it first hand.

Technically, yes, a person has the right to run his company any way he sees fit - or the stockholders, in the case of an incorporated business. Speaking for the company off-hours should certainly be discouraged. However, giving unofficial help in a tech forum to frustrated users (either from your ISP, or from a competitor's) should not be an offense, much less one worthy of termination. Hell, I'd be MORE likely to hire someone who did that.

(In fact, I've got a good story for ya - a friend of mine split up his DSL line with several other people, and one of said people ended up getting the ISP targeted for a two-day DoS attack. The abuse staff at the ISP ran the name of my friend through Google - and got nothing but postings on LUGs, Sendmail mailing lists, and overclocking forums. They ended up hiring him part-time.)

Yep, everyone has a right to make business decisions. However, some decisions are better than others. Having seen first-hand what happens when ISP word of mouth goes from very good to very bad (the result of policy and staff changes in a previously stable company following a buyout) it's apparent to me that decisions that lead to bad word of mouth should be avoided. This is basic microeconomics, bud.

If I were ever interested in working for an ISP again, or maybe running one, the number one thing I'd shoot for is trust - trust between employer and employees, and trust between business and customers. It may not be the most guaranteed to make profit, but it's the best way to maintain repeat business - and, frankly, if I wanted to make big bucks and hate my career, I'd go work for the government.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[MarkusQ]

What sort of nonsense are you going off about here?

Companies have the right to run their companies the way management sees fit.

And (by the same logic). he has the right to respond to the way they run their companies the way he sees fit. You're correct that management has the right to make choices. But that doesn't mean that customers, stockholders, employees, competitors, ad all the rest of us have lost the right to hold, voice, and even act on our oppinions of the choices the managers make. I have called companies to tell them I supported them for making a hard but sound choice; why should I not chastise them for making easy but stupid ones?

-- MarkusQ

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[raiyu]

"Im glad I dont work for that company any more, they were more into making a profit then helping their customers."

Oh yes, how silly of them, a company actaully caring about profits.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm guessing you own stock in tandy corp.

or you're an idiot - either one

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[PD]

I don't do anything at all for friends, either for money or for free. Just my computer and my wife's.

Once, my wife told a colleague that I could take a quick look at her computer. She had forgotten my rule that I don't work on anybody's computers but my own. Well, I did her a favor and looked at it.

Typical Windows machine, with its share of installation problems and cruft. I fixed the one thing I had to fix (which took WAY longer than my wife thought it would take - she was waiting for me a long time) and declined to fix anything else as graciously as I could.

What if I had accidentally deleted something important? What if I fried an internal component? These are risks that I don't want to take, thank you very much. I'm not insured nearly enough to compensate someone if I destroyed important data.
And what would happen to the working relationship between my wife and her colleague? Things like that are not work risking over a printer driver installation. Now she understands why it's best to just tell everyone to take it to a good computer shop and pay them to look at it, or figure it out yourself.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[ZuG]

I can tell you about v.92, since I support it at my local ISP. It's a *bitch*. Three months will go along with no issues, and then one day the modem suddenly won't connect. 75 percent of the time, forcing an init string, or other software fixes, will fix the problem (after a long diagnostic process). The other 25%, though, they'll never work again and we have to send them off to the OEM, who will tell the customer that their POS Conexant HSP Micromodem is just fine and it's really us...

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[jonadab]

> You would be amazed at what kinds of things can disrupt a dialup
> connection.

What amazes me is how _robust_ my dialup connection is. Sometimes
it can go for several hours at a time before it drops. That may
sound like a short time, but I have ears, and I know what the phone
lines are like. Your wetware filters it out if you don't pay the
right kind of attention, just like the stereo in the background when
you are listening to somebody talking, but doing that filtering is
AI-complete, or so I would think. But if you *listen* for line
noise, you can hear it in any ten-minute phone call -- at least,
around here you can. I would expect that kind of thing to disrupt
a data link every single time it happens, but apparently most of
the time it doesn't. Whoever designed ppp knew what he was doing,
that's my take on it. I don't have any other explanation.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[digitalsushi]

Most all dial-up boxes are purposely misconfigured by the ISP to ensure they drop the connection at the sound of a pin drop. I've been told so by the person at said ISP who has had an opportunity to view the config of these boxes.

There's no admin who is competent enough to understand how to configure a terminal server enough to let you connect, but threshold it enough to drop you randomly but shortly afterwards, who is working for a dialup ISP. They're all working in house for Fortune 5 companies :D

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[shepd]

>There's no admin who is competent enough to understand how to configure a terminal server enough to let you connect, but threshold it enough to drop you randomly but shortly afterwards, who is working for a dialup ISP. They're all working in house for Fortune 5 companies :D

:-) But seriously, management is always looking for a way for users to get disco'ed. I've heard of some much, much, much more terrible ways that ISPs disconnect users, and this is one of the 'nicer' methods.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Lumpy]

wow you have zero clue or are an economics major at a University...

Let me spell it out for you in words you can understand...

if a place does bad things to the nice people that help on their free time, you need to tell others about how bad they are.

so here's a list for you....
(1) Find a way to curb your ADHD and read the entire post and it's parent post before spouting off... it makes you look exceptionall stupid. (sorry, I used a big word for you there)

(2) Grow up and learn how the real world works. Companies are EXPECTED to treat the customer as the most important thing , and they needto REWARD employees that im[prove the customer relations.. not the silly men who's daddy's money got them their job.

(3) the "them" I am attacking is the company I discover that their employee abuses and rampant disregard for the customer all for the sake of feeding some middle or upper manager's ego and control-freak tendancies.

Here's some education for you..

#1- your customer is right, always... if you say otherwise you are an IDIOT.

#2- encouraging your employees to help your customers in any legal way they can, increases customer satisfaction and therefore profits and bottom line... anyone who disagrees with this is also STUPID.

#3- any tactic that you use or policy you set that hinders or keeps your employees from doing their jobs is STUPID.

companies are in business for one thing ... making money and lots of it. if your business tactics are to keep "TIGHT" control over your employees then you need to stop right now and never ever go into business... you have no clue on how to run a sucessful place, and you have no abilities that can even be taught. your core personality is that which is destructive to businesses.

the role of a leader is to SERVE. the role of a manager is to server his employees. if you dont or cant understand that... please do the world and the stock market a favor and never ever hold a position where you manage anything.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[digitalsushi]

Eh. maybe some places. I am the netadmin at a random nameless ISP, and I've never, ever been told to in any way, shape, or form tweak with a customers settings. i sit in the tech center, along with the call center reps (who do WAY more work than i, as netadmin. they are the heroes at my company, not me). in sitting with the tech reps, i WOULD get physically abused if they had the slightest notion I was messing with things. I don't mean to be contrary- I respect you as a known, intelligent slashdotter, but I cant really think of a good reason for an ISP to randomly disconnect users. Users get angry, and call in. That costs money. I think it costs us like 80 cents for a 60 second call, when you calculate overhead in. When you're a mom and pop company (still a few of us as ISPs!), pennies count. Then again, I would LOVE to get in the head of an AOL tech, one with a good understanding of the secret big ISP mantra. Maybe when you're not the biggest, good connectivity and excellent customer service stand to be the only venue to success. (and if anyone in the call center where I work reads this, let me know in person and I'll grab you a biggie fry :D)

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Doctor Faustus]

You read it backwards. On his side job, he generated business for his main job.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Many would say too strict.

Oh, aren't you elegant in your brevity. Many would say drinking piss is healthful. Have at, dipshit. You may as well do _something_ constructive, since you can't make a contributory posting.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, how silly of them, a company actaully caring about profits.

Drop dead, you sneering bastard. You know goddamned well the poster meant making profit to the exclusion of providing reasonable service to the customer. Providing _proper_ service at the lowest possible cost is not bad, it's good, for everyone. It's when businesses try to go below that cost (to themselves) and short-change the customer that the moral problem arises. Any company that tries to profit by failing to provide good value should simply be fucked to the lowest pit of jell.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[stwrtpj]

Not that this is a bad idea or anything, but after living in the country, I can tell you the majority of those calls are, in fact, the ISP's/Telco's fault. Most all dial-up boxes are purposely misconfigured by the ISP to ensure they drop the connection at the sound of a pin drop. I've been told so by the person at said ISP who has had an opportunity to view the config of these boxes.

Then I can tell you that either this this a case of one ISP that sucks, or you're listening to the rant of a disgruntled former employee, because this is bullshit.

Much of the discussion on this article seems centered around the fact that customer support sucks for most telcos/ISPs. Well, this may be true for the majority of /. readers who tend to be a lot more computer literate and intelligent, but sad to say this is not true for the rest of the unwashed masses that use the internet.

Most telcos and ISPs are BIG. Their user base is BIG. Therefore, their customer support staff has to be BIG. And the only way to achieve this is hire a bunch of people at low wage for long hours, give them bare minimum training, and stick them on the phones.

And for the most part, it works.

There's a reason why customer service asks dumbass questions like "Is it plugged in?" "Is the power switch on?" "Did you change the settings?" The reason is because most of the calls they get are from equally dumbass people that do these sorts of things. I have several friends that used to work at customer service and who have since moved on to bigger and better things. They could tell you stories about this stuff.

No, ISPs do not purposely screw up your service. They care about their customers, but only to a certain point. The bottom line is, if X% of the customers are happy, that's good enough for them, where X varies from company to company. The remaining 100-X% are seen as one or more of the following:

• Cranks who just like to complain
• Idiots too stupid to understand any of this stuff and probably won't be buying any more of our products anyway.
• Non-windows users whom we don't officially support anyway, so who cares if we lose them.

The other half of the story (which has been remarked on already but bears repeating anyway) is litigation. So long as the customer service staff follow the script to the letter, the collective ass of the company is covered. Anything that deviates from that risks some fool deciding he can make a quick buck by dragging the company through the legal mud.

Want to improve customer service? Start by shooting all the lawyers.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[dWhisper]

Before I get into refuting your post I will touch on a couple of things. First of all, you may have used a big word, but you also misspelled it. Exceptionally. Second of all, words like STUPID, TIGHT, and IDIOT just serve to diminish any argument you make. On a side note, I will not correct your grammar or terrible use of language.

Now on to the post.

#1- your customer is right, always... if you say otherwise you are an IDIOT.
The customer is not always right. The customer is the most important thing to any business, but if they were always right, then they would drive a business under within minutes. A customer can purchase a blender from Target, and use it for a year, and then it breaks. They bring it back in and try to return it. They say it has never has worked. Now, they've had it for a year, and they used it. They have no right to return it, and they need to contact the vendor. It's no different for technical support professionals. You may own a Gateway computer, and you purchase a game for it. Everything else, besides that game, works. That game crashes every time, so who do you call? Gateway? And you expect them to help, and they say no. You have a warranty agreement, and you want help, but they tell you to contact your game vendor. If the customer was right, then they could call who ever they wanted, so long as they could tie it into that company somehow.

#2- encouraging your employees to help your customers in any legal way they can, increases customer satisfaction and therefore profits and bottom line... anyone who disagrees with this is also STUPID.
The American consumer is motivated by price and incentive. Positive attitude only serves to not lose customers. Which is more important to a customer: getting help from someone who probably doesn't know the product or service they're requesting help on, or getting the problem fixed? It costs money to pick up the phone, it costs money to pay a rep to talk on that phone, and customers are not happy waiting for a voice to come to the phone. When a rep is fixing something that is outside of a scope of support, then there is someone with a valid (or, for logic's sake, invalid) issue waiting. And there is no guarantee that a satisfied customer brings about more profits. Any tech will be able to tell you that there are people that wouldn't be satisfied for anything.

#3- any tactic that you use or policy you set that hinders or keeps your employees from doing their jobs is STUPID.
That's true, but you're assuming that their job is to help anyone. That's not true; they're paid to help customers of that company. What these companies are saying is they don't want their techs to help people under someone else's scope of support. When you purchase a product, you typically purchase a warranty or service agreement with it. Just because you're Windows has eaten your important paper doesn't mean your ISP can help you find it.

Companies are in business to make money, and to be successful. Profit = Success in the capitalist marketplace. Losing money because of practices has sunk countless business, just like good business practices don't dictate success. A person's personality does not make a successful company. Do you think Dell, HP and Gateway got where they were at because they nice to people, or because they did something right?

The role of a leader is to both lead and serve. But manager does not equate to leader. Managers are there to manage and aid employees in doing their job. The stock market doesn't give a rat's arse about good intentions or friendly managers; they are motivated by the bottom line and by results.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Reziac]

Having been on the x2 vs k56Flex vs V.90 merry-go-round, I can attest to the chaos caused by all those updates :( As to other causes of shitty or chronically-dropped connexions, here it's the broken DMS at the local office, which Verizon refuses to fix. So there are over 1100 phone lines here that max out at 26.4k on a GOOD day, and drop connexion if someone looks at 'em crosseyed. (I'm also fairly sure the constant line static killed the modem in my other machine.)

OTOH, when I was having login and speed problems due to the update roundabout, I couldn't get a single person at ELN who could tell me WTF was going on. Normally their tech support is pretty good, so I have to wonder about this.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I can tell you that either this this a case of one ISP that sucks

Yes, this is likely the case, although I don't blame it on the sysadmins.

I'm AC now for a good reason.

The same ISP that does this also had the telco drop most of their lines for a while in an effort to scare away heavy users. This was obvious by the fact that I, as a computer repair type guy, had to deal with countless users who, all of a sudden, complained they got nothing but busy signals with their modems.

I'll say no more on this matter.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Anonymous Coward]

#1- your customer is right, always... if you say otherwise you are an IDIOT.

Wrong. The customer is NOT always right. Anyone who subscribes to this notion is a halfwit. (hehe...how's that for some faulty reasoning...) Customers make this claim because some ad-exec thought it would make a great sales pitch years ago before consumers' rights advocates got their feet under them and started telling companies to get their shit together. It is bad business to subscribe to this credo -- Joe Customer claims his computer's dead because it got hacked during an online chat session and demands the ISP replace it. Following your ill-advised credo "the customer is always right" means the ISP just bought that dirt-tooth a new computer. In this case, the customer is clearly wrong, but he is still the customer, so the tech can't just tell him to fuck off for being an idiot. Rather, Jeff Tech must use his wits to find out what the real problem is and either fix the problem or refer the customer to an alternate source of help.

#2- encouraging your employees to help your customers in any legal way they can, increases customer satisfaction and therefore profits and bottom line... anyone who disagrees with this is also STUPID.

Wrong again, Lumpy. In an effort to at least nod in the direction of the OT, let's take an ISP support tech in our example. Joe Customer calls in for tech support. Jeff Tech can't fix the problem over the phone, so he offers to come to the customer's house to fix the problem. While Jeff's at Joe's house, Joe asks him if he can take a look at his car because it's just not running right here lately. Because Joe Customer is a customer, by your statement, Jeff Tech should be encouraged to leave work, go to the customer's house, fix his computer, fix his car, do his dishes and take out the trash because he's helping the customer in any legal way he can and, by God, that customer is going to certainly appreciate it. Sure thing, slick. It's all legal, but, to parrot your statement, anyone who considers this good business is STUPID. Companies have policies for a reason -- they protect the company, the employees, and the customer. They prevent the company from assuming unnecessary liability, prevent the employee from placing himself/herself in a position in which unnecessary liablity is incurred, and they prevent the customer from receiving information, in the company's name, which may be inaccurate, misleading, or false.

#3- any tactic that you use or policy you set that hinders or keeps your employees from doing their jobs is STUPID.

Absolutely correct. Now, riddle me this, Batman: How does a policy which forbids a technician from answering support questions, off the clock, in the company's name hinder or prevent that employee from doing his job while on the clock and as a paid agent of the company?

You're absolutely correct: Companies are in business to make money. Company's make money by providing a product people want and by helping those people get the most of that product once they've purchased it. It is possible to provide excellent customer service without giving in to every customer's every whim. It is not possible, however, to satisfy every customer's every whim and still remain in business.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Erik Hollensbe]

What always got to me were the people that seem to think that it's my job to fix their computer from now on after the first visit.

