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Techs Discover End Users Aren't So Bright
hkypipe writes "In response to a CNN story slamming tech support, a former tech fired back. He correctly points out that much of the trouble end users have with their PCs can be traced to their skillset, which in many if not most cases would make them more qualified to operate an Etch-A-Sketch." Not everyone who calls support is clueless though. How many of us have had to sit on hold for hours and reformat a hard drive as DOS just to convince the tech support lackey on the other end that a hard drive really is bad? The article also covers other factors like scripted support, and per-customer time limits, which can make for a poor tech support experience.
Well I never! Here I was thinking people always read the manual, always took the time to understand what they were trying to do, always listened to instructions and never tried to do something stupid.
Who'd have thought?!
From THIS???
My personal favorite is when the RoadRunner tech support drone refuses to believe that some computers don't need to be rebooted to change network settings. But no matter what you tell them, they refuse to put down their precious script and accept that maybe, just maybe, I'm not running windows.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
In other news, it was discovered that everyone looks like an idiot when they require the services of a domain expert. What's next, neurosurgeons complaining that patients don't know as much as them? Of course end users don't know much about tech - that's what they're paying support workers for! Just like drivers pay auto mechanics, and anyone who has a bathroom pays a plumber.
Just because someone doesn't happen to have some specialized piece of knowledge you have, that doesn't make them "not so bright". I know plenty of PhDs who are extremely competent in their fields, which aren't computing, who need to call helpdesks from time to time. You see, and this will sound harsh to a Slashbot, most people have better things to do than learn the minutae of their PCs.
Most of the people who call for help don't even know what operating system they're using -- even though they've spent their money buying the machine.
How many drivers know what OS runs their engine control computer? Even tho' they spent their money buying the machine. You see, techies are into operating systems are care a lot about them. End users care about getting their jobs done, and the computer is just a tool. One version of Windows looks a lot like another - can you tell the difference between '95, '98 and ME with just a glance? You can? Can you tell the difference between Red Hat, Debian and SuSE at a glance? You think so? I didn't tell you they're all in console mode at a $ prompt.
Tech support needs to stop thinking of end users as the enemy and start thinking of them as what they really are, its bread and butter.
Before tech support people rant about the lack of knowledge of their users, remember that it isn't the user's job to be an expert in use of the software or hardware - but it is their job, and it is one they often fail at.
Yep.. end users seem to be getting worse IMO.
:-|
There is no excuse not to be learning how to use a computer in this day and age, yet the majority of support calls I get are for people with most basic problems.
"Oh, my start menu has moved up to the top of the screen! No, I never did anything to it, it just went by itself!"
"Everything in my Inbox has vanished! No I never pressed delete! I think I know how to use the email thankyou!!" - "Funny, but our records show that it was you who deleted the email.."
And so on.. most end users think tech support guys just came down with the last shower, and think they can lie about how they have just broken the machine.
Can be frustrating sometimes
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I do a little bit of support in addition to my primary duties as a developer (so I can keep in touch with the customers and their requests/etc). We have commercial products that we sell, but we also have a limited, free service accessible from our web page to serve as a demo of the product. I find it interesting that the customers that call in who have purchased our products are generally friendly and respectful. The customers that call in about the free service are almost always rude and demanding. They ask for more features and complain about the limitations. Sometimes you just want to tell them: IT'S A ~FREE~ SERVICE!!! You can always buy our products.
That aside, I have also noticed a serious lack of knowledge in many customers, some of whom are the only "IT" person in the company (I put IT in quotes since their knowledge expressed during the support bring this claim into serious question). I find it really sad how many people I have to walk through the basics (saving a CSV file in Excel, for example) especially when these are people who are supposed to know what they are doing (IT, programmers). Sometimes the web developers are the worst. I have run into so many who know how to use Dreamweaver, but they have no concept of how to actually modify an HTML page by hand. (Another example of where learning the basics before learning the fancy tools is vital... please keep calculators out of schools until at least High School... but I digress...) It is so refreshing when you find someone who actually seems to know what they are doing!