I'd fix a computer. Most of the time, I wouldn't ask for anything, but sometimes they'd give me something like a piece of old hardware or whatever.

Then, I'd get a call a week later - what I did doesn't work anymore. I'd go over, fix the problem they created, and politely told them how to avoid having it happen again.

A week later - another call.... Rarely after the second call it's the same thing. It's something new, like 'can you install office for me?' or something of the like. I tell them I'm too busy.

They, for some reason, have come to the conclusion that it's my honor-bound duty to do these things for them, and won't speak to me, etc., because of it.

Recently, I've just become so bitter about it that I really haven't done anything for anybody.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Kris_J]

As IT support in a small-medium organisation it can sometimes be politically impossible to say no to a personal request to do private consulting. By the same token, it has significantly negative tax implications. Not to mention that repairing some dodgy PC the staff members thinks is just as good as the work PC you've personally chosen and maintained since it came in the door can drive you up the wall. To risk being fired on top of all this is just too much. It's a no-win situation.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[dWhisper]

Allow me to say that this was very nicely said. Always glad to see a conherent and valid post.

I work as a Tech Support Professional for a large company (read my posts, you'll figure it out quick), and found out quickly that most places don't hired the most qualified techs for the job. Most ISPs also don't hire the top knotch techs out there, but rather people who put forward the best image.

Word of mouth is a powerful enemy, but not a very useful ally. Most people that are happy with a service will tell two-or-three people, maybe, but most are just content. It's one of those situations that come up when someone asks "who do you get on the internet with?" If it's a good company, they'll say so, but most likely, if not asked, they will not say anything.

The reverse of that is one of the most powerful anti-marketing tools out there. Poor word of mouth spreads like disease in an native village. A person is far more likely to tell of the bad than the good, and those people retell it as if it happened to them.

Of course, bad word of mouth is only really damaging to small companies. AOL is still out there, and there's more negative press on them than Microsoft.

That is the main thing that companies would be trying to protect against is the representation of a tech outside of the workplace. He may be Billy the ISP tech, and if something goes wrong, people will blame the ISP. More like plausable denability. I don't think they took the greatest execution on it, and I don't think it's a firing offense, but then again, I'm not the one giving out the checks.

And as for boycotts and protests, they're just empty threats. There's a concept that most business have that is summed up like this: "We can afford to lose you." A good business will not sacrafice more resources than a contact is worth, especially if that contact will still give them negative press. A client that pays $30 a month to an ISP, then complains about them on boards, and also calls in 10 times a week (at @$10 a shot, let's say), then they can afford to lose them.

What I am curious on is whether these techs that were offering help were doing it in downtime or in freetime. One means they were doing it on the job when not on a call (say, like my typing this post), or if I was doing it at home.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Phroggy]

OTOH, when I was having login and speed problems due to the update roundabout, I couldn't get a single person at ELN who could tell me WTF was going on. Normally their tech support is pretty good, so I have to wonder about this.

I don't know how much information is communicated between the people who work with the equipment and the people who answer the phones. Quite possibly not very much. Earthlink outsources some of their Windows tier-1 dialup support to other companies (they do tier-2, Mac dialup, and DSL support in-house). Also, Earthlink is a national ISP with millions of customers; a tech may not be aware of a specific issue with your particular CO. I did DSL support for Earthlink, but we had under a quarter million DSL customers, and regional problems were a bit easier to keep track of.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[sjames]

A big part of the issue is the monthly fee. At 10-15 dollars a month, after uplink costs, phone costs (or POP costs in many cases), various business overhead, and such, they probably make $2.50/month or less per account. If they have to spend more than 15min worth of tech support on an account they make nothing.

In cases where the ISP is virtual (that is they outsource the dialup banks), they may actually have no control over the modems in the first place.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[sjames]

Companies have the right to run their companies the way management sees fit.

Yes, they do! And I have the right to tell people what I think of their ideas, and those people have the right to take or leave my advice to avoid those businesses.

If you (as a potential customer) decide that a businesses decisions are not to your liking for any reason, you have the right to say so, and the right to take your business elsewhere.

It is perfectly legitimate for me to decide that I don't like what CEO X did with company Y and to conclude that he/she will have done the same undesirable (to me) things with company Z. Given that conclusion, If I stay away from Y because I don't like the way they operate, why WOULD I do business with Z?

If I believe my decisions to be reasonable, and want (as a consumer) to see more viable choices (for myself and others who agree with me) in the marketplace, my best bet is to make sure as many people as possible know of my decision and the reasons for it. The invisible hand only works when the consumer is well informed.

This is more important now than ever before. Many companies hire a small army of psychologists in an effort to minimize rational consumer choice in favor of an irrational loyalty to a fictional company facade. If that tactic is successful, we face a market filled with irrational choices. If the tactic is made to fail, we will see a market filled with rational choices.

When you're in the market for a product or service, what sort of offers do you wish to choose from?

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[Reziac]

This was several years ago now (I've been with ELN for 6 years this month, and feel no urge to switch), and I always call very late at night as that usually gets me Pasadena -- better grade of techs there :) (I've given up on email support; the best you get there is an automated script response, seldom relevant to the inquiry.)

But yeah, that did seem to be the problem: no one had bothered to inform the hapless support dudes WTF the problem was, or even that it existed. It was obviously something to do with a change on their end, and not the same for all POPs, presumably depending on whether PSInet or UUNet or whoever owned/owns each one had got around to updating it and to what extent. So the lack of info-flow may not even have been within ELN itself.

Now if they'd finally get done "testing" fixed wireless and get it deployed out here.. that's my only hope of broadband. Cable and DSL will *never* be available here.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[benedict]

It sounds to me like you're doing a poor job of
managing expectations. When someone approaches
me for side work, I explain to them that there
are certain types of work I prefer to avoid, and
I make it clear that I expect to be compensated
for all work that I do.

Before I did things this way, I had the same kinds
of problems you're having. It is tough.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[benedict]

Where do you live?

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[benedict]

Error-correction happens mainly or entirely below
PPP, in the modem firmware.

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[shepd]

>Where do you live?

That's an unusual question (for slashdot). :-)

Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada area...

Re:Thats the reason I was fired

[swb]

What always got to me were the people that seem to think that it's my job to fix their computer from now on after the first visit.

I always hated fixing employees home PCs. If there were no kids, they were antique Packard-Bells that were fortunate to still work. If there *were* kids they were new Packard-Bells with every piece of BS on them they could install.

I solved this problem by starting to tell anyone that it was $100/hr, 2 hour minimum and I wouldn't even touch the computer without all the original installation disks in case something needed fixing. This scared everyone and let me off the hook.

It's a simple case of liability

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISPs don't want the potential liability of having their employees giving out anything other than the "company line," whether in an official capacity or not. I can't really say as I blame them. What if ISPTechA is posting on BBR and the advice he gives leads someone to wreck their hard drive? What if ISPTechB makes an offhanded comment about how ISPTechA sucks goat nards?

You've probably seen plenty of usenet posts with long .sigs about how "the opinions of this post are that of the author and not the employer." Some companies handle it that way, and some are a bit more draconian by forbidding non-official contact across the board. But it all boils down to liability.

Re:It's a simple case of liability

[Anonymous Coward]

"The ISPs don't want the potential liability of having their employees giving out anything other than the "company line," whether in an official capacity or not."
This may be true, but those same companies do not mind some of these idiots spouting pure bullshit on company time and claim it is Technical Support. See how the worm turns? Woot! Where did I put that www.goatse.cx URL?

Re:It's a simple case of liability

[Technician]

The company I work for has a warning out regarding "Official company position". All my posts have no refrence to my place of employment. (OK maybe a generic refrence - I do hardware, not software) Once in a while if I see genuine wrong information on Slashdot (very rare), I may post a link to the official company website showing the disputed fact instead of giving "My opinion IMHO". I never provide an opinion on the company or it's direct competitors. It keeps me out of trouble and many times allows insight in the industry not colored by company position. From the article the company had no problem regarding generic tech support postings only. Just don't get into anything regarding if the company is fair, doing well, biased, cheating, etc. That will raise red flags whether the info is true or not. Don't do water cooler talk outside your company. EVER!

Re:It's a simple case of liability

[Anonymous Coward]

I beleive one should be free to post what he wants when he wants. I you start posting that you think that product X from the 'company line' is not that good, that's your opinion. Don't expect those who write your paycheck to be happy with that.

Dammit, will those company listen up to personnal phone lines to see if anything wrong - as per their opinion - is said about the company ?

- company: Who were you talking to last night on the phone?
- employee: Oh that was my mother, her modem is...
- company: fired.

Re:It's a simple case of liability

[rgbscan]

I worked for Ameritech during thier DSL "beta" period (which lasted almost 3 years). Our call center regularily read the Ameritech.dsl newsgroups and offered help to the beta customers. Our access to posting messages was soon cut off because help wasn't being sought through "official" channels. The company line was that they couldn't make accurate forcasts and measurements of support costs and needs unless offical avenues were used. Eventually our read-only access at the call center was removed as well. Apparently we weren't supposed to see he end-user reports of how much the service sucked and what kind of problems the field was really seeing, we were just supposed to follow the Ameritech support script right down to the letter when they called in.

I was politely pulled aside and told how short my career would be if I continued posting HELP to the newsgroups using my fictious Ameritech account. Nice huh? No wonder they're constantly being sued for poor customer service!

Re:It's a simple case of liability

[ZuG]

Actually, I work for a reigonal Midwest ISP. I love it. The customers are *very* important to them and so are their employees. We don't have to follow a script or company line of any sort, except to not put down customers equipment unnecessarily. We fix things the way we like best. We answer the phone how we like. And you know what? Even though my ISP is one of the most expensive in the area ($21.95/mo for dialup), we still get *tons* of customer referrals and appreciation letters.

The Samaritan Effect

[pgrote]

I have had SBC DSL since they offered it. I was an early adopter and paid for it heavily with downtime and mysterious router issues. Add to that I actually signed up for static IP addresses and bandwidth guarantees and I feel into the black hole when it came to support.

The techs working undercover on Broadband Reports helped me out and since then, two years, I haven't had a single issue.

This raises the interesting prospect of if they weren't available I would have cancelled and taken my business elsewhere. Where I am located there are multiple companies and solutions available, so I am lucky.

99.9% of the techs on the boards do it for their own gratification. I call it the Samaritan Effect. It's what online support used to be back in the days of the BBS and message networks. Personal handholding on issues that others could learn from.

Each time a tech takes the time to answer a question, solve a problem or offer advice it lightens the load on the overworked phone staff.

The techs enjoy it because they find, gasp, satisfaction that they are making a difference in their jobs. Most of those folks are not customer facing getting their orders from ticket systems, etc. It provides them a chance to make a difference.

Yes, there are negative implications on doing this, but for the most part it works. Providers should read the Cluetrain Manifesto for more exposure to what they should be doing.

Re:The Samaritan Effect

[sco08y]

It's like that with a lot of new technology. Early adopters are self-interested altruists: they realize that if they help the pioneering companies out that they will be help to establish their favorite technology. Established technology is worth more than technology noone's ever heard of, so they are indirectly investing in themselves.

If you look at the history of companies like Apple, for example, you see this effect can be quite pronounced. If we Mac-heads had let Apple die, our investment in skills and hardware would all be worthless now!

Re:The Samaritan Effect

[Phroggy]

Each time a tech takes the time to answer a question, solve a problem or offer advice it lightens the load on the overworked phone staff.

I think this is the key motivation for a lot of techs. If you can explain something in a public forum, and 20 people read it and understand it, you've just saved yourself and the rest of your team 20 phone calls, all in a couple of minutes. The fewer calls there are, the less stressful the job is (management doesn't bitch so much about long call times, and customers don't bitch so much about long hold times).

Re:The Samaritan Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is the key motivation for a lot of techs. If you can explain something in a public forum, and 20 people read it and understand it, you've just saved yourself and the rest of your team 20 phone calls, all in a couple of minutes. The fewer calls there are, the less stressful the job is (management doesn't bitch so much about long call times, and customers don't bitch so much about long hold times).

Would that this were true. Not all, but many, managements will still insist on "optimizing" call times to the shortest possible. Fewer calls, to them, mean only that they should be getting by with a smaller staff.

Ever get one of those "Due to an unusually high call volume, all our representatives are helping other customers ...." lines? At two thirty in the morning? Were you aware this means their only rep, somewhere in North Dakota, finally flipped the switch so he could go take a dump?

Unofficual support

[eth00]

I can see them not allowing for official support, they may start trying to claim they are working and go for overtime or something. However, they should tell them to use a different login on after hours support. Some people just like helping others...I know I spend a few hours a night on a tech support irc channel helping out all sorts of problems that are easy to me. Unfortunatly in this money hungry world you have to always watch your back.

Uncool

[Sh0t]

That's pretty damn gimp considering the trouble most non computer savvy people have getting started and troubleshooting.

Don't see anything wrong with this

[unterderbrucke]

Companies just want customers to go through the traditionial support lines in order to provide statistics about problems. If everyone uses BBR's forums, then the company doesn't have statistics about problems with it's modems, then it doesn't know to issues patches or not.

Seems common sense to me...

Re:Don't see anything wrong with this

[alecto]

More like companies don't want their poor performance or tech support illuminated in forums they don't control.

It's a lose-lose situation. The customers and potential customers lose vital information about ISPs and the companies come off like jackbooted thugs.

Re:Don't see anything wrong with this

[giantsfan89]

I work for a university, and we provide Internet service, so that makes us somewhat of an ISP. We are members of the IBM ThinkPad University program, and cannot support every laptop or desktop that students bring with them. There are simply too many applications and hardware configurations.

When talking to students, many of our techs offer to help off the clock, and they usually even get paid more than at the help desk. They can use their knowledge and help people, even though the official university can't support everything and everyone. I think even though techs are not officially representing the university in this work, they give the impression that there are people who work for the university (usually other students in this case) who care about students getting problems fixed.

ISPs want good PR, not bad, right?

Re:Don't see anything wrong with this

[Skapare]

If that were the case, then the companies should free their employees to provide all the assistance they can right there at work, where those statistics are gathered. Instead, what we have are scripted procedures for helping that really don't help at all. I've had to lie to techs several times when they ask me to reboot my computer while trying to resolve an issue of why I am getting busy signals or no answer from their dialup pool, just to get them past one of the many "stupid points" in their script. In at least one case I know I was dealing with a tech who knew damned well I didn't reboot, but because the call may have been recorded, he couldn't really say it. But he obviously knew Linux and dropped a few buzzwords that hinted to me what he was really thinking, which would probably have gone over his PHB's head as chit-chat (often allowed when tests being done take some time). But the real problem ultimately is that under company rules, getting tech support from the company usually sucks. There are some notable exceptions.

Re:Don't see anything wrong with this

[Phroggy]

If the tech had to be that sneaky about it to avoid getting caught helping you, you should complain to upper management. Write a letter to the president of the company, or to the callcenter director maybe (not to the tech's supervisor or that supervisor's manager, it has to go higher than that). Let them know that you really appreciate what that tech wanted to do, and they were able to solve your problem, and if they hadn't been able to solve your problem, you would have taken your business elsewhere - but you think management's draconian policies about what the tech is and is not allowed to help you with are apalling, and you will not recommend their company to any of the clients you consult for unless you get some assurance that the environment will change. You were able to get help by being sneaky, but you can't expect other people to be sneaky like that, and you can't risk your reputation by recommending their company if things continue like this.

Re:Don't see anything wrong with this

[Anonymous Coward]

More like companies don't want their poor performance or tech support illuminated in forums they don't control.

Exactly. Many (many, many) years ago, I used to follow the Practical Peripheral forum on Compuserve. It started out OK, but when a few people started holding their feet to the fire over inadequate answers, they kicked the complainers' off the forum, rather than dealing with the issues. They forum finally went away because the techs got so defensive. They were OK as long as the answers were easy and let them look good, but not beyond that.

The wave of the future...

[JakiChan]

You know, when when I first read some of the semi-near future cyberpunk stuff (like SnowCrash and Gibson's "bridge trilogy"), I thought the way the future was being portrayed was simply taking things to an absurd level with excessive litigation and examples of corporate bad-citizenship. Now everywhere I turn it seems like the predictions are spot on and the bleak realities that we read as fiction are slowly becoming truth. As much as I like SciFi that paints the future as full of Shiney Happy People, I think the reality is that we'll all end up living on a bridge or in subway tunnels someday...

Re:The wave of the future...

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

There were at least as many "Good" corporations (the Mafia, the corporation that made the mech-enhanced guard dogs...) as "Bad" ones (Rife, The Pearly Gates) in Snow Crash. And remember in Snow Crash the world is still transitioning from the death of Nation States. If you read The Diamond Age, it's a depiction of how it eventually ends up, and yoÅÕï8t to find out what happens to Y.T.

Tim

Re:The wave of the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

(like SnowCrash and Gibson's "bridge trilogy")

How do you get bridge from sprawl? It's the Sprawl trilogy. Wtf did bridge come from?

Re:The wave of the future...

[JakiChan]

The "spawl" trilogy is Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The "bridge" trilogy is Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties. The SF Bay Bridge features significantly in Virtual Light and ATP, and Idoru takes place in the same "universe". Yes, Gibson has written more than 3 books...

is...?

[MarvinMouse]

Free time during work time or when they go home?

The employees should be allowed to do pretty much anything they want when they go home. (apart from selling non-disclosure agreement secrets.) This is kinda like firing a doctor for curing someone without charging them. Seems kinda silly to me.

But then again, the tech market is in a slump, and they may need the money.

If this is during work though, it's somewhat understandable (note: I am not condoning it (IANCI).). Some offices prefer you work for them during work hours, and not work for free online.

As well, if these techies are giving out details that they aren't allowed to (due to some agreement or another). Then again, it is understablable (IANCI). Businesses have their "intellectual property" that they'd prefer to sell then give away.

Seem odd though for a company to do this and risk the bad press.

Re:is...?

[jaymz168]

The employees should be allowed to do pretty much anything they want when they go home. (apart from selling non-disclosure agreement secrets.) This is kinda like firing a doctor for curing someone without charging them. Seems kinda silly to me.


Yeah, it seems pretty sensible, that your life outside of work is your life, but because of insurance companies charging ridiculous amounts of money for group coverage you get companies not hiring smokers or testing people's cholestorol levels. Apparently some companies go the route of giving bonuses to those who have good health stats, but most just won't will refuse to employ those who don't. Oh, and an interesting wrinkle: apparently a company was sued by an overweight employee when he fired for being unhealthy (driving up everybody's coverage), he took it to court and won; however it seems that if you're not overweight you don't get the special treatment. Just another example of extortion companies...er, insurance companies screwing everbody, and this time they're doing it by proxy.

New? to who?

[Papa Legba]

Must have been a slow news day. I love it when people report on an ongoing trend as if it is "New" all of a sudden. What is their next news flash? That moisture, when it falls from the sky in the form of rain, tends to get things wet?

I worked for a dial-up ISP for several years. In 1999 they closed our forums so that the techs could not answer questions that way. The only way after that to get tech support was to call us or to send an E-mail. No public forums allowed. At the time it was justified by saying that we were only following an industry trend.

What this article should have pointed out is that the shutting of access to a help forum has more to do with the disinegration of the item being supported. You only restrict access if their is a problem. This is a bigger indicator that the broadband networks are overloaded and are starting to self destruct more than it is a new indicator of customer service. Look for some major system failures in the next year (like anyone with any industry knowledge didn't already know that).

Re:New? to who?

[marauder404]

That's not true. News doesn't have to be "new." Sometimes, exposing existing information to the public is as important as getting the scoop and delivering new information. Reporting trends isn't really new news because it's obviously been having for a while (hence the term, "trend"), but it's just as important to expose announce the fact that it has been going on for a while. Reporting that something's been happening for years is not redundant: it's obviously different from reporting the first incident years ago. The first child abuduction was notable, but reporting that it's a trend has an entirely different meaning.

I do agree that this isn't particularly interesting news or surprising, but your suggestion that only new things are news is something that I disagree with.

Bandwidth costs money...

[BSOD from above]

they don't want the customers to use bandwidth, it lowers margins.

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog

[Anonymous Coward]

...or a support tech.

The easy way around this is to answer questions under a fake name.

Heck, they can even explain the whole crappy situation in their sig if they want.

"Official Capacity"

[tmark]

Is the key and operative term used in the article. It makes perfect sense for these companies to want to have some control over what will get said by THEIR employees and hence as THEIR _Official_ representatives. There are lots of techs out there who are quick to say/write/post things that are offensive/incorrect - policy guidelines notwithstanding, and there's no good way for these companies to retract/correct them. How many times have _you_ dealt with a surly/incompetent/incoherent tech that reflects very poorly on their company ? Could you imagine the company having a policy that, say, only fluent English speakers are allowed to post, without that company being open to lawsuits ?

I don't blame these companies a bit for wanting to be able to control what their company says and how their company is portrayed. The article says nothing about the companies prohibiting the techs from posting in an unofficial capacity.

Re:"Official Capacity"

[gtsquirrel]

Would the janitor also count as an official representative if he posted about how to properly clean around computers sitting on the floor? Human Resources and managers are the ones who are really the "Official" representatives, little pale faced techies aren't. One of the greatest parts of the open source creedo is the ability to help others...call centers may suffered a bit because of online forums, but that means less people the corporation has to hire, people who really don't make the company any money. Wouldn't corporations like that better? I think the article's original point sums it up well: "Companies naturally fear litigation, and dislike not being able to sanitize and spin information before it reaches the ears and eyes of their customers."

Some thoughts..

[erktrek]

I can see (but not necessarily agree with) companies discouraging techies from offering free support IF they are trying to charge for such services.

On the other hand, having employees participate in such forums can take the sting out of that company having a mediocre (or over worked) support group.

What about disgruntled employees posting FUD?

Understandable...

[nuxx]

I can sort of understand this. From my skimming of the article, it looks like the employees were offering their time in an official capacity while off hours. This is somewhat of a no-no, because then the employees are presenting themselves as representatives of their employer, during a time which they are not at work. This could potentially cause all sorts of problems for the company, since the employees won't be working within the offical support model framework that the company uses. (eg: Solution for X is Y, etc.)

This is akin to an employee offering up advice to people on the street corner, off hours, saying that it's the offical position of his employer. It would introduce all sorts of legal headaches if something gets broken, someone gets misinformed, etc.

I fail to see anything in this article that says that employees cannot offer tech support off hours, it just says that they can't do it and say it's the stance of their employer, as indicated by "As of December 31, BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity." So what's to keep someone from helping out without saying it's their company's line? Nothing.

Re:Understandable...

[FuzzzyLogik]

True, but does it say they were doing it for the company in which they worked? Or for some general website that helps users? I haven't read the article, my stance is usually objective anyway so it doesn't matter. If they're not on company time, and saying they work for such and such, yes, that's a problem. But if they simple answer simple questions, or help trouble shoot something, i don't see why this is a problem, as long as they don't say they work for such and such company. All in all i agree with your post, good job.

Kyle

Re:Understandable...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that people know that you work for a given company, when you are at work , does not make it official support ....

When they pay that company money - that is when the suppport becomes official.

Its the correct move.

[nlinecomputers]

Techs who provide support in a non-authorised manner and therefore unsupervised manor should be prohibited from doing this.

I personally have seen incorrect information posted on BBSs. Yet if the poster IDs him/herself as an employee of company X and that incorrect information causes damage the company could be liable. The article says "So instead of spending twenty minutes drafting clear corporate policy on public forum relations protocol, some companies clamp down on such activities; sometimes brutally." No they took there 20 minutes and elimiated a potential legal loophole. Running a proper BBS forum would take a lot of resources and I can understand why a corportaion would want to clamp down on this.

This isn't the evil empire. This is CYOA. And considering the amount of stupid and incorrect information that can be found out there I don't blame them on bit!

Re:Its the correct move.

[nniillss]

You are an Object oriented Graphics Rendering Engine??? By the way, what's the meaning of CYOA? Enlighten me!

Re:Its the correct move.

[Anonymous Coward]

This implies that the official support is always accurate. If users had half a clue they would demand such forums.

I've dealt with Verizon tech support. At least one level 2 tech had a clue. All the rest could only RTFM a manual that was obviously out of date. Favorite line "Are the lights blinking on the (DSL) modem? No, I told you it was an internal modem (Repeat several times apiece per tech)". Bell Atlantic only sold internal at that time/place.

Re:Its the correct move.

[pcmills]

Cover Your Own Ass®.

I think it has to do with the goatse.cx guy.

Re:Its the correct move.

[nlinecomputers]

Cover Your Own Ass

Another words the companies are only looking to protect themselves from lawsuits.

Re:Its the correct move.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fix the stupid law that makes the company liable for somthing they didn't take part in ....

Fix the problem - not the symptoms !

Besides being able to win a case based on :

'damage being caused by free advise on a bbs from a third party'

is absolutely ludicrous - IMHO

Re:Its the correct move.

[nlinecomputers]

This implies that the official support is always accurate. If users had half a clue they would demand such forums.

And your impling that somehow if its online that it is correct as well. Neither is correct. But at least if the company is RUNNING the bbs and not some third party the company can remove/edit the incorrect information. If it's "out in the wild" they have no control. SO when stupid tech-rep X posts incorrect information the company is still going to get the phone call(or the lawsuit) from dumb user A who formated his hard drive because the "offical" rep told him to on a non-offical BBS that the company wasn't monitoring. And worse Google will make sure that that incorrect info is preserved forever.

I've had the scripts used on me as well. It just points out that they don't have the money to run a proper help support. Running A BBS would cost even more money and might or might not ease the help desk support load.

Re:Its the correct move.

[nlinecomputers]

It isn't about WINNING a case. Most lawsuits never get to court. It's about the threat of a lawsuit and expense of having to payoff a foolish user that followed the incorrect advise of an off duty tech that posted incoreect information using the company name.

In a court of law the claim doesn't have to be winable for you to sue someone. It just has to be enough of a problem to be profitable.

It isn't the stupid managers or there stupid techs that are the problem. It is the fscking lawyers.

Re:Its the correct move.

[ameoba]

Here's one for you on Verizon DSL support...

I was helping a friend with his DSL, 'cuz it went down. I checked everything I could, and couldn't get it to come up. Since he's not too tech-savy, he had me call the tech support. The lady that answered ran me through the generic checklist, with no results. Twice.

When she started going through the spiel about how the ticked was going to be elevated & sent off to 'senior techs' or something, I spoke up, and asked her to confirm that the network settings on the PC were correct, as confirming network settings was not on her checklist.

I mean, the _first_ thing I look at when I'm looking at an unknown system with network problems is the network configuration. In this case, they were, but I was suprised that it wasn't part of the script.

The network config turned out to be correct. I think it was something down on their system, as the problem simply disappeared & the connection came back up 6hr later.

Re:Its the correct move.

[nniillss]

Thanks. Now we have this OGRE left, Sir...

Why can't they be like TiVo

[RevMike]

I've spent alot of time participating in TiVo forums. Glad that TiVo is a little more farsighted in this area. There are quite a few TiVo employees on the TiVo boards, and the always are able to provide the best information.

Shouldn't be allowed

[Trusty Penfold]

The corporate world is all about politics, not technology. The people that know the technical answers cannot know the politics behind the problems.

It could be very bad for the company if a moonlighter helps with a security issue, say, when the offical company line is to deny its existance.

People should do what their job descriptions says they should do.

Re:Shouldn't be allowed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I tried to mod you, but there's no (-1, unfunny) available.

All Aboard!

[GGardner]

The Cluetrain is leaving the station!

Re:All Aboard!

[waferbuster]

The parent comment isn't really off-topic. Reading through the manifesto, it directly relates to companies not allowing personal interaction by their employees. Good website.

Damn, I wish I had some moderation points now.

Things never change....

[KristsInferno]

This also reminds me of a semi-large MSN Tech outsource that did the same thing both on and off the clock. The MSN motto for support was "Get that customer off the phone!" Actually helping the customer fix their issue was frowned upon if it took more than 60 seconds. As an employee, the techs were also forbidden to, in any way, say that they represented MSN in a public forum, even while on the clock! I, for one, still rate a company largely on thier customer relations. Too bad there isn't a big ISP that taps that demographic...

Re:Things never change....

[Guppy06]

"The MSN motto for support was "Get that customer off the phone!""

Hell, that's the motto on 99% of the call floors out there. Even when I worked for an outsource company for Dell (supposedly focused on customer satisfaction... apparently my satisfaction issues with their controllerless modem don't count...), there was much more pressure to "clear the que" than to solve problems. To the point where it's easier with most problems to tell the customer to do an FFR (FDISK, FORMAT, re-install, doo-dah doo-dah) simply because you can get them off the phone while they're formatting.

Re:Things never change....

[Coke in a Can]

60 Seconds? SIXTY seconds? Wow. That's... like... scary. I recently spent 2 HOURS talking to my ISP's tech support, trying to get my DSL back online.

maybe the issue is CONTROL

[Anonymous Coward]

Big companies seem to like centralized control.

Pretty standard, actually, unfrotunately

[MacAndrew]

BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity

It is important to be cautious in drawing many conclusions from a single press account. As everyone knows, sometimes the press does a mediocre job.

The key word is "official" -- the company should and must control its employees' official activities, because they are then acting as representatives of the company. This is standard business law. True, the company would get credit for the good things the reps did in their spare time, but it would also get the blame or, worse, monetary liability.

So the employees shouldn't do it if told not to. That might be dumb business logic for the company, but who knows, is is their call. Assuming the reps were doing a good jobs and not generating complaints, their committment sounds laudable. I've avoided calling for tech help of any sort for years b/c of frustration with clueless techs (not always, but too often).

That's the right; but here it *sounds* like the companies here are also being jerks about it and treating their employees reprehensibly. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax, and one for which I am entirely unsympathetic.

Re:Pretty standard, actually, unfrotunately

[Anonymous Coward]

I think another part of the problem here is that legal business contracts exist (outsourcing) for various types of 'support'. For example, the tech person at an ISP is basically there to assist with ISP related issues. Operating system issues are a HUGE industry and are genereally contracted to other companies, through the vendor of the operating system. That's where the potential liability issue comes into play. Unfortunately for most consumers, the contracts include service level agreements which restrict the amount of time a tech should spend on any given issue, the end result being that techs feel pressured to get through calls as quickly as possible, which affects quality of service actually provided, and gives the consumer the impression that the tech just wants to get off the phone.

Excuse me for babbling there.

Wait a second

[Have Blue]

If they get fired, won't that release them from any corporate online behavior guidelines? Then they can offer support on the forums as members of the public until the cows come home. And they won't have any obligation not to badmouth the company when it deserves it.

Re:Wait a second

[Izeickl]

This is all good and well, until the bills keep coming through the door but you now dont have a paycheck. As with OSS, at end of the day, no matter how much you want to do things for free you still have to live and maybe support a family and thus need income from somewhere.

Re:Wait a second

[Wiseazz]

I guess the only problem with that is that now the tech has no job. I wouldn't be too motivated to help out my old company's customers for free.

I do hate to see people loosing their jobs for being nice, though. WTF.

Eh?

[Cytlid]

I can't imagine this... I've been a technician for about a year and a half. I think I got the job *because* I helped people in my spare time. I know for a fact my employer went to google groups and did a search on my name ... They must have put something really potentially damaging (to the business) in their posts?

Re:Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Afraid its just not true.

I moderately recently got a job as tech support for computers for the computers bought at PCW, Dixens and Currys. On these support lines we support the hardware and the responsability is to ensure the hardware is working, not the software ... the software can only be a sympton of hardware with settings which are wrong or broken hardware. Anything above that level of support is time consuming and hard to resolve without lots more information on the software settup ... understandable, but sometimes painful in our position ...

I am a Bellsouth customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Bellsouth! It appears that you are sucking big time. Perhaps I should look elsewhere for broadband...in case you did not know, there are alternatives to your 'stranglehold' in these parts. In short, you are stupid. I "used to work for XXXXXXXXX, and I know they blow!" is a common phrase heard whenever yout tech support is mentioned. Your first level script reading morons do not qualify as tech support. Get back to customer service, and leave your techs alone, you should be proud they go the extra distance. Failing that...blow me.