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
i'm a tech, and I have to treat the customers as dumb, otherwise I find us getting out of synch, or assume the customer knows what an icon is or something.
The problem being if you treat a user as intelligent, they'll catch you out by not bothering to tell you about something i would regard as blindingly obvious.
For example:
I was talking to a user who was trying to set up one of our mail accounts. When i tried to talk him through outlook expres setup, he irately pointed out that he'd be and engineer for 5 years and knew what he was doing. He tried to tell me that there was a problem with his mail account, despite the fact that I logged int it fine.
It turns out he'd broken his DNS somehow, and my standard debug procedure, had he acted like a dumb user would have been far faster....
can you send mail? no?
can you see our web page? no? your problem.
wahey, a early post!
Back when I started consulting in the late 80's, I could pick up a telephone and call an 800 number and usually talk to a REAL LIVE ENGINEER (in many cases, the guys and gals that actually designed the software or hardware in question) because a lot of companies rotated through their engineers through the tech support department as part of their dudies. Nowadays, they get way too large a volume of calls for that to be prectical.
Most of the time, I don't even bother calling tech support anymore becuase it's not worth my time unless I have a specific question. I wish I had an ID card I could swipe on my phone that would ID me as compenent to stand trial by direct-escalation-to-third-level-support.
Odds are, if I'm bothering to call, it's not a loose plug.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I am currently using Comcast cable internet, formally ATT&T internet....formally @home.
We have outtages in our area from time to time, not as bad as it used to be, but they do pop up. Every time I try to call the 800 number to tell them an outtage is in the area, I get the same canned response.
They always say, "sir, we can't see your computer, are you hooked up to a router"?
I say "well, yes, but that's not the point. The connection is out in this area...I'm just reporting it to you as you don't have it on your outtage board."
"I'm sorry, we don't support routers, please plug your computer directly into you cable modem."
At this point, I'm getting a little irritated..."no, I'm not, I'm reporting a outtage...there is NOTHING wrong with my equipment. Nothing has changed on my settings. I'm not going to sit here, re-route my cables and change settings just so you can finally know there is an outtage in my area. Trust me, the problem is on your end."
"Sir, I can't help you unless you follow my directions".
Ok, so the first time through this, I go with everything they tell me, and finally after 45 minutes of trying everything under the sun short of putting all my computer parts in a paper bag, going out on my lawn, waving it over my head and screaming like a chicken...they finally figure out that it's a problem on their end.
Now I don't even mess with it, I call them up when an outtage happens, and get all my neighbors that are out to call them also. I cut them off right away, and tell them they'll be getting 5 other calls from the neighborhood telling them the same thing and hang up.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Most computer users are utterly and completely retarded concerning anything related to computers. They know that the power buttons turns on the damn thing, that clicking twice on OE or MS Word starts a program and that Steven McGregor likes to send funny mails with .exe files attached. Even the most basic questions about computers to these people will be answered with a "Huh?".
Now, comparing it to a car is a good thing, though one should remember that one should not known the complete design of the engine to be able to drive a car. There are two other things that are more important; being able to properly handle the car AND being able to conform to a set of rules and regulations set up to protect you and others from yourself. The thing is, knowledge of these rules are enforced (or at least around here) and violating them will cost you money. But the difference between a car and a computer, damage wise, is the fact you can kill someone with a car accident. No one gets hurt if you run "anna kournikova.jpg.vbs".
Eventually, the worst problems will solve themselves; the most error prone people are those who haven't grown up with computers. Kids nowadays grown up with computers all around, so it's going to be easier to solve stuff later on as the general population slowly becomes more tech-savvy. Still, a few good regulations regarding the teaching about computer usage might be nice, especially in the modern world where nearly anything is somehow related to computers. Teach kids the basics, some more advanced things later on, like basic component knowledge (what's an HD, what's a CD/DVD-ROM, what's a processor, how to recognize them, etc) and explanation into the use of various office applications and what to do and what not to do with them. (to prevent people from writing essays in powerpoint and making a database in excel while recording financial data in a word document)
Hate me!
My cable ISP, Adelphia, possibly has the worst tech support ever.
I've called before, and literally said "I'm losing packets past the third hop, [router name] in Albany. I have a link, I just can't get out onto the backbone."
She had me reboot my modem. Unsurprisgly, still didn't work. Then she wanted my IP to try to ping. After what seemed like a few hours, she concluded "Hmm... I can't get to you." Really?
Better yet, my dad somehow ended up having to explain how to the tech how she used ping.
(I'm not mentioning the 30 minute wait times, the horrible on-hold music that cuts out, or that ads for phone service that play while you're calling to report that your cable modem's down -- rather a bad time to try to sell me stuff... And the ads interrupt each other if you wait long enough, too.)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I think the main problem is expectation management. Users occasionally encounter the tech support person who is everything that they could hope for - within 5 minutes, they've figured out that the hard drive cable was plugged in upside-down, and they're back in business thanks to Harold Sharpstuff. However, the next time that the user calls in, they draw Neville Newbie, and after Neville fumbles around and finally helps them get their system running after 2 hours of tests, the user comes up with fodder for a new customer support horror story.
Meanwhile, Harold Sharpstuff has quit because after the tenth "coffee-mug-holder-is-broken" call in 2 hours, and after the third "I'm-paying-your-salary-so-you-should-help-me- adjust-my-screen-contrast" call (which is particularly ironic from users calling a toll-free support line), he's decided that his not-so-great paycheck isn't worth the headache.
There's lots of aggravation to spread around, folks. The users who piss and moan about clueless phone support (but who could never do that job themselves!) and the tech support personnel who complain about the 10th "the Internet is down!" call (but forget that these are 10 different people, NOT 1 single person calling 10 times!) both need to modify their expectations a bit.
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
The helpdesk is a great place to pick up a little experience before moving somewhere else, but it's the burger flipping job of the IT world. Most people don't stay on the lines for long and you really don't want to talk to the ones who have made a career out of it.
Despite the fact that these positions are the lowest-paid in the industry, they seem to be the ones that are also most frequently "best shored" to other countries. That's because the company doesn't really care what happens to you after you buy their product. If they could get away with no support line at all, they'd do that. If they "best shore" developers, they might not be able to get all of the shiny features that make you buy the product in the first place. See how it works?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I presume this is the same Gateway support that told my dad's friend to run fdisk when he was having trouble connecting to AOL.
I work in tech support. I actually don't mind helping old people learn to use computers, because I am fortunate enough to work without a time limit. Most people are friendly if you are patient and don't talk down to them.
Know what is 100 times more annoying than the computer illiterate? Computer experts. That's right, slashdot readers are the bane of my existence.
That fact that you can write software/build a network from paperclips and phone line/replace a hard drive does not mean you haven't forgotten your password. I have talked to hundreds of computer geniuses who wanted to go "Off script" only to realize that their password was l33thax0r3, not l33thax0r4. How about you just take two seconds and clear your browser cache instead of giveing me your resume?
Web designers are worse. Apparently, being a web designer means you don't have to read the most basic instructions on any website. If you can't login with your eyes closed, then they could have done a much better job with the site.
Keep in mind, no matter how many times you TELL me what a smart guy you are, I have no way of telling if you really know how to diagnose a bad hard drive, or if you're one of the many people who thinks "surge protector turned off" and "bad hard drive are the same thing. Save some time and answer a few simple questions.
Of course, if you really are the the genius you would have me beleive, do us both a favor and don't call. I'm sure you'll get it figured out.
I have turned off The computer several times and every time I turn it back on it says "You may safely turn off your computer"
"What does it say next to the power button?"
"NEC MultiSync"
This
A few years back I had the VP of a department call because his laptop suddenly shut down. I went to look and found that the power supply wasn't plugged in. He turned red, looked at em and said "I should have known better". I replied by telling him not to worry about it, as long as he did his job of keeping the company running, I'd do mine of making sure his laptop worked.
Point is, end users aren't stupid, they simply have other things they do, and what we find intuitive, they may not. It's tech supports job to help them, and make them feel better about it when you walk off into the sunset.