FYI

[cioxx]

Here's the announcement thread on the forums.

I got fired

[TerryAtWork]

By a tech support company in Toronto the second day on the job. The company itself was chin deep in the Snow White virus. The people there were clueless outside of their tiny domain of expertise.

I described the letter promoting it to some people working there so they'd know what to avoid, trying to help you see, and this girl went to management and they fired me.

When the word got back to the agency that sent me there THEY fired me. Twice in one day, a personal best.

I'm not making this up.

Re:I got fired

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you rape that cunt for being such a whore?

Re:I got fired

[TerryAtWork]

No - but I was so stunned at getting fired I left without my briefcase with a $100 cell phone in it... Also I owed a guy there $10 for lunch.

When I went back for the briefcase and to leave an envelope with reception with the $10 I was told later by my agency that if I ever went back again I'd be charged with criminal trespass...

There are quite a few

[nuckin futs]

Being a regular/forum member at broadbandreports/dslreports, I can tell you that some of the ISP techs send their customers to those forums for answers. It has helped many users in the past and it will continue to help others in the future, whether the ISPs like it or not.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hand Slaps You For Lending A Hand

Common sense here guys

[Anonymous Coward]

The isp's are just trying to cover their back..

If a tech on their spare time, gives out the wrong information, that say causes the computer to crash and need to be reformated, the customer can go and try to sue the ISP.

I cant say I blame the ISP

BellSouth's New Slogan...

[Quaoar]

"Because you're tired of companies who care."

Two-part solution

[JoshuaDFranklin]

they were fired for violating a non-existent public forum non-disclosure agreement, and for identifying themselves as a Roadrunner employee

First of all, the employers need to get all their support personnel to sign NDAs. I worked tech support for a small regional ISP and we were not allowed to tell people what brand of AS we used (this could change), the speed of our uplink, the model of our gateway router, details of our network map, etc. What's wrong with that? (I should mention that we also always recommended hardware-based modems and customers could bring in their PC for connection troubleshooting FOR FREE. This was a great ISP.)

Second, though, these tech support people should know better than to identify themselves as employees of the ISP. That makes it sound like it's official company policy when it's really just some guy saying "try this... it might help".

Re:Two-part solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I wholeheartedly agree. Participating in online forums, mailinglists and irc is one thing. Identifying one as a company employee is another, it implies, IMHO, some official opinion from the company. There needs to be a clear line and clear understaning between the company and the employee as to what can be disclosed on behalf of the company and where it is merely ones personal opinion.

This is of particular importance where individuals hobbies and interests are closely related to the employment. In this case it is often not reasonable to not participate in public discussions during off-work hours.

Not surprising.

[JessLeah]

Recently, I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with the Verizon Residential DSL support people. So I call up; I realize (due to factors of age and gender) I don't "sound like a geek" but I am. After a few minutes the tech realized he was conversing with a fellow techie, and we worked together to solve my problem (him using Verizon's proprietary tools and me using RoaringPenguin's pppoe and standard Linux TCP/IP tools). He was quite nice and we even had an ongoing side-discussion about running Linux on the PowerPC architecture while we worked to solve the problem.

Then it came time to hand off the problem to Verizon's internal tech support team, since it became obvious that it was a systemic problem affecting people in my area (or at least me, but we determined that the problem was clearly on their end, not mine). At this point, my friend tech apologized, and warned me that this report might not go anywhere-- since I was not running Windows on my box. Apparently, internal tech support only honors reports from people running Windows...

It's just another example of how the legions of PHBs running the telecom field (and the dot-com field, as I can testify from having worked far too long in said field) are trying to regulate everything in the support process. It's all about the Benjamins, and these people believe that by regulating, and restricting, and prohibiting everything-- to the point of "scripting" common tech support dialogs and replacing human operators with "automatic phone support systems", they can make more money.

They may be right, they may be wrong. In any case, I don't like it...

Re:Not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up Reza, you fucking huge whale. Please don't eat your newborn if you can help it, thanks.

Re:Not surprising.

[JessLeah]

I donno who Reza is, but she's obviously not me. I'm not overweight. (Unlike most of the people on SlashDot, I'd suspect... ;) )

Re:Not surprising.

[FattMattP]

It's all about the Benjamins,

So you are saying that all the people named Benjamin are behind the mishandling of customer support? That sounds like you're a bit nuts to me.

Re:Not surprising.

[Sycraft-fu]

Sounds like a similar experience I had with Qwest. I have their professional DSL service (marketed to bussiness) with symetric speed and multiple static IPs. Ok, now I think based off of the configuration and the marketing that it is reasonable to assume you are selling this to someone that is going to have more than one computer.

So, my DSL is having intermittent, but increasing problems. The physical layer stays up but the PPPoA keeps loosing link and trying to reconnect. Being that I am a networking guy, I start doing testing to see what's wrong. It's easy to figure out that it's not my comptuers or the switch, afterall THAT network never goes down and I can telnet into teh routrer when the I1 link is down and see the error reports. So that leaves teh possability that it's my router. I grab a new one and test it, same problem.

Ok, I think at this point is about 99.99% certian that it is NOT my problem, so I call Qwest. The basic questions start and I get asked what kind of router I have. I have a Cisco 677, a DMT type ADSL router (Qwest uses DMT for low speed lines, CAP for high speed). They tell me it's not supported and that I need a 678. Well teh only difference between the 677 and the 678 is that the 678 supports CAP and DMT, and teh 677 is just DMT. I try and explain this, and explain that I have been happily using the 677 for around half a year, but to no avail.

Ok, fine, hang up, call back, lie about the router. Not like they have any way they can tell anyhow. More questions, then do I have a network? Well of COURSE I have a network, I don't have a bunch of static IPs for nothing. They say THAT isn't supported, that I'll need to down my network and hook a sing. Call back, ok, no I don't have a network either. This went on until like 3 am.

I didn't get anything accomplished for a few weeks, despite figuring out what was wrong and telling them (their DSLAM was dying, took the Cisco engineer about 8 seconds to dfigure that out after I told him the symptoms). Finally after repeated calls and such from me and other customers, they replaced the DSLAM and it's worked ever since.

It just amazed me how retarded the tech support scripting is. I wish they'd train and allow these people to do a little problem solving, rahter than just reading from a book.

Re:Not surprising.

[ameoba]

Somehow, I find this hard to believe. In my experiences with Verizon's tech support, they staff the front-line tech support with barely-literate workers who read through a script to make sure that you actually have your hardware plugged in correctly.

That you actually get to a person who actually understands a computer, rather than simply regurgites a script, without first having gone through the first-level BS is mind-boggling.

Not New

[RWarrior(fobw)]

This is not new, and it is not limited to ISPs.

Basically any company with a big enough apparatus wants to control its public image, and it can't do that if its rank-and-file representatives are speaking when they're not spoken to.

Sprint PCS squelched one such representative who was participating in alt.cellular.sprintpcs. Over the four or five months she hung out in the newsgroup (as a publicly known SPCS employee, but not representing the company in any official capacity), she made a number of customers happy by offering solutions to their problems, or offering ways that they could get Customer Care to take care of their problems without calling the President's office or escalating to a supervisor. Her respect in the newsgroup was very high.

When she left the newsgroup, here is what she said.

It's telling. Especially telling is the 40+ responses she got.

Big companies can't deal with the Internet. It's too new, too public, and too uncontrolled. Despite all of our whining about corporate control and ICANN's UDRP and copyright and DMCA, the fact remains that the Internet scares the crap out of large multinationals.

And that won't change any time soon.

...Every day you'll see the dust...

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure glad Speakeasy has Ms. Kat, a Speakeasy-sanctioned representitive from the Communications dept. SBC sucks!!!

This is standard operating procedure

[signe]

While I was working at AOL, I was constantly frustrated by the amount of misinformation that flew around about the company and things that were going on. And we're not even talking about company confidential things. Just stuff that the corporate communications group didn't have the time or inclination to work on. And it was only made worse by the fact that noone at AOL responded to correct or clear up the incorrect information. It was clearly a lack of communication between the industry and the company, and something that could easily be helped by just a little effort on the part of employees who participated in forums like Slashdot and wanted to help.

I tried to propose an internal volunteer group of people who wanted to do this. They'd be held to standards as to the correctness and appropriateness of the information they were providing to outside sources. And there would be peer review and recourse for people doing the wrong things. The idea was that AOL could significantly improve their image within the community by participating in it. Noone wanted to hear it. I wrote a formal proposal and passed it up the line. I don't think it even got past the director.

Corporations sit here and ask for your loyalty as employees. They offer bonuses, options, perks, and tons of other things to try to secure it. But they can't imagine that employees might actually want to do things to help the company in their spare time. And more than that, they don't want to release their tight grip on corporate communications and allow employees to help out with the forums they participated in. Until they realize that these things are harming them and find a better way to deal with employees than by saying "Don't talk to anyone unless we approve it first," they'll have the same old image problems.

The most we can do is continue to attempt to raise consciousness within the corporations we work for. Write proposals for new communications policies for employees. Leave copies of The Cluetrain Mainfesto on the VP's desk. Not much else we can do.

-Todd

Re:This is standard operating procedure

[Pig Hogger]

. But they can't imagine that employees might actually want to do things to help the company in their spare time.

That's because if you give'm something for free, they'd expect people would want something for free from them...

Re:This is standard operating procedure

[Disoculated]

As a former rep myself, I have a little bit to say about this.

AOL doesn't try to keep staff from assisting members outside of work (keyword MHM is practically devoted to that), but of course they can't identify themselves as such. There's no way for a random member to differentiate between message board comments posted by a troll or by a tech rep. I mean, c'mon, there's a little warning on the IM window telling people not to give ANYONE they're credit card info, and they do it anyway. Staff impersonation would become impossible to check. But a lot of staff did (and do) go there to help people out simply out of the kindness in there hearts, and all of management knew it, and it was all good.

Of course, if a member DID want to be connected to a definitive response by the company itself, they could always send email to stevecase@aol.com. Steve himself doesn't answer, but they're pretty good about finding someone who can. If I remember correctly the response time was required to be less than 48 hours.

AOL is also fairly tolerant of the TOM program, which is a perfect example of just how BAD employees can fuck things up when decide to volunteer to "help" the company.

Re:This is standard operating procedure

[Anonymous Coward]

No corporation deserves any loyalty from me, nor will they get any. Scam what you can before the company implodes, for whatever you obtain by fair or foul means is what you deserve. Since companies and CEOs have no moral obligation to the workers, that erases any conscience problems I might have had.

But, well, aren't they already offical?

[rmckeethen]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most technical support staffers already official representatives of the companies they work for? When I did technical support for computer manufacturers, the word 'representative' was in every title I held. So what's different now?

I think the real problem is that companies are afraid low-paid techs might take out some of their job frustrations in on-line forums, where the eyes of supervisors are usually absent. That, and the fact that by putting their help in writing on a public forum, these companies worry that their employees might reveal embarrassing service issues to a wider audience instead of just one customer at a time. Of course, if these same companies bothered to instill in their employees a sense of professionalism and loyalty, or God forbid maybe even pride in their work, I doubt there would be a problem with this.

The truth is, you represent any company you work for, regardless of if you're on the clock or not. Executives certainly realize this, but it's easy to blame low customer satisfaction scores on employees just trying to lend a hand to angry customer's they meet in other parts of the on-line community.

Sad really, just another example of PHB syndrome.

Re:But, well, aren't they already offical?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former under-paid bellsouth Tech, let me tell you some wonderful stories, and offer any advice i can =)

First off, BS FastAccess is a great service when it works. But when it doesn't, it can take forever to get taken care of. Personally, i've seen enough horror stories i went with cable modem instead.

When you call BS tech support, if they don't sound like they know what they're doing, hang up and call again. The support is handled by several contractors (I worked for one). When they're borderline, ask where they're from, if they're in South Carolina or Florida, hang up. You want Tennessee or North Carolina. Trust me, i've read notes from all of the above.

If all else fails, demand to "speak with the president of bellsouth!" This goes into a special queue, a "presidential" escalation, and you eventually will get at least part of what you want (Free truck roll? definitely. Free home run, maybe. Free replacement equipment... sometimes). Just don't act like you know what you're getting into, and be very, very pissed off. BS has quality standards they promised shareholders they would adhere to or some such, so they have to handle pissy customers very nicely.

If you demand to a "Supervisor," you won't, but it's a fasttrack into second-level technicians. Keep in mind that the best frontline techs get stuck on the front-line because their average handle times are generally very low (they know exactly what the problem is and snip it in the bud) or very high (they're very thorough and check for secondary or tertiary issues).

If you have a network, for god's sake, work with us. We need to prove it's the line that's at issue so we can issue tickets up to DSG.

Dirty little secrets:

DSG (Digital Services Group), another set of "contractors" that happens to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of BS, is the set of people who actually do the line maintenance and such. They handle the lines for all ISPs.

If you had real problems getting online at the beginning of the year, it was because DSG fucked up a BBG upgrade. BBG basically DHCPs IPs out to the PPPoE clients. They tweaked some settings and then rolled some existing customers to BBG and ran out of IPs. Those were hellish days to work.

There's a giant A-B switch someplace, labelled "Atlanta | Miami." If Miami is up, Atlanta is down, and vice-versa. Keep this in mind.

BS tech support has no procedures for dealing with hosed machines, period. If you're lucky, you'll wind up with someone who knows what they're doing as an "escalation."

If your account gets "turned off" for non-payment, and you've still got sync (like they ever turn the circuits off...) try the normal username with a password of "hotline". This was supposed to be changing in the future.

Lots of sensitive customer data is available over the public internet via HTTPs. That 3-digit code can be looked up on a public HTTPS site. Password resets, account cancellation, etc, is on the same site as the customer controls, but with a different login page and set of logins.

They probably don't want the competition

[rsilvergun]

Remeber that many ISPs outsource their tech support to cheap call centers. These call centers make their money doing tech support, so free tech support is naturally bad for them. Also, if a tech does support on his free time, the customer might not distinguish between the free, private support he's recieving and the company's support. Imagine a customer calling up furious because "Your darn tech broke my 'puter" when in point of fact he isn't your tech.

Waiver?

[giantsfan89]

If the tech isn't working, then you wouldn't think the company would be held responsible. What about a signed waiver form when doing off-the-clock jobs? Maybe that's hard to do on messages boards...

Re:Waiver?

[Shalome]

The company may not be held legally responsible, but imagine Mr. Irate User calling up screaming to talk to "YOUR SUPERVISOR, and THEIR SUPERVISOR, DAMMIT!" Most companies do what they can to please the end user. Even if the tech signs a waiver of responsibility, the perception on the part of the user is still that the company is responsible for the tech's actions, because, conceivably, the company trained said tech, and said tech was conceivably acting on behalf of the company.

Completely understandable - even nescessary

[jgaynor]

Besides the legal liability and misrepresentation that a "rogue tech" places on his employer, he also screws the tech support process for the user the next time he/she decides to call in for real help.

Succesful helpdesks, specifically in the level 1 & 2 enivronments, rely on scripts. These scripts are written so that an escalated ticket (one that level 1 cannot handle) arrives at the next level of tech support with that user environment "clean" - that is, level 2 assumes that level 1 has already made sure the user's environment is in a kind of "virgin" state.

When a higher level tech jumps in on a problem from level 1 (such as in these forums) they almost always prolong the length of the customer's next call to tech support because of user assumptions and level 1 ignorance of the support history. While some problems may be solved completely within the context of a forum, the majority of users will at some time in the future call tech support again. This raises costs and decreases the availability of support for the rest of the userbase.

BTW I talk with Optimum Online techs on the BBR forums and Yahoogroups all the time. They are careful not to engage in tech support out in the open, and speak only in an unofficial context. They're extremely helpful and hundreds of users appreciate their unofficial support everyday. If you want a model of how to keep your more advanced users happy while limiting liability and misrepresentation - check out the impromptu support model they've created there.

You can't catch the techies

[shazbotus]

I dont see how this really stops anything. Those techs can still get another account and just help people without really mentioning that they work for "Foobar" company.

Attention moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

Erik is a very well known troll. Mod down accordingly.

Re:Attention moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend,

I post what's in my heart. If this upsets people on occasion, then they regard me as a "troll". But more often than not, my comments are interesting or informative and usually a bit funny, too.

My goal is to make people smile and enjoy learning. Combining education with humor has great benefits.

I never mean to offend anyone, but every once in awhile it happens because I tend to be very objective and candid.

I am always open to new ideas and enjoy constructive criticism, but blatant name-calling isn't very nice.

Thank you for listening,
-- ekrout

Re:Attention moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I forgot to add that I posted this as AC because, like other cool trolls like Shoeboy, I don't want to risk my hard earned karma.

Thank you for listening,
-- ekrout

Tech Support

[joelwest]

As a former 1st tier tech support person I can empathize, however most companies delineate what is 'officially' supported and what is not. Most questions in forums are about things that techs are not 'allowed' to support officially during business hours. I can't say that I agree with the policy, but what Bell South is doing is protecting itself by demarking that which is 'oficial Bell South tech support' from what is users helping each other.

No, it's not right or fair. Unfortunately, in these days when people cannot recognize that hot coffee can burn and so sue the restaurant, Bell South is protecting itself from that sort of legislation.

But, no, it isn't right.

Re:Tech Support

[SparkyMartin]

Pretty much what I wuz gonna say. :) I don't think it's right and obviously the company is simply trying to prevent unecessary litigation, but if I was in their position I would probably do something similar.

I did tech support years ago in the heyday of tech support and that was a time when when you had few restrictions. As long as we didn't brand products, badmouth the company no matter how bad the service was, and were nice to the customer we were free to help the customer in any way we could, short of going over to their place. The time between calls was long as were our coffee breaks. :) Nowadays what you can support is determined by scripts, your calls, lunch, breaks, wrapup time is traked to the second, and what you can't do far outnumbers what you can do. Phone tech support has turned into a sweatshop.

Brazil

[cornflux]

This reminds me of Mr. Tuttle, from Terry Gilliam's Brazil .

Re:Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? Trying to impress people with your knowledge of movies? "Buttle" was eliminated beacuse of a cockroach in the typewriter, not because he worked for bellsouth.

Next time, try to reference the original russian SOLARIS without subtitles, to try and impress the geeks.

I'm a tech for a horrible small/local isp.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we had a forum all our users would know that they're all having the same problems.

My boss tells me to lie to our users. He tells me to never admit that any problem is ours. I lie to 85% of the people that call me blaming problems on various things when in reality our service is just shitty in many many ways. One of the most common things I say in a day of work is 'No other users have reported this problem sir' after which I blame the problem on something(line quality, modem driver are my favorites). My boss threatens my job security constantly and bitches to me about the other two employees here and how he wants to fire them. I just got promoted to manager without a raise because I do such a good job of lying and covering my ass. FUCK THIS PLACE.

-Irate Anonymouse Tech Out!

Re:I'm a tech for a horrible small/local isp.

[aeschenkarnos]

So quit. Every day you spend doing that shit is a bit more of your essential humanity gone. Learn to live cheaper, so you can get by on a worse-paid, but better-satisfying, job. Move to a smaller house, sell the least played 300 of your PS2 games, go to movies a bit less often, start shopping for clothes at seconds outlets, whatever it takes.

Stuff is not worth being a wage slave for, worse yet a cringing, lying, and snivelling wage slave. And buddy, that's what you are. You cringe to your boss, who is the kind of guy who deserves a good hard punch in the nose (you'll be charged with assault, but you have no prior convictions (and I know this because you are a wuss): plead guilty, claim provocation, get witness statements from your fellow employees; you'll probably get off with a couple hundred dollar fine and may not even get a conviction recorded), you lie to your customers, and you snivel about your life to us.

You are responsible for your own fate. If you don't like it, you have the right to change. Go reclaim your humanity: punch your damn boss right in the nose, right now, and quit, and get yourself a life you wouldn't be ashamed to post under your real name about.

Re:I'm a tech for a horrible small/local isp.

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like what heppened when I used to work for arn.net (http://www.arn.net/)

Science or politics?

[MarkusQ]

The plots are given high levels of water, heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen in different combinations to simulate predicted global climate change in the next hundred years.

Unless there is something more solid that they aren't reporting, this looks more like politics than science. At least, the way they report the findings sounds very skewed:

"The three-factor combination of increased temperature, precipitation and nitrogen deposition produced the largest stimulation [an 84 percent increase], but adding carbon dioxide reduced this to 40 percent," Shaw and her colleagues wrote.

In other words, they are saying that high Co2 levels increased plant growth 40%, but because of their agenda they are reporting this effect as a reduction because it is less than they would have seen if they'd done something else.

A more likely/solid conclusion might be: if the climate changes plants in a given area might not be as well adapted to the new conditions as they were to the old.

And this is news...how?

-- MarkusQ

Before everyone says how rediculous this is..

[mindstrm]

Please note, this is about providing OFFICIAL SUPPORT on remote forums... not about providing support in general.

And that makes sense.. because OFFICIAL SUPPORT should only go through OFFICIAL CHANNELS that the company is geared to deal with.

Employees are still free to offer support in forums.. just not in an official capacity.

Sorta makes sense

[browser_war_pow]

If they really were doing this in an official capacity then it is a potential liability. However the company should recognize that such a willingness to help is an asset if the company simply sits them down and politely tells them not to do it "officially." I would imagine that such a spirit of helpfullness isn't easy to find. It's easy to pay people to be civil, it's not easy to find people willing to provide free help after hours. Firing them was a major strategic mistake if they were first time offenders.

The Good and the Bad

[Lobsang]

Although I despise the current ISP mentality (let the customers burn to hell -- it's worse than getting sued), I partially understand their position.

The main problem is that some people just do not have the correct "attitude" and a disgruntled employee (rightfully or not) might cause severe damage to the "corporate" image.

OK, OK. You must be thinking now: "But not helping also damages their reputation!". And I couldn't agree more. I think they should "pre-screen" the employees that can do that, or employ some similar process.

I speak from past experience. In a previous job, we were in charge of fixing a broken Oracle Database (poor backup schemes and a disk failure -- you get the idea). The development team sent a programmer to "help us out". The management team on the branch office where the problem happened was already demanding answers (who? why? How can we avoid it?). We were kindly explaining everything to calm them down (a new backup policy, redundant hardware and all). Everything was going in the right direction.

Later on that day, in the middle of a big meeting to discuss the problem (with the aforementioned managers), Mr. Programmer does some quick queries to an yet to be fully restored database and says "Well, I say that this database is completely messed up -- I don't trust this data anymore...".

Needless to say we had to counter his false and invalid arguments with some facts. Took us some good hours and a lot of paperwork.

That is the danger of having someone without any tact representing the company or a group in a "delicate" situation.

Re:The Good and the Bad

[kcbrown]

That is the danger of having someone without any tact representing the company or a group in a "delicate" situation.

No, it's the danger of having someone who is willing to pass judgement on the state of something without going to the trouble to find out what's really going on.

If I'm running a company, I'd much rather have someone who is willing to tell me what they think rather than a sheep who will tell me only what they think I want to hear. The latter is what most people think of as "tact", and frankly it amazes me that people who make decisions care about that.

Decision making depends on having solid information, not on "feel good" pronouncements.

Customers want/need contact

[PuddleBoy]

I worked for an ISP that offered incredible customer service. We would take as much time as it took to make the customer happy. We gave advice on hardware and software not related to the online experience. We even offered to go to their house to fix connectivity problems, as a last resort.

In return, most of our customers remained loyal customers despite the fact that we charged a little more than most ISPs.

Unfortunately, this is not a good business model - we were never quite profitable. We ended up getting bought-out by a larger company. Though the current Tech Support is OK, it's nothing like the old days. Now, it's more like "help them, but do it as fast as you can - don't waste time".

How do you find the balance between great service and cost-containment?

"Our employess are. . .

[kfg]

our most valuable asset. Oh, by the way, you've proven too valuable so you're fired. Merry Christmas."

KFG

peter principle

[zogger]

--no idea of europe or asia, etc, but in the US our government and our corporations are infested with peter principle managers. People who have gotten promoted to that position where they can't get promoted any longer, ie, they suck at that level but were probably great one level below. The deal is they don't get put back at the level of their competence.

funny story kinda. Once I was made city manager of this company. I hated it. I was great and quite happy at my previous position, acting as a project strawboss/hands on worker. Loved it. Was offered the management position, significant more money at salary so I tried it. It was terrible. So many times it was quicker for me-on the clients nickle-to just "do" a problem rather than try to explain to someone how to do it. I thought this was good customer service, granted, it dropped our billable hours slightly and occassionally, but the industry we were in was/is extremely competitive and it helps to retain established customers and keep them happy. The customers loved it, my bosses hated it, sometimes I would cost the company x amount small bucks on a particular job, but to me at least the brownie points seemed like a decent tradeoff. We lost zero customers under my watch and I got all good reviews and feedback. The bosses hated it ordered me to "manage" only which was a useless expenditure on a lot of smaller jobs, it meant standing around doing nothing a lot of the time. I hated it, prefer working to slacking. Anyway, after a couple of months I went in and demanded my old job back, and they did it for me but were amazed, I mean dumbfounded that anyone wouldn't just keep the superior paid position, it was such an alien concept to the "money is god" types. They had never even seen anyone do that. In short I demanded to not be a peter principle victim, or to participate in it.

Oh ya, the company basically collapsed a coupla years later, none of the bosses got along with each other, they kept losing customers, etc. I was right, they were wrong, but they were the owners. Ho hum I found other work same field easily.

How this applies to bell south and these other ISP's is-this is *probably* what's happening. Internal politics and back stabbing and greed lead to too many rank foul bosses in levels of decision making where they have no ability, no skill and cause problems. I mean, for real, harassing employees for trying to help customers on their own time and for free? ISP's don't charge for tech support as far as I know, seems to me these employees were saving the company money, and also creating more satisfied customers. And this is wrong?

There were many reasons the grand telephone monopoly was broken, customer complaints were right up there, and the baby bells are apparently infected with the same retarded mindset and lack of intelligence. Too many bosses in positions of incompetence.

Hope the fired techs start their own businesses (community WISPSs perhaps?), bell south doesn't deserve quality employees. Let them hire and keep on the clock drones and robots, lead by drones and robots, then let them go broke and collapse and be sold off for pennies on the dollar, let someone else give it a try. the techs actually got a good headsup of who they work for, now they can start looking for better quality humans to work for.

Re:peter principle

[interstellar_donkey]

And you've just demonstrated exactly what is wrong with the internal structure of most ISP support departments.

I spent a year tour working for a major ISP, and what bothered me was that when I started in the trenches, there was a feeling that 'yes, we want to help the customers. We want to make them happy. We want to do a good job.'

But after a short time it was discovered that customer satisfacation is not what makes the company happy, and it does not help you if you actually do want to move up.

The management structure is such that so many people sit in a position they are incompitant to handle. In a large company, managers are unable to handle dynamic concepts such as 'quality', 'customer satisfaction', or 'customer retention', so they fall back on easily measurable numbers such as call times as their only way to judge perforance.

And it is quickly learned that a manger who incourages his/her people to take the time to fix the problem right the first time and making sure that the customer is happy does not make the poor boob above him happy. Who cares if the customers are happy, don't cancel their service, or refers the service to others, or at the very least is able to resolve the problem with 1 30 minute call instead of 5 10 minute calls? The person above him/her can't seem to handle that leap of logic.

And what does the company do when suddenly the customers are unhappy and start cancling the service? They take some of their best techs and put them in a 'retention team', and offer all sorts of benifits to the customer--such as a few months free--if they change their mind.

To the customer, the impression the ISP sends is 'We will treat you like shit, unless you decide you want to get rid of us.'

That this is not the way to do business should be obivous to anyone. It happens more often then not, however, because the people calling the shots find it's a heck of a lot easier to look at the bottom line in small, quantifiable statistics then to take the trouble to look at the bigger picture.

In my case my guess is that it came down something like this: 'Our research indicates that the biggest customer complaint is long hold times. The top of the company has told me that I have to fix this. So I will do whatever I can to make my people keep call times low. I am succesful, and my bosses are happy. 6 months later the biggest customer complaint is poor customer service. I can just blame the techs on this and yell at them to be nicer to the customer. The top brass trusts me on this; after all, I am a good manager (I reduced call times!)'. But by this time, the company decides to promote me to a higher position.

I left that company, making a promise to myself to never work for a large corperation again. I havn't, and I couldn't be happier.

Do the techs learn by helping ?

[Anonymous Coward]

if so the companies they work for will be liable for BIG TRAINING BILLS.

Not all ISPs are like this

[mickwd]

My ISP is Pipex (I'm in the UK) and from time to time even their Managing Director takes part in the forums on ADSLGuide.co.uk.

I like to see this sort of interaction from an ISP, and it's one of the reasons I'm with them.

.....oh, alright then, I'm with them because they're cheap ;)

But it's nice to see a large ISP with a healthy attitude towards their customers.

Europe has better coffee

[Anonymous Coward]

better looking women and better attitudes towards sex and religion - plus there's lots of white people ...

sign me up

Yeah.

[Renraku]

I got fired from Bellsouth almost a year ago for helping people. They didn't like my review, either. I was then unemployed for six months, all the time being bitched at by my parents for being 'stupid enough to say something bad about Bellsouth when I'm using their ISP'.

Re:Yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your parents were bitching because they wanted you to move out of the basement.

More proof that big providers don't care...

[Maul]

Surprise surprise!
Big providers don't care about their customers.

Techs are always being fired for being too helpful.
Their biggest "offense" is undermining the PHBs and
the process that prevents them from _properly_ doing their jobs.

But broadband has infinite capacity!!

[Anonymous Coward]

there will be no problems!

I think you are mistaking this for the cell phone market :-P

For once Qwest does something right....

[Myuu]

Apparently Qwest monitors DSLR for reviews, but on numerous occansions they had bitched at us for bad tech support reviews.

When I was on DSL, I and my friend closely monitored DSLR and tried to lend a helping hand.

I've also had sups encourage my activities on DSLR.

wow...

Re:For once Qwest does something right....

[Anonymous Coward]

I support Internet customers, both business and residential, for a large cable company. Like some of my coworkers, I read DSL reports regularly. People often post problems there, sometimes after they haven't been able to get them fixed through normal channels. Sometimes I post a helpful response, just on my own time.

Recently, everyone in my department was asked to sign a broad non-disclosure agreement. It covered just about everything we might say about this company I'm not naming. (It's the one who's mission is to "carry out Paul Allen's Wired World vision".)

I balked a bit at signing it, and asked my supervisor (who is pretty cool, having been one of us until very recently) what this was all about. He told me Corporate was concerned about things posted to DSL reports, and mentioned one example in particular.

The post in question was not inaccurate--it was the company's own conclusions. The post sumarized an analysis of a (still) ongoing problem affecting lag time for high use customers.

Since the crackdown on what we can say, many regular posters to DSL reports who work for the company have slowed way down on posting, or changed accounts, or even dropped off. I don't think that helps customers.

Posting anonymously so I don't have to worry about discussing this with someone from HR.

Re:For once Qwest does something right....

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope you're not one of the techs working out of Parkersburg--who told one of my commercial installs that he needed a second NIC and second wires because his current TCP/IP network was incompatiable with his pipeline connection.

I post psuedo-anon at broadbandreports.com; not using my work address, and with my very legal-ease statement saying that my views are just that...my views, and not the views of the my employer.

Also, is it just me, or has customer service gone down the shitter?

"E"

typical asshole

[pigfukr]

I see once again there are assholes trying to belittle the statement they are addressing by attacking the posters spelling.

So when will you be done with your teaching degree? Those 3rd graders can't wait for you forever.

Re:typical asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

You can deny it if you like, but there is a strong correlation between having a strong grasp of your native language and not being a fucking moron. If you can't type a sentence without one spelling or grammatical error for every two words, then most likely your thoughts aren't worth reading anyway.