Years ago, I had a Sun Enterprise 150 as my "home box" -- it's basically an Ultra-1 with a bunch of disk; looks a lot like an E450.
Anyhow, my cable modem stopped working one day. So, I called tech support, and told them. Long story short, I was a student at the time, and since the University had a deal with Cogeco, they felt obligated to at least not tell me to fuck off because I wasn't running Windows... but they weren't much help, either. After consulting with his boss, my telephone lacky got back to me -- "I'm sorry sir; Suns don't work on the internet".
I felt like reaching right through my phone and choking the living daylights out of him!
It turns out the local cable installer had put a one-way filter on line.
Assholes.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I have been a network administrator for over five years. It has been said that administration is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer panic. Through the highs and lows of this existence, there is one constant: answering user requests.
Help Me Help You
Accounting for a large part of my day, users requests can be both rewarding and frustrating. Users, I know your computer can infuriate you at times. I feel for you. I want to help you. I want you to learn how the computer can make your day-to-day work easier. Unfortunately, I cannot help you unless you are willing to help yourselves.
By far, the most valuable commodity in the business world is time. You want your computer to save you time. As I sit at your desk, I tell you, "Outlook would run much better for you if you would delete all your unwanted mail. Your pst file is too large."
"I don't have time to read them all, and I may need one later. I have to keep them all, just in case."
You tell me that you cannot afford to spend time performing preventive maintenance on your computer. Instead, you spend time waiting for me to repair your computer.
Let me put it to you this way:
You will spend a finite amount of time each month either maintaining your computer or waiting for me to repair it.
Many think I'm ranting, and tend to ignore me. Ask other computer support personnel. They will tell you the same thing. I want to help you. I can show you how to prevent many problems from occurring. Heed me, and I guarantee you will have more time to do your work.
Information is at least as valuable as time, for without information, how will you know how to spend your time? Information is as important to me as it is to you. Too often, my inbox is filled with vague support requests with little or no information. Because of them, I have to waste your time asking you for the information I need. I have to ask you to repeat your problem and write down the error. Give me all the information in the first request. Tell me exactly what you would like to accomplish. Often, your goal is more important than the steps you have followed. Given your goal, I may be able to show you how to cut steps and save time in ways you would have never imagined. Regularly, I supply you with information. I write FAQs and HowTos on the company support site. I send email offering advice to those who may need it.
"My disk is full, and now Windows has stopped working," you say.
"Did you read the section on the support site about keeping your computer running smoothly?" I ask. "There is a section at the end about keeping empty space on your hard drive."
"No," is the usual reply, in my experience.
Read the documents I provide for you, I beg you. If you had read them and followed my advice, quite often you would not have had to contact me in the first place. You would not have had to waste your time. I do not wish to hide knowledge from you. I will tell you all that I know. Just ask!
I know I seem harsh and borderline abusive. I do not wish to be. Indeed, some of you are a joy to work for. Yes, I meant work for. Part of my job is to work for you. Some of you come to me and ask questions. You question why things on your computer seem so difficult. Sometimes, I'm able to show you a better way. You smile with joy. Your work day is suddenly easier. Those are the times I enjoy my job the most. When I see you take to heart and fully embrace my advice, that is the most rewarding part of my day. Thank you.
I know your jobs are busy. I know spare time is hard to find, but that computer on your desk is expensive. You owe it to yourself to learn how and why it works, in order to get a good return on your investment. Do not make learning about your computer a side project. Make it part of your everyday duties. To the best of my abilities, I swear I will give you the knowledge you need. You will be happier in the end. I promise.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I would say at least 50% of the calls and problems were user error, this is probably higher but this was 10 years ago so I am not sure. The real joy was trying to troubleshoot what the person did, this was made even more exciting by doing it over the phone (now click on the Icon that looks like a Computer, long pause... where?, try the top left corner, under breath (Moron)) AND the user not being honest about what they did to screw it up! I do remember thinking how much time I could save if the user would just fess up to what they did.
There is no reason why any sane/intelligent person would work in support for any length of time. It is the worst IT job and surely competing for worst job period. Therefore what is the typical support person going to be like? I'll let you figure that one out.
Scripts are used to deal with dumb customers and dumb tech employees. I hate 'em, I understand why they use them but it drives me nuts.
I think the typical Slashdot reader is frustrated with support because we usually know more about the problem, and software than the tech support person we talk too! This is frustrating! It is also frustrating when you can only understand about 50% of what the support person is saying, I will not identify any ethnicity but I think many people know what I am talking about. I can't tell you how many times I have wanted to say, "listen I know what the hell I am doing can you put someone on the phone who knows what the hell they are doing too!". I call support as my last option, and when I do I expect the person to not understand or care.
When I did tech support it was always a pleasure to deal with an intelligent user, being intelligent myself it was usually a quick or easy process to help. Dealing with average users was difficult and dumb users was simply an exercise in frustration. I can only imagine what a dumb user, dumb tech interchange must be like... oh yea...
Paradise!
For example, we have Dell servers where I work, that have RAID arrays. Sometimes a disk fails, so we grab our spare (we keep one spare for each type of RAID so that we can quickly rebuild in case of a failure) and pop it in, and it rebuilds and all is happy.
Then comes the hard part; convincing Dell support to send us a replacement disk, under warranty. Even though their own hardware reported the disk was bad, and the spare disk formatted and rebuilt fine, they insist that we run diagnostics on the disk. Running them, of course, would require that we down a production server! I once spent a good deal of time explaining this simple concept of not being able to down a production server to verify a disk is bad, when we already know it is.
Eventually we manage to convince them to give us an RMA and cross ship us a replacement disk, but not after a lot of hair-pulling and grinding. Speaking of grinding, sometimes we fib and tell them the disk was grinding to speed the process.
Tech support people: Stop ASSUMING your customers are idiots. Especially system administrators at your customer sites. We know when a disk is bad!
I work for a hotel chain. We are entirely a resort hotel company, the people staying at our facilities are people on vacation.
Customer service is a big, giant issue for us. We aren't going to hassle our vacationers with grief over losing their room key while they had a drunken walk down the beach. We aren't going to berate someone for being so stupid as to allow their kids to ride the elevators just for fun while unsupervised.
The company exists to support these folks, make them happy and make them want to come back to us again and again. Some of them are clueless, some of them are mean, some of them are thieves. Then again, most of them are nice folks.
At the end of the day they have a choice on if they want to stay with us or not.
IT support departments have the luxury of having a captive audience. However in a business like ours, we work very hard to spread a customer focused culture throughout the organization.
If you can imagine what it's like to be an immigrant housekeeper working for a bit over minimum wage and having to do manual labor to clean up after folks who earn vast sums more than you and act like you don't exist, and do your job with a smile, then you can see that maybe working at the IT help desk isn't the most difficult thing in the company, talking people through how to get Word to print in landscape or something equally as silly.
The IT folks that I work with are fantastic, and just like the housekeepers, and the front desk staff, and the food & beverage folks, they realize that they too have customers to serve and the purpose of our company isn't to support the IT staff, to buy many l33t Sun boxen or to provide a rationale for a data center, it's to serve customers. And as far as we go in my firm, there's no difference between an internal and external customer.
I'm in the training department for my company. Mostly I develop multimedia CBTs to train reservation agents and front desk staff on how to use their systems. So my PC isn't the standard MS Office/Outlook setup. I have all kinds of weird multimedia programs and development tools that sometimes don't play nice together. Needless to say, I have to get IT help from time to time. (Even as a power user, some installs don't run and so on. Plus we have a training room with multimedia laptops set up as a CBT learning lab and the dongles break, the laptops are old and lousy and require lots of help since they get constant use and abuse.) When I told an IT staffer that I hate to submit lots of tickets he jumped up and down and got mad. "You should submit as many tickets as you need! We have some people that routinely put in 15 tickets every day! The more tickets I can close the more justification I have for IT staff and those are people's jobs! If you need something to get your job done or the laptops aren't working right or whatever it is, don't even hesitate to call us. If i catch you not submitting tickets, I will beat you up."