Re:typical asshole

[pigfukr]

You quote it as if your statement is based on some statistical study. Care to share this source, or do you happen to be an expert in this field of "studying shit that doesn't matter"? It's a generalization to say bad spellers are ignorant. Just as it's incorrect to assume that a person with a degree is intelligent.

Re:typical asshole

[Shalome]

Hey, man, when the poster reveals to us all that they are actually a third-grader, I'll withdraw my criticism. ;)

Re:typical asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it is a generalization. But you know what? Practically everyone thinks that way. You usually don't get burned when you ignore someone who can't type something that hurts your eyes when you read it.

Having proper spelling and grammar suggests that you have spent at least enough time studying in school to be exposed to different topics and it proves you are educated to a certain degree. I think in most cases it also proves that you want other people to understand what you are trying to tell them. If you suck at spelling and grammar it tells people you slept through your English classes.

I didn't say there was a study, and I didn't say everyone with a degree is intelligent. Sadly, I don't have a statistical survey to prove my point. However, have fun looking for an example of where a poorly written note or letter to an important person that made an impact. People don't have all day to sit and read your crappy writing.

When was the last time you saw an announcement such as, "d00d I found the cure 4 cancar, give me a tv spot so I can tell the world an cur ppl plz". Educated people who have something meaningful to say don't generally suck that bad at writing. Not that educated people are the only people that have anything meaningful to say, but they are usually the only ones that have anything *new* and meaningful to say. People don't take bad grammar and abysmal spelling seriously. I am sorry, but that is the way it is.

It also takes extra energy to read poorly written sentences, and slows down the reader as he tries to comprehend what you are trying to tell him. This can very easily make him miss your entire point. Therefore, it is to your benefit to write proper sentences, as it helps get your point across.

Heavy use of bad grammar and spelling also implies that you didn't put as much energy and effort into trying to get your point across as you could have. Plus, most people don't feel like wasting time reading what is most likely drivel anyway.

You could go through life believing that proper spelling and grammar aren't necessary to do anything or get anywhere in life, but you will find yourself pissed off and annoyed all the time as you are constantly proven wrong.

Re:typical asshole

[Shalome]

Amen, brother (or sister, since you're Anonymous)!

Re:typical asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

> brother (or sister, since you're Anonymous)!

You actually think there's a real chance that AC is one of the
seven girls who post on slashdot?

Re:typical asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

> brother (or sister, since you're Anonymous)!

You actually think there's a real chance that AC is one of the
seven girls who post on slashdot?

Shit, for all I know he may be all seven of them. And the four women.

SIgned,

An atypical asshole

Re:typical asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful of the singular/plural reference. You said "the poster", which is singular, but then used "they", which is plural. The correct version would be "he" or "he/she".

This is one of the tougher grammatical constructs. Unfortunately, sometimes it's glaringly obvious that a singular reference should have been used, as it is in your post above.

(I've never agreed with putting punctuation within quotes, BTW. I'm not quoting the damn punctuation. So my example of "bad grammar" above is actually a political statement. Heh. ;)

im sorry, the correct answer is who gives a shit?

[Metaldsa]

Who cares about karma whores or bad posters?

Slashdot is just a news site. Read an article, read the comments for more info or comments from the peanut gallery. If you actually put time into getting a "good" rating in your karma or think your Score -1 comment is actually causing people grief then think again.

Caring about good karma/bad karma ranks slightly below collecting bottle caps in the "Useful Things to Do" list.

Somebody's in need of a cluetrain

[braindead]

It looks like BellSouth missed the clue train.

understandable - even nescessary

[Snowhare]

Let me nutshell it: The scripts don't work if you have a clue and only call when you have a REAL problem.

I am a 'network engineer' as one of my collateral duties in my job and am quite comfortable troubleshooting network issues. It drives me around the bend when it takes me an hour to manage to reach someone who can understand 'the modem is synced but your gateway can't be pinged' rather than "OK, now click on the 'Control Panel' and choose 'Network Settings'. Now click on 'Advanced'. Now verify that your gateway address is ......".

Useful phrase for clueful people: "Why, yes Mr. Level 1 Tech Support, I do run Windows ME." Know why? "I'm sorry, we can't help you unless you are running Windows or Macintosh." Not even if the problem is that the DSL is down because PacBell (hey - why not give them the free advertising that their 'Controlled Customer Interaction' deserved) screwed up and turned it off. The next time I have to reconfigure my home network so that a Windows machine can be plugged directly into the DSL modem because that is the only thing their script supports and they can't discover that THEY have an error until I do this - I am going to BILL them for wasting my time at $200 US dollars an hour.

Fucking scripts.

In the last 3 years I've had my DSL disconnected IN ERROR by PacBell 3 times. Each time it took 2 weeks to get reconnected and the first week was nothing but forcing my way up through the support levels to someone who DIDN'T have a script and COULD fix the damn problem. For the record: The problem is that I have a static IP address and their install people messed up the database entries saying I'm a customer after first messing up and assigning me dynamic addressing. So a year or so down the line when they have a router problem and rebuild all their routes from the database - I get dropped from the routing tables for 'not being a customer'. Two weeks. Three times. Three years. Average of over 10 phone calls lasting more than 30 minutes for each incident. All because the damn problem wasn't on their script.

And it probably didn't occur to you that the number of people calling tech support is significantly reduced when people have some useful forum for getting their problems resolved that doesn't involve getting put on hold for 20 minutes before you ever talk to a human. You can afford to spend 2X as long on a call if 3 calls weren't made as a consequence of a good support forum. People's problems are rarely unique. But by 'hiding' problems and solutions behind phone trees and scripts rather than placing them in open forums, you prevent people from finding the solutions for themselves. Instead you waste your company's time and money doing the exact same thing over and over and over 'By the Script'.

But, hey, no one ever got fired for going 'by the script.'

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do make the scripts publically available and
downloadable? Even a few thousand pages of html with links (no images/fancy stuff just text) would
not take up much space. Or provide a program
which checks the state of the users machine and checks the configuration is a supported one?

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[iCEBaLM]

Arrogant pricks like you piss me off more than stupid people, and I do TS for a living.

You don't seem to realize that there is no way in hell we can guage your intelligence in a 10 minute phone call. No, saying you are a network administrator/engineer does not make us think any more of you because half the people who are calling us for tech support ARE network administrators who run Win2k networks and have no clue how to set user permissions!

I had a customer profess over and over that he was a cisco engineer, he made routers for a living and our network was down! Uninstalled and reinstalled his dialup networking in windows and look at that, back on the net...

If I had a nickle for every time I've told a customer that he would have to talk to his network admin to fix his network and then have them reply "I am the network admin" I would be a very rich man.

Also, if you're so intelligent why can't you understand that there is no way we can support Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, etc? What part of "Windows and MacOS support only" don't you understand? A select few may be able to pull off Linux support but not every tech can and if we do it we set customer expectation that "well the LAST guy I spoke to helped me!" and start pissing more people off.

Your singular account is quite the exception and not the rule.

Now, I'm not a big fan of scripts and I don't use them myself, we don't generally have scripts where I work. But we do have a thing called support boundaries (only supporting what you make) which I follow almost to the letter because I understand the merits for both I and the customer, even though the customer may think less of me.

-- iCEBaLM

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Snowhare]

Arrogant or not, listen when someone tells you they configure networks for a living. It takes 30 seconds for me to reel off my network settings and the person at the other end to check that they correct. Leaving the other 9 minutes and 30 seconds to actually fix the problem.

It pisses the hell out of me to have my DSL disconnected once a year for two weeks because the the ISP can't frigging remember who is their customer and who isn't.

And as for the 'support Linux' et al: I'm not asking you to support my damn box - I am more than happy to support my own box. But the ONLY 'my end' problems I've called tech support for since first getting DSL in '98 were flaky ISP provided modems that had to be power cycled after locking up mysteriously in the middle of the night.

Really.

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Snowhare]

"Your singular account is quite the exception and not the rule."

BTW: The number of people I've talked to (face to face, mind you, not on the net) who have similar horror stories about PacBell tells me that PacBell's DSL tech support is FUBARed in general.

Basically - nearly EVERYONE who has dealt with them has a horror story to relate about their install. It is just that people normally only have to go through it once: They don't have to repeatedly get their service activated. So they don't realize that the problem wasn't just them - it happens with nearly every install.

They don't even provide a 'priority access' phone number/code for their own techs. You think it is funny sitting on hold for 30 minutes waiting for a human? Try having a PacBell contractor sitting in your kitchen for 45 minutes waiting for a human to answer the phone.

By the way: When PacBell's own contractor left that time, PacBell was still in the dark about why they couldn't make a simple static IP DSL connection work. It was another week before they pulled their head out.

Excuse me if I am, ah, skeptical about my experience being the "exception".

There is a difference between "happened to me once" and "happens every time."

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[iCEBaLM]

I'm going to reply once to both your posts.

Arrogant or not, listen when someone tells you they configure networks for a living.

Why should I? The 500 people before you who said the same thing were as dumb as posts, why should I think you're any different? They were just as arrogant, adamant and rude as you.

It takes 30 seconds for me to reel off my network settings and the person at the other end to check that they correct. Leaving the other 9 minutes and 30 seconds to actually fix the problem.

Except when you're using an unsupported OS (linux) which also has the wonderful nicities of netfilter and other technologies which can screw up a connection even though everything *seems* correct. Which is why we don't support you and we don't take your word for it unless you're using a windows box and we check the settings ourselves because, again, the last 500 people before you who claimed they were cluefull were dumb as posts and the issue was on their end.

And as for the 'support Linux' et al: I'm not asking you to support my damn box - I am more than happy to support my own box. But the ONLY 'my end' problems I've called tech support for since first getting DSL in '98 were flaky ISP provided modems that had to be power cycled after locking up mysteriously in the middle of the night.

As soon as you call you're asking us to support it whether you think you are or not. We have to troubleshoot unless we have extraordinary evidence to prove conclusively one finding, period. We don't know you, we don't know your abilities, we cannot take your word for it that your computer is setup properly because, again, the last 500 people who claimed they knew what they were doing really didn't.

Sure, it's really easy to say "listen to the customer!" but when you do you end up missing the simple issue of "is it plugged in?" because they said it was but they're experiencing a power outage and wondering why their computer wont turn on. Customers lie to us all the time, they mislead or give us wrong information because they don't know any better, or even worse they think they do.

Any tech agent worth anything learns to completely disregard 90% of what customers say and verify everything on his own. Sure, the .01% of cluefull customers get a little pissed off at it, but the 99% of customers get their shit fixed because of it, and they're the ones who pay the bills.

-- iCEBaLM

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[CashCarSTAR]

Agreed. Tech support isn't for the techs. It's for the masses. That's what the call flow is designed for. If you are a tech, either ask a few pointed questions then do it yourself, or live with it. IceBaLM is exactly right. Even the most knowledgable person misses something from time to time.

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Rande]

Tech support don't exactly help themselves when they do telephone tag, and misleading options on the automated systems.

I had a notebook full of phone numbers trying to switch from one provider to another all because noone knew the correct phone number and the one way to do it was hidden under '2. I want to place a new order'.

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Rande]

oh, and I forgot - the nice person who found this out for me broke out of the script, rang around himself and called me back with how to do it.

Now that is Support.

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Anonymous Coward]

However, I can pretty accurately guage the intelligence of a TS person in a 10-minute phone call.

But it often takes a 60-minute phone call to realize the stupidity of some TS reps.

Case in point:

I ordered DSL from Bellsouth a couple months ago. I received my home install kit and modem, and two days after my supposed activation date, I still had no synch.

Now I had done some of my own wiring through a siecor outdoor splitter, to get around my alarm system which would've killed my DSL signal. But I knew Bellsouth would've instantly blamed that, so I tried synching up at the test jack in the NID outside. No go. That's when I called support.

Within the first 10 minutes, I was told that my splitter was causing the problem. Then it was my alarm system causing the problem.
After I explained that I couldn't even get a signal at the test jack in the NID I was told "it's not supposed to work from there."

So basically she was only going to help me out after I redid my inside wiring, bypassed my alarm system altogether, and hooked my modem up to my PC directly. I did this with her on the phone. When I finished, she would actually try to look up my account.
But it got worse. You know things are bad when your TS rep asks you who your ISP is. "Well, my self-install kit says Bell South, which is who I signed up for, and I called Bell South tech support, so I guess that makes my ISP Bell South, eh?"

When she finally located my account information, the root cause of my problem became immediately clear. My account was "Pending Facility." BellSouth was delayed in installing their new equipment in the remote terminal. It took 60 minutes to find that out when it should've been a simple account lookup. Once that was installed a week later, everything (including my own wiring) worked great.

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why we don't support you and we don't take your word for it unless you're using a windows box and we check the settings ourselves....

You're NOT checking the settings yourself; you're asking the -how did you put it... ah, yes- "dumb as posts" caller to check them. So what the Fuck difference is it what OS they are running. If they tell you their settings, they've told you their settings.

We have to troubleshoot unless we have extraordinary evidence to prove conclusively one finding, period

Like, maybe the caller saying "Hello. My DSL is down. My network is working properly: I can ping all my boxes from all my other boxes. I can telnet into my router (whatever the fucking model number) and see the error messages piling up from it not connecting to YOUR END."

Isn't that enough "evidence" the person knows what the fuck they are talking about???

We don't know you, we don't know your abilities ... so we'll treat you like an idiot, even after you offer evidence you're not one.

Sure, it's really easy to say "listen to the customer!" but when you do you end up missing the simple issue of "is it plugged in?" because they said it was but they're experiencing a power outage and wondering why their computer wont turn on.

Ohh, right. Bring in the Urban Legends, why don't you.

Are you really saying you'd ask the person "Is it plugged in?" If they just told you they checked already, and it is?"

Customer: "Hi. I'm having trouble connecting. My DSL router is plugged in, I've tried power cycling it, and re-booting my computer. I can ping it, but not beyond it. When I telnet into it, I see error messages which state it cannot connect to you."

You: "Is the router plugged in?"

Customer: " I just told you it was. I've tried power cycling both it and my computer. I can ping to it, but not beyond it. When I telnet into it, I see error messages which state it cannot connect to you."

You: "Can you turn the router off and on again, please?"

Customer: "Grr. I told you, I already power-cycled it. And I rebooted my computer. Nothing changed- I still cannot ping past the router."

You: "Please reboot your computer."

etc, etc, etc...

Any tech agent worth anything learns to completely disregard 90% of what customers say and verify everything on his own.

Again, you're NOT verifying anything. You are getting the person on the other end to verify everything.

Sure, the .01% of cluefull customers get a little pissed off at it, but the 99% of customers get their shit fixed because of it, and they're the ones who pay the bills.

1) your numbers don't add up to 100%

2) Maybe there should be, oh, I don't know- a way for the smart people to skip the crap and get to the help they need?

Re:understandable - even nescessary

[iCEBaLM]

For the record, no, I don't work for whatever company you're getting DSL through, Pacbell you said, right? Anyways...

Isn't that enough "evidence" the person knows what the fuck they are talking about???

No for reasons already stated.

Ohh, right. Bring in the Urban Legends, why don't you.

They are not urban legends, they are *real*, I have had them. Like the guy complaining about not getting a dialtone: "Yeah, I have it plugged in", and after 10 minutes of troubleshooting I find out that he plugged it into his ethernet port.

Again, you're NOT verifying anything. You are getting the person on the other end to verify everything.

Yes I am, because if they read it quickly they have less chance of making something up trying to "sanitize" their answers.

1) your numbers don't add up to 100%

Some people never get fixed, sad but true.

2) Maybe there should be, oh, I don't know- a way for the smart people to skip the crap and get to the help they need?

How would you differentiate? If you're so pissed off at a company why keep them as your provider? Switch already, jesus.

-- iCEBaLM

Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

it looks like the employees were offering their time in an official capacity while off hours. This is somewhat of a no-no, because then the employees are presenting themselves as representatives of their employer, during a time which they are not at work.

So how then does this jive with employment contracts that stipulate the company owns everything you create, even off hours? They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

INTERESTING ARTICLES, MOD UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

(n/t)

Attention: You did not read everything

[ekrout troll]

This is not about Karma, this is about the past history of a guy that gave the good people at Kuro5hin months of grief. This is about a man that comments not because he's interested in the discuss, but rather because he is a troll. This is why he requested to be on trollback.