All I could think was "Wow!" Here is an IT help desk guy that has a customer focus, which is what the whole damn company is about!
So maybe the end users aren't so bright sometimes, or they don't know what OS they are using. Look on the upside. If they don't know what OS they have, it will be easier to transition them to Linux.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
To be fair, there are multiple problems here:
1) The users -- they range from completely helpless with computers to grand masters, and there isn't a system yet by which helpdesk can sort them out quickly. This is compounded by people who think that just because they can install a new mouse, they're expert level and expect to be treated so.
2) Tech support personnel -- Ummm, putting this gently, tech support is a stepping stone on the career path. Support personnel either rise out of it to developers, admins, etc; sink below it to cashier at the fast food joint; or find a new job. It's a big hole in the company into which you shovel people. So, you may get a good tech support person, who eventually might be a very good developer or sysadmin; or you might get a loser whose next job will be reading "this end towards burger" in his training manual.
3) The companies. They're half the reason tech support is a big hole in the company, into which you shovel people. They see it as a giant cost center, and continously attempt to minimize it by hiring cheaply and getting rid of more expensive people. Eventually, they're at the bottom of the barrell, and in order to use their front line people, they create scripts for them to use before escalating them to 2nd tier. Which annoys the end users and annoys the tech support personnel. Then the companies decide on ticket quotas or time limits, in which the tech's job is dependant on how many tickets they close, not how well -- which annoys customers and tech support, further contributing to the problem.
I've had hororible experiences, including one company that insisted I reinstall windows 98 on their laptop, as obviously I was too clueless to install win2k and linux -- because the onboard mouse had died! (I called back after downloading their diagnostic utils and gave them the error output)
I've also had tolerable experiences, where the tech asked a basic question, and I responded with "no, I did not try $VENDOR diag utility, but I did do $X, $Y and $Z, which if the device was working, should have given me $A, $B and $C. Instead I got $SOS". One notable one, the tech shouted over the cube wall "Anyone know what ping and tcpdump are?" and a reply came back "The router's broken".
Kids nowadays grown up with computers all around, so it's going to be easier to solve stuff later on as the general population slowly becomes more tech-savvy.
Are they really more savvy, or just accostomed to executing a different set of tasks than the previous generation? As computers get more complex over time, is your average computer user today really equipped to handle learning the new tech?
I might actually propose that the opposite may be the case. As computers become more "appliance-like" for average users, all the scary configuration stuff will be even more mysterious to an average user than they are today.
Look at the history. It used to be that computers were very difficult to use: you had to be a qualified expert to use one. Typically, if you were dedicated enough to learn to use the thing, you also learned enough along the way to be able to fix it as well, or at least be helpful to someone supporting him/her. Today, the average user uses Windows, which is somewhat easy enough for non-savvy people to use, but the expectation is there that things will break and they will have to change some stuff around to "make it work" again. In the future, I would wager that the average user will be completely incapable of (or not permitted to) making any changes to a computer's workings.
The analogy is, once again, the automobile. Early on, old timers refused to have anything to do with cars, and if they tried they'd fail, while the early adopters had a steep learing curve on how to drive and maintain the car. Later (30's-40's), anyone who owned a car had a neighbour who was an expert on maintaining it, while the rest relied on just learning to drive. Now, it is very rare indeed that you can find anyone outside of the "customer service" ranks (a garage) who has any inkling on what to do if something breaks, or for that matter on what some of the technology under the hood is doing in the first place!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Group 1 users aren't too bad - they can usually be handled with the troubleshooting script. They will generally do what you tell them to do (within the limits of their understanding of your instructions). As long as you treat them reasonably well they will treat you reasonably well.
Group 2 users are a bit worse simply because their problems are NOT going to be handled by the script - if they were they wouldn't be calling you. However, once you identify them as being in group 2, you can "kick it up a notch" and use "the big words" to quickly find the problem (assuming the problem can quickly be found). However, the problem arises if they user is in Group 2 and the tech support person your standard Tier-1 meatware text-to-speech unit - the user will want to skip over the script (because he's already run it) and that leaves the meatpuppet floundering.
The group that causes the problems for ALL of us is group 3 - the luser who thinks he is a tech:god. Look at this guy from the tech support person's perspective:
In other words, to the tech support person Group 3 looks just like Group 2.
If a Tier-1 person passes one of these jokers on to Tier-2, when it comes out that the moron didn't have something plugged in (as step 4 of the script checks), the Tier-1 guy gets dinged for it. Now, if you were the Tier-1 guy, would you be really willing to transfer somebody like this to Tier-2?
Of course, these Group 3's make it harder for us Group 2's to get anything done. So how do we Group 2's work around this?
If you have a tech support group you need to work with on a regular basis, try to get to know them by name, and be known to them by name. IF you prove to the Tier-2 guys that you really are Group 2, they MAY give you a direct number to them. Example: I have just such a relationship with my ISP - they know that when I call them and say "router 3 is down", they need to fix it, not ask me to reboot Windows.
However, this is not always an option - if the organization is large, or you contact them infrequently you won't be able to do this, so:
Let Mr. Tier-1 drive the conversation. Play dumb. If he says to reboot Windows and you are running Linux, just say "OK, give me a minute" and lie. Follow his script. Remember, Group 2 and Group 3 look alike to him, so the only way to not be taken for a Group 3 blowhard is to look like a Group 1.
Accept the fact that you are going to have to run the rat's maze of Tier-1 support, take a deep breath, and get over it. Eventually, when you hit the end of the script you will be transferred to a Tier-2 support, and can start to "use the big words".
Them: "Did you reboot your modem?"
You: "Yes, I rebooted the modem, and tried to ping the gateway, and got no response."
That way, the guy on the other end slowly comes to the realization that you actually know what you are doing, and are NOT simply trying to impress him.
Yes, this is time consuming, even time wasting. But in the long run you are more likely to get your problem fixed this way then by coming across all arrogant.
Final story: I've been on both sides of the phone - I frequently have to do Tier-3 type support on my projects (and sometimes Tier-1, before I cracked the whip over the service manager and told him in no uncertain terms that I would NOT accept his people dropping calls on me cold
www.eFax.com are spammers
What about the fact that users lie? I have had many many cases where a user calling in would not tell me what they had done to crash their computer / download the file / whatever.
Me: What were you doing when it crashed
Usr: Nothing, I was just typing a letter and it crashed.
[after I go to the user's desk on a different floor]
Me: ok, I it looks like there is a "printing..." box up. So you were trying to print?
Usr: No, it just crashed, why won't you get me a new computer!!!!
OR
Usr: I can't download the file into excel
Me: Ok, what do you see on your screen
Usr: What does that matter I want to download my statement!
Me: You see the underlined words that say "download file."
Usr: [immediately]Yeah sure.
Me: Click that
Usr: [slience]
Me: Well?
Usr: NOTHING HAPPENED!
Me: Ok, you didn't see a box pop up that said "save as"?
Usr: There isn't anything that says "download file!"
Me: You just said clicked it, right?
Usr: Look, just help me download my statement ok?
Me: Ok, can you scroll down?
Usr: Ok i found it.
Me: Um ok click "download"
Usr: [immediately]I did. Nothing happened!
Me: Uh you have to wait for the file to download.
Usr: Ok I clicked it. It says "downloading"
Me: Ok good
Usr: But excel's not opening! Look, ok, I just want to get this done. Give me your manager.
(Sidenote: customer's account manager confirmed later that this is a "problem" customer - i.e. stupidity is not a factor here).
Arg.
This is the highest single praise I've ever heard given to any OS ever. I'm honored to be using it.
That and can someone PLEASE tell me how to open a unix console without having to pull up the help screen first.
Ummmm.... I have no idea how to open Terminal via the help menu. But
Applications > Utilities > (double-click) Terminal.
Once Terminal is launched either [cntl]-click or clic-and-hold the mouse over the icon in the dock and select Keep in Dock. Now not only are you running Terminal it's stays in your dock forever so you can start it simply by clicking on it from the dock.