Caring about good karma/bad karma ranks slightly below collecting bottle caps in the "Useful Things to Do" list.

This is exactly my point, ekrout trolls for good karma. He cheapens the work people that actually have real feedback into the discussion and aren't posting just for 3 or 4 karma points.

Re:Attention: You did not read everything

[Anonymous Coward]

"this is about the past history of a guy that gave the good people at Kuro5hin months of grief"

Er..this isn't Kuro5hin. Who goes there any more? Who cares what a bunch of 16 year old American males think about drug laws or muslims? Last I heard there was some sort of SlashDot boycott..something to do with moderation? Ooh, fear the wrath of the nerds, SlashDot - 17 people aren't going to visit your site for a whole day! Woooh, we're changing the world now!

Common sense?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much legal nonsense and crap is one supposed to swallow in USA, the land of the litigous?

Person needs help -> gets help -> everybody happy.

If this is so troublesome for a 'corporation' then just make sure your employees inform people that this is their freetime and have nothing to do with the 'corporation' whatsoever.

...at least you're thick skinned. :)

[pigfukr]

He did have a point, sad that some sort of palsey may have gotten in the way of expressing the thought. pigfukr = chronic crappy typing followed by obsessive proofreading.

Re:...at least you're thick skinned. :)

[Shalome]

I am terminally amused by people's perception of me. I am also dyslexic, and an obsessive proofreader myself. ;) If I can do it, everyone else should be able to as well... or at least run their post through a spell-checker before posting.

Re:...at least you're thick skinned. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone's not you.

Repeat after me..and repeat it yourself at least 100 times.

"Everyone's NOT you."

Got it yet? No? Well, let me put it another way. Some people aren't obsessed about their typing, like you. Some people, god forbid, don't really feel like going through their whole posting to make sure it's grammatically correct, so that you have nothing to complain about. Some people are just interested in having their say here and having fun -- they aren't interested in running their post "through a spell-checker before posting." In short:

EVERYONE'S NOT YOU.

Just because everyone should be able to doesn't mean they should be obligated to, just because you don't like it.

Re:...at least you're thick skinned. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Everyone's NOT you."

Got it yet? No? Well, let me put it another way. Some people aren't obsessed about their typing, like you.

Wel than, perfaps those pepl who xpect Shalome to b tolerunt of they're crappy grammer n speling shul also plannn 2 b eqwally tolarent of the gramer nasis.

Not intelligence, but diligence

[Shalome]

There is a major difference between ability and apathy, intelligence and diligence. I've learned it, and I firmly believe that if one wants to be taking seriously in a public arena, one should learn the magic of spellcheck and dictionary.com.

Re:Not intelligence, but diligence

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a major difference between ability and apathy, intelligence and diligence. I've learned it, and I firmly believe that if one wants to be taking seriously in a public arena, one should learn the magic of spellcheck and dictionary.com [dictionary.com].

Typical management bullshit -- I can't distinguish between presentation and content (style and substance), so I'll assume if it ain't pretty it's without meaning. You probably don't believe people without a suit and a crewcut. You would likely also assume Stephen Hawking is a moron because he doesn't meet your lofty fucking criteria for presentation.

Resume playing with yourself.

bad generalization

[Anonymous Coward]

in fact you can be dyslexic in the sense that you have great problems with spelling and none with reading.

so.. not only can you be intelligent while being bad at spelling, you can also be well read.

That is SO-O-O Corporate

[VB]

I used to be like this: going out of my way to help people in my free time fix their mouse; reconnect to their ISP; trouble-shoot that broken coffee holder...

I don't do this any more, but that's not really relevant to the point I'd like to make. We live in a day where our government (yes, you Aussies and Euros, too; can't actually see what's happening in Asia but different story) is continuually seeking additional control over our personal lives. Most 1st world governments are largely financed by the people in some form of taxation, but controlled more by corporations within (or even outside) them. Think about that for a second.

So, we get something like 75 - 80 years to live; the first 25 we're busy getting educated, partying and otherwise not doing much productive, and then venture into a 20-year career helping some company with our expertise and best years, all the while making yet a little more money from our boss and paying yet a little more in taxes to our government to help subsidize it's financing for the corporations to use it to control its minions... Seeing a trend here?

I love good samaritanism, generosity and philanthropy just as much as the next dude, but there are other ways to spend our spare time. You don't have much left anyway, so go pick up a guitar, write some poetry, ride your mountain bike off a cliff, or throw frisbees at your mutt, but don't spend your limited leisure time on line helping other people try to figure out what your money-grubbing employer can't make work for them.

And, if you really need to, then go log in and break a digit, or two; just don't say you're representing your employer. They can sue you for helping them out! How cool is that?

just thinking aloud, here...

spell checking takes time..

[Anonymous Coward]

how are you ever going to get frist post then?

Re:Attention: Ekrout is a known troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Asshole,

I post what's in my ass. If this upsets people on occasion, then they regard me as a "troll". But more often than not, my comments are interesting or informative and usually a bit funny, too.

My goal is to make people angry. Combining trolling with humor has great benefits.

I always mean to offend anyone, but every once in awhile it doesn't happen because I tend to be very stupid and retarded

I am always open to new ideas and enjoy constructive criticism, but blatant name-calling isn't very nice.

Thank you for listening,
-- ekrout

Archibald 'Harry' Tuttle

[davinc]

Suddenly the somewhat goofy Brazil become that much more prophetic.

DSLreports Is A Terrible Place To Get Help

[lanner]

Have any of you actually gone to DSL reports and gotten help from message boards? You post a problem and you get 200 answers about "it's your CDROM drivers" and, "your MTU window size is too small!".

Most of these techs may be enthusiastic about their jobs and helping people, but they are also not very technically inclined to help the customers. How many of them are actually qualified to do anything on the ISPs systems? Does that tech know about ATM VPI/VCI addressing, am I supposed to be using 0/32 or something else? The difference between AAL3 and AAL5? What about PPP components and how laying PPP over Ethernet is such a bad idea? Can they tell you why they use PAP instead of CHAP authentication? Do they know half a DINK about RADIUS? Ask them what the frequency ranges are for CAP and DMT. Do they even know how IPv4 addressing works? Hell, ask them how many pairs DSL runs on and you may be surprised at the answers that you get. They couldn't lay out a static route on a Cisco if their jobs depended on it -- which is why they don't get exec, or even login access.

At first I was disappointed when I turned to DSL reports to see what their message boards looked like. Then I realized that it was a good thing. DSL Reports is a idiot magnet, keeping all of those screaming kids and adults away from... ME.

I am still against the big ISPs, telcos, and cable Internet providers. This was a good move but done in classic big-stupid teclo tradition. They are to blame for the fact that these customers need technical support in the first place. Your network operator is stupid from top to bottom.

Re:DSLreports Is A Terrible Place To Get Help

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to do DSL support and knew most of that stuff. Mind you I wouldn't tell any user any of that information PERIOD, even if it wasn't confidential. It just muddies the issue up for what I call "power lusers". True knowledgable people don't care about any of that stuff. Either it works or it doesn't.

People who think they have a lot of tech knowledge tend to "tech high" as I call it. I used to hear on a daily basis the number of people who call in saying that a DHCP server is down or the server is misconfigured, when the problem is that their router has lost the IP address and just needs to be restarted.

Easy.

in customer relations, you DON'T..

[512k]

go out of your way to help people. It will invariably turn and bite you in the ass. I used to work at Kinkos..and they reprimanded me for being too good..the reason being, if the customers started expecting the level of support that I gave them..they'd expect it all the time, and when I wasn't there, there wasn't a computer litterate person availible to help them and they'd get pissed..(more so than they would if they assumed that nobody knew enough to fix their problems)..but ending my rant, and getting back to the subject of liability, I can see the companies position..if the customers hard drive fails, while they're changing their IP address (even though the two events are completely unrelated) the customer may call up and blame the ISP for destroying their computer. Unless you (the employee) are doing everything acording to policy, you're going to be held responsible (they won't care if it's not your fault)

Into, or Out of?

[Kelerain]

"scaring them into submission."

So the techs were lending a hand in an online forum..
Don't you mean scaring them OUT OF submission?

Where's the common sense?

[CausticWindow]

I've read most of the posts attached to this article and I must admit to feeling a bit sad when reading the posts defending this kind of behaviour. These posts all use words like 'corporation', 'disclosure', 'liability', 'licensed', 'business practice'. I will never accept any of these explanations no matter how many "legalese" words you throw in. Common sense must prevail. It should be noted that I have first hand experience with this as I work part-time with support, and that helping customers on our free time is pretty much the standard. I could even get paid for it, if I bothered to keep track of the time. But since it's five minutes here and five minutes there, I don't.

Liability and identification

[vandelais]

Sorry if I get modded down, but people should at least hear this, even if they don't agree.

In addition to the liability issues that would be redundant to bring up, there is the issue of identification.

You don't see people who work for Schwab or Fidelity offer "good sumeritan" advice online for financial services. These guys should know better even if they haven't signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Do you think your doctor's insurer for malpractice would like it if a doctor began diagnosing people outside the scope of his work environment?

These types of people can do what they do anonymously quite easily over the net, but yet they choose to identify themselves as currently associated. A pseudonym or anonymous claim of credibility as "formerly employed" or "technical consultant to" would be sufficient identification to those who would be consumers of his assistance.

I've seen it both ways, though. When I did tech support for an OEM (outsourced, though), one guy I know got led out of the building and fired immediately for posting opinions and disclosures on legitimate problems with certain system configurations and the unlawful actions the OEM was doing to stall and prevent customer returns on the defective product until the engineers came up with the solution. This info (even though unlawful) was considered to be proprietary and a breach of trade secrets according to the outsourced vendor. He got fired without due process and was unable to fight back because he was under the age of 18 at that time.

My bet is that there is more behind the scenes going on than this story reports and that because reporters are lazy, they got the sensational side of this in their back pocket and just let 'er rip.

no, it's stupid.

[twitter]

Yet if the poster IDs him/herself as an employee of company X and that incorrect information causes damage the company could be liable.

A troll like you should know that people will still identify themselves as working for the company and will still post incorrect information and the company's reputation will still be harmed. What? You say that the company will point out that no one is alowed to tell anyone anything and can point to an official policy? Great, now I know not to trust the company ever again.

This kind of corporate censorship should outrage us all. There are laws against punishing whistle blowers, and that's what this ammounts to. These big dumb companies are worried that their employees will tell the truth and embarass them. Everyone whould know that it you want BellSouth's opinion, you should go to BellSouth's published information, that's why you think the policy will be effective against trolls, right? What the tech tells you is not a statement of company policy it's a statement of personal opinion. With a punishment policy like this in force, I know that none of those employees can give me a candid opinion, even when I meet them in person. These companies just themselves look like monolithic liars who punish people brave enough to tell you like it is. Way to go!

Re:no, it's stupid.

[nlinecomputers]

Oh pleeeeeeese!

We are not talking about "whistle blowers" you stupid nitwit! Any body can post something anonymously. If a company truly has problems such things will happen. I'm talking about a poorly trained or new employee trying to do "the right thing" and posting incorrect and harmful info. I sure you have dealt with nitwit techs who shouldn't be working on the job yet do. They can't be corrected/trained/fired if they are posting as company reps off the clock and off site.

Everyone would know that it you want BellSouth's opinion, you should go to BellSouth's published information, that's why you think the policy will be effective against trolls, right?

Plenty of people if they saw a posting signed by someone claiming to be a company rep would assume that it was an authorized post. Many end users are idiots. And idiots have lawyers. Common sense is pushed aside when lawyers come on board.

You are a naive idiot. Run a company and get sued. Then you understand my point. I got sued once by someone that was stung by a bee at my front door.

Re:no, it's stupid.

[twitter]

I got sued once by someone that was stung by a bee at my front door.

If you treated them as well as you just treated me, I can understand why they pressed on. If you treated your atorney that way, I'll bet you were poorly represented. If you treated the court that way, I'll bet you lost lots of money. That's what happens when you assume everyone else is stupid and call them, "stupid nitwit", "naive idiot", "idiots." who push common sense aside.

You are right about one thing only, I've met technicians who know less than I do about what I called them for but they generally know something else that I don't and the combination gets things fixed. I'm not sure what that has to do with what such a technician would do with their off hours. Such technicians have a tendency to work at places that would impliment a dumb policy like this. Oh, that's it! If the technician makes mistakes off hours, they will make the same mistake at work. Err, that does not work either. Oh yeah, that's it, the company just wants to give these poor folks a script to read and tell them to keep their opinions to themselves. Got to tow the company line, right? That's what this is all about, thanks for noticing.

Re:Attention: Ekrout is a known troll

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You might want to make note of the fact that karma is not redeemable; it cannot be exchanged for valuable prizes. There is no reason to begrudge it of anyone.

Instead of trying to drag this guy down-- who, even if nothing else, is really entertaining-- why don't you try posting something insightful or funny yourself?

They're only hurting themselves

[ThatDamnMurphyGuy]

DSL Reports' SBC/Ameritech telco forums has a few techs helping in the forums in an OFFICIAL capacity.

I've suffered through SBC's DNS servers being setup incorrectly, a bad router, and a line problem, NONE of which I would have gotten solved without the help of the OFFICIAL tech support by SBC in those forums.

I literaly spent 5 days in phone queues and Tier 1 hell to try and confirm and get fixed reverse DNS problems with NO luck. IT was only after the official tech in the forums looked into the issues or made calls that I got things fixed.

It is clear the forums/usenet support is more efficient than phone suppport in most case IMHO.

simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

You have one of those small sig files at th end which says that ISP X is not in any way affiliated with this volunteer. Case closed. The company has no responsability real or imagined.

Actually, I would make sure that the helpful fellows add that line to protect themselves.

Or how about a novel approach? Just dont use the ISP's name...

Helping hand

[buss_error]

Just today I visited a web site with the hackable SSL (Checked with netcraft), and several places that should have been SSL that were just plain normal unencrypted pages.

Did I e-mail the web master about this? Not just no, but HELL NO!

At best, they would ignore the advice, and at worst, I could have a "friendly" visit from the FBI to explain my "hacking" activities in relation to this bank site. No thank you! I won't open an account there now because (without going any deeper than what my web browser shows when I visit the site) their security is a joke.

At least I won't have anything to explain to the FBI.

Re:Helping hand

[TeddyR]

I no longer inform sites that they have a problem without a written agreement that says that they will not consider anything I tell them as "hacking" even if it is used as so.

This is because I used to have an informal agreement (this was back in 1997) with an ISP where I knew one of the lead tech support/security persons well (or so I thought; we went to Uni. together). I regulary informed him of problems with their system and possible security problems.

Well, one of their systems was used as a stepping stone to break into other systems. One of the issues that I had told them about {three months before} was the one that may have been used. They blamed me since at the time it was not a widely known issue and they needed a scapegoat to cover their asses with the customers whose data was compromised. Yes, I had an UNFriendly visit from the local law enforcement people.. Luckily the charges were finally dropped....

3 Cheers for SBC SNET!

[dharma21]

Hidden on the bottom of the article was a comment on a good policy. I have SNET DSL. The forum for them: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/ilec,snet is an amazing community of users and Authorized(!!!) Tech people who help solve most every problem. We had an issue 2 months ago where all of us started getting slow bandwidth. None of the tech support people we called could find problems, but by gathering together and posting trace route's, ping tests, bandwidth test results, we were able to show SNET the problem (it wasn't showing up on network diagnostics) and help them trace it to a router that got new software installed and was screwing things up. Imagine that, the users and technical support coming together to figure out a problem. The end result: everyone was back to normal bandwidth, and the company looks great. Satisfied customers, what a concept!

Two ways to consider....

[Lokist]

I can see two reasons why a company would have a problem with there tech's freely giving away technical advise...

The first reason... The most obvious (well to me anyway)... The less people who get there problems answered freely over the internet the more money the corporations will make if they charge for tech support. In my eyes... this is pulling at hairs. I can't see any reason why a product cannot get free technical support. You did buy the product didn't you? Now I only briefly read the article but I caught the gist of it right away. If companies are legally allowed to fire people for providing free tech support maybe the consumers (us) should take a second look at what were buying. If a product is not designed to break...why should they care?

Here is the other view... Every time someone helps out an end user and says that they are from "xyz" company...they then represent that company... If a tech gives bad advise the company could be liable for what the tech said... Although this is a valid view...I have a feeling this would be used more as a scapegoat then anything else.

Bottom line:

No product is perfect...BUT if the company that makes the product starts to limit the amount of free help there customers are able to get...and they start charging high prices for tech support...take a second look at the companies reputation and the product you are buying...

You know the saying...

South Name

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with companies that have the word South in their name?
BellSouth - threatening techs who give free support
AppleSouth - working their servers to the bone (Applebee's)
Southwest Airlines - fly for peanuts

EarthLink has been like this for years

[Anonymous Coward]

When I worked for EarthLink, there was a long-standing rule that no one in customer service or tech support could post to any of the earthlink.* newsgroups. This was so that the only people responding to enquiries were people who were actually trained in how to answer them. When you have a bunch of employees answering, there's no telling what they might say, or how much trouble it might be for the company if the advice turns out to be flawed. In essence you could have a well-meaning employee who winds up making the whole company look stupid. That's why it has never been allowed.

Re:Its the correct move.-Lawyer bashing.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It isn't the stupid managers or there stupid techs that are the problem. It is the fscking lawyers."

Incorrect. I know it's fun to bash lawyers, but remember lawyers aren't going out on their own doing all this stuff. They are being employed(payed) by someone else to do what they do. If one is going to point to lawyers as the harbinger of societies ills, one should also drag in the people who employ them.

Yea that's right. The individuals who go to court with a frivilous lawsuit because they didn't read the instructions. The companies that take the easy way out of a problem. The nations that substitute a bountiful abundance of ill thought laws, for common sense, and then almost requires an army of lawyers to keep the mess straight. The common citizen who never votes. Get's his opinion on the world from CNN, and expresses the way things should be on an opinion poll. Yea it's easier to single a group out and say "they're the reason we're in this mess", rather than take a good hard look in the mirror and say "I'm part of the reason the worlds in this kind of mess". The only difference between the results of "no action" and the "wrong action" is how much of a mess you end up with.

Post went to wrong article

[MarkusQ]

This post was supposed to go here.

-- MarkusQ

Support from companies are all done wrong..

[Anonymous Coward]

Companys should take lessons from "Thawte", a digital Certification company. THEY are doing it right. They use online chat systems, and within just 15 seconds, a person will know exactly when they will get personal attention.

Their system provides file transfers, sending screen shots. I also think more companies should adopt VOIP contact as well, using common programs like NetMeeting, or Speak Freely.

No phone queues, voice trees, waiting on hold. It's personal, and yet a single support staff can serve up to 6 - 8 persons as a time.

No support or call centers, offshore support people is very inexpensive, support reps can be anywhere. they can take on-line training, no geographical restrictions. But then, most CURRENT systems are stupid, operated by clueless people.

Employers not being unreasonable

[harlows_monkeys]

It is not unreasonable for employers to not want their support people providing help in public forums while identified as working for the company.

• People will come to expect support via that forum. What happens when the employee tires of spending his own time providing support there? He stops, and then the company gets a reputation in the forum of not providing good tech support!

If the employee just wants to be nice, and help people out that they see having trouble in a forum they are reading for their own enjoyment, they should simply not mention where they work. Help out as an unusually knowledgable consumer.

I agree with the polilcy, here's why:

[joejoejoejoe]

I work for an Internet company. I _never_ link myself to that company. I'm sure many others could say the same.

The main reasons for me: Job secruity and a Professional projection of myself and my company.

When I get home, I drink beer, sniff glue, etc. If I were to post to the boards I would probably offer some good help. Then the beer starts to kick in (and the glue, oh boy!) I bet my own level of control and professionalism would begin to disappear. (and if I were in my physical work building they would know)

How many times have you seen post where some "tech guy" or such says, well you know what?: Customers are Idiots, Aholes, etc? I have seen this. How many times have you gone to work the next day and said to yourself, 'shit I really should not have sent that email last night...' because you were half in the bag when you sent it.

It reminds me of the guy who posted on the Ciruit City thing, saying "we don't need customer's like that" (the ones who return a lot of goods). While he may have posted a fact about the company he still sounded like a jerk b/c the companies public position probably is that "the customer is always right". Now the real position is out in the open, for good or bad.

Companies want to present themselves in a professional way. People acting as rogue representative of a company after hours is a bad thing.

But don't get me totally wrong, it took me a while to get to this point (beer, glue, etc) and if I go out for a beer I wear work logos and all (shirts, hats, etc).

If you have so much energy to devote to helping others do it at work. Teach the other techs a thing or two, improve the 'system' don't operate out side of it.

All that being said, if you still want to help out on your own time, don't claim to be an employee of 'the company' and don't reveal the 'secrets' when you do so.

Tech Support Contractor

[spleck]

I used to work for ClientLogic, who along with Compaq and TAG (The Answer Group), handled all of the tech support for Bellsouth FastAccess (DSL). The DNS entry for BBR/DSL Reports had been removed so that we couldn't get to their site (unless we used the IP address...). We were told we weren't allowed to post anything related to Bellsouth FastAccess on BBR at all.

Of course we were also told to lie to our customers and tell them that we worked for BellSouth. We were told not to schedule installer/techs earlier than 3-4 days unless the customer was angry, then we could send one out in 24 hrs. We also had the usual stuff like not recommending any brands over others.

Promotions were dependent not on whether we went above and beyond, but if we could get the customer off the phone in a certain amount of time. Our target was 16 minutes total handle time including our opening spiel and verification (1-2 minutes) and ACW (after call work, 1 min) of entering notes about the call. If you averaged about 16 minutes you were meeting the requirement, but you should be about 12 minutes to be "good". Anyone remember OfficeSpace's "flair"?

Half the tech support calls I took were people complaining because the previous agent told them to download new drivers from the website using dialup since they were calling because their DSL was out.

We were supposed to be there to help people, but our "metrics" were about how fast we handled the call and whether we mentioned the "Connection Manager" which didn't actually manage your connection, it was basically spyware and slowly evolved into being able to backup/restore your internet settings... but not drivers etc where we really needed it, and it didn't make a connection to FastAccess like all the customers thought.

It was probably the poll that did it.

[God! Awful 2]

Roadrunner was particularly displeased with an informal customer satisfaction poll placed on the employee's personal website.

That was a really dumb thing to do. Most companies aren't fond of polls when they can't spin the numbers. An unscientific poll run by a member of their own staff would really tick them off.

-a

My experiance with convergys

[slakdrgn]

Or rather a friend of mine, he use to work at what most people I know, call "Tech Support Hell," Convergy, they do outsourceing for a whole bunch of people, you can see it all on their website, anyways he posted a few things on (tho got a little carried away, prolly while drunk) and ended up getting himself canned (hence the reason he started posting on how to beat warrenty system. He's lucky he didn't get sued, he still claims its not him. But they threated him, fired him, and said if he ever said anything about it again they'd "sue him into poverty" they even made him sign some lame ass paper (to which he has a copy of) that basically says if he doesn't say anything, they won't sue, if he does they have the right to garnish his current wages for an unspecified amount of damages (he was 18 at the time which is the only reason I could think that he would even sign such a paper)

bellsouth people giving tech support!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bellsouth tech support" is a contradiction in terms. So when the company found out their employees were doing their job,... something just HAD to be done about it! I have called and dealt with those people (if you can call them that) so many times and not once have they ever actually solved a problem.

it's all outsourced support anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't blame any ISP for not wanting some outsourced idiot that was flipping burgers two months ago to speak as an employee on a public forum. 1st tier support morons are notoriously ignorant and often pass around superstitous nonsense as fact.

You have got to be kidding

[Morgaine]

If you work for a company where they care more about their image and liability than about how good your technical contribution is and how well you are helping the customer, it's time you got up and left, because it's clearly run by lawyers and image makers instead of by someone that does anything useful.

Re:You have got to be kidding

[nlinecomputers]

Hey I work for myself. My point is I understand and agree with the idea of preventing someone from doing this.

If you work for a company where they care more about their image and liability than about how good your technical contribution is and how well you are helping the customer?

Who says you can't have BOTH? What does it say about a company that allows paid on-staff nitwits free reign to say any stupid thing they want to. Frequently I've found "tech support" to be any thing but good. Many companies are aware of that. Maybe some companies are trying to improve that. GOOD tech support REQUIRES training and supervision. You get neither with incidents on some third party BBS. Perhaps they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot by allowing someone to say something stupid and cause problems for the company.

Internationalization could explain it

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway, some of the major symptoms are present. Check out the whole roundup:

• 
  
  1. =>
  2. Reorganization, in this case, of the TSG (technical support group). An MBA fresh out of international management business school is brought in by a VP legal consultant to handle the tricks of internationalizing the workforce in order to cut costs more than in half.
  
  
  1. => A reorg implies reassignment of responsibilities, but less likely to be noticed is the convenient
  2. compartmentalization of information under the new org branch as a huge side benefit. Thus, the paper trail of any secret agenda can be effectively hidden from the existing workforce, managers included. It also facilitates shredding.
  
  
  1. => An
  2. excuse, slim or otherwise, that allows legal-proof firing of the employees. Any excuse will do, but hard evidence allows the lawyers to sleep at night.
  
  
  1. =>
  2. Firing, instead of laying off. Firing makes it easier to claim that no qualified domestic job candidates are available, so that the company can exceed its H-1B quota. At hiring time, it can be argued that now only more "highly trained" foreigners are capable of doing the job. If I'm right, the new job ads will require an inflated list of buzzwords from here to the moon -- no domestic candidates need apply.
  
  
  1. =>
  2. Relocation of the new group to another site, where none of the existing employees can notice the changes so as to think that they are to be internationalized next. This can be hard to determine, because the new employees, as well as the new management may be entirely offshore.
  
  
  1. => If the replacements are of a younger
  2. age: The VP consultant knows that older people have a more legal savvy profile, or their spouse does, and that increases the risk that the entire group will learn how to pull off a class-action.
     
  
  
  1. =>
  2. Training. The new foreign workers will need training, if in nothing else, after-the-fact in the buzzwords nobody else knows about. In some cases, the employer is brazen enough to require the existing employees to provide it in the form of cross-training, but usually this is too risky.
  
  

If forum support would continue to be provided, it would provide a visible way for a large number of witnesses (not just customers) to detect slight cultural differences, something which could be used as an indicator that internationalization was occurring within the company. Not that customers mind dealing with different cultures that much, or that the new management is customer-blind, it is that they are concerned this gives the opposing lawyers in a class-action a nice paper trail of evidence to use to get the company to show its books... those that haven't been shredded by now.

There is a valid point...

[Archfeld]

What if these guys are identifying themselves as employees and they get out of line, or give advice that causes damage ? Granted the chances of that happening are slim, but that is how a corporate lawyer thinks. Another possibilty is a former employee with a score to settle posing as a support person....
It is really sad that it comes to this, when in reality I've gotten help from covad tech's on DSLREPORTS before, and several times I've gotten help with advanced router functions from some really sharp people there...

Liability and Walmart

[lockheed23]

It is funny that the article mentioned WalMart, seeing how there is a case against Walmart concerning employees working off the clock. If the liability of the techs giving bad advice isn't enough, the HUGE liability of a tech, representing himself as a company tech, doing tech support to that company's customers is. If they are going to do so, just saying that "I'm a tech for an ISP", or going anonymous would be more appropriate.

Way out of context...

[Anonymous Coward]

So I followed the link and read the article. What did I find? That the comments referenced in the linked article are being taken waaaaay out of context. I'm posting anonymously for what should be obvious reasons (mega hint: my employer is running those JD Power and Associates commercials in the Southeast US). Tech support was not reprimanded, forbidden, or any such nonsense. Tech support in the forums has stopped due to organizational changes. That's right - people were shuffled, positions eliminated, departments consolidated. This isn't some master plan to control and spin all information available to customers. How do I know? Read that part about my employer again.

Assumptions and generalizations

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how quickly these generalizations are building on themselves. The end of forum tech support was NOT due to intimidation, harassment, and reprimands. Read the referenced links - Andy Houtz says - Due to a recent organizational change...
And that's exactly what it was. There is no mention of anyone being fired, or reprimanded, or even given a dirty look. The second article has some unsubstantiated rumor that one of the techs, NetTech is no longer posting. It doesn't say why. It doesn't even definitively say that his employer told him not to.

Enough with the madness!
Bellsouth has gone through a lot of organizational changes in the last few months. Forum tech support took a hit because of that, NOTHING ELSE.
Jeez.

Participate a little more "anonymously"

[phoneboy]

I don't think any company can completely forbid you from participating in online forums (well, maybe they can with employee contracts), but if you're going to do so, don't make it clear who you work for.

Part of the reason I was hired to work for my existing employer is because I was known on the Internet for providing assistance with Check Point FireWall-1, maintaining an FAQ page on the subject as well. I did it on the "side" in addition to my day job.

My own personal "rule" that I've always maintained is to not disclose who I work for in online forums. This means using my personal email account for posting message as well as never making named references to my employer. That isn't to say some people don't know where I work (my customers are out there, after all), but purely by reading my activity in the online forum, it isn't obvious.

Because of where I work, there are some conversations I simply won't get involved with, as by doing so, I would reveal where I work. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to live with.

-- PhoneBoy

Kicking and gagging the support staff

[Morgaine]

What does it say about a company that allows paid on-staff nitwits free reign to say any stupid thing they want to.

It says that the company is in the business of hiring incompetents to save money, and then finds that they have have got exactly what they paid for.

A competent professional will in general not work (for long, anyway) under gagging orders, and will for the most part provide good support. But good support is not always comfortable for those "in control", because it often exposes the weaknesses created by management and other handwavers. Tough. Ultimately it's the company's senior people that have created its problems, and blaming the low-paid first-line support staff is the height of arrogance and misdirection of blame.

It's all about Control

[Anonymous Coward]

I likely work for an ISP as a tech support Rep.
I am prohibited from making and posts on behalf of said ISP in any forums online. Even in said ISP's own newsgroups. Laywers run the world nowadays because the threat of a lawsuit for a rep misrepresenting an ISP is a scary thing.

that being said, I am posting as anonoymous.

Furthermore, what a bunch of corporate dipshit morons. Support is likley the biggest COST of running an ISP (about 1$ per minute on the phone), and here they don't want the reps contributing free support. Free support may mean letting people know how to get around the restrictive AUP policies of ISP's, and as a representative of a corporation, truth and enlightenment is a side issue, Image is much bigger thing. There are several things that I am NOT ALLOWD TO TELL PEOPLE, even though they are simple facts. MS (Under the guise of Bill Gates personal investments) owns 2% of the ISP where I work, 500 million dolars is a drop in the bucket for evil bill. coincidentally, we no longer support Netscape,(around the same time as this unrelated investment) and are not even allowed to tell customers how to configure thier mail accounts in Netscape. This means, that we must have a client install lookout express and sit through the reboots and such which takes much longer and thus costs more money (I have t sit through a reboot with the customer, where netscape just installs and launches.)

tell me that this is not an example of some type of criminal act on a corporate level looking to get some cash injected into the company by Bill, and I'll tell you to go fuck youself you stupid Microserf.

All of them do it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got fired from a small ISP in Amarillo (http://www.arn.net/) because I told one of the customers the truth about how their network bandwidth was set up at the time....

At the time they advertised "multiple T3" links.

They offered services to 3 cities (Amarillo, Lubbock, and Dallas)

What the customer was not told was that the T3 links were in Dallas. Amarillo had 1 T3 to dallas and Lubbock had 2 T1s to Amarillo. This was in 1998 before the broadband push....

Private capacity

[dswan69]

If they're doing this in their private capacity then in any sane country where workers' rights are protected they would be able to sue their employer for wrongful termination and get re-instated or the settlement to which they are rightfully entitled.

But this is the US where abusing your employees is right and proper. Down with worker's rights.