What could be easier? Well, you can simply drag the Terminal icon to the dock and it's little icon will lodge itself there. Same with a document. Have a document you open all the time? Drag it to the dock and it'll live there for you as well.
Want more? If you REALLY want access to a document or an application at anytime? Drag it to the toolbar at the top of any Finder window and it will live there. You can access it from any Finder window at any time.
For god's sake, I thought we established you had abandoned god with your choice of OS X. But anyway I've been using Macs for years, but I feel like a complete idiot using X
Okay - I'll be serious here for a second. Buy a book. OS X has packed with features and everyday I use it I like it more. It's wildly customizible and you can set it up any way you want - but you have to have the desire and the willingness to play with it or read a book and find out what you can do. I have friends whose set-ups are completely different then mine. They hide the harddrive(s) and work completely from columned file windows and they love it that way. (The interface of 10.3 is more like this.)
How many people have never even used View > Customize Toolbar in the Finder? Want the Path of a current folder or Get Info or Burn commands in the toolbar? They're there along with hide or text-only display options. Also check out Finder > Preferences for some other cool stuff you can do. Hiding Hard drives as I mentioned before or even change the languages you are using when you searching file contents.
OS X is amazingingly customizable but if you're not the kind of person who is going to find these things by tinkering and trying then think about buying a book and use someone else's work.
I've worked with people at ALL levels of Mac usage and I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who went from 7 to 8 to 9 and NEVER used any of the new features that were added to OS. They don't understand the power of aliases or they don't know that you can type in any window to automatically find the file you're looking for alphabetically. I always get "How'd you do that again?" when I'm just navigating the Finder or something simple. I guess it's a tribute to Apple that their OSes were so consistant that people could use each successive one without ever reading a manual but maybe the time has come to actually spend $20 or so to learn how to fully use the new OS.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Me: Please put the disk in the drive and close the door.
Him: Okay, wait a minute. (sound of walking and a door closing) Okay, the door is closed.
I got a letter from a customer which explains that another tech had asked her to send a copy of her data disk so we could fix it. Enclosed was a photocopy of said disk.
I got a letter from another customer. Enclosed was a floppy disk with "Bad Disk" scrawled over the label. The handwritten letter explained that he was furious because this was the third disk that he had received that had bad sectors on it. The paper on which the letter was written was a printout of chkdsk, which had clearly been run on his 20MB hard drive. After showing everyone, I wrote back and explained that his floppy was fine. Then I sent him back Bad Disk.
The longest call I ever took was from a guy who could run his programs, could back them up, could see his data in the list in his backup program, but couldn't find the data on his disk. I had him cd here and cd there, all to no avail. I finally caught on to his use of the phrase "I installed the program to my DOS" and had him look in his C:\DOS directory. Sure enough, he had installed all his software in the same folder.
So, my theory is that proficient use of a computer requires not only seeing what's in front of you, but also maintaining a model in your head of what's going on. In all these cases, the person misunderstood something fundamental about what they thought they were trying to do and consequently could not work out a correct sequence of actions.
I'm sure most slashdotters would recognize the experience of "seeing where you're going" (a folder, a dialog box, a menu in an application) before your fingers make it happen. If you are generally proficient with your tools, you probably are really irked by the experience of, for example, navigating up and down the menus of a new program (or an MS-Office upgrade where the menu items have been pointlessly shuffled); and you feel like you're getting somewhere with your new app/tool/whatever when you start memorizing the keystrokes to get where you're going, and you no longer actually read the menus most of the time.
This is where I think most "technically illiterate" people differ. They don't have that model, don't really think that way, and can't understand it if you try to explain it to them. For instance, my dad used to insist he couldn't use a computer because he didn't learn the New Math in school. He simply would not hear differently until his company made him use a browser to access his reports; he changed his tune pretty quickly, after that. :-) But if he hadn't
been forced, he never would have made what seems a pretty simple leap to most
of us. Whether it's biological or cultural, some people don't "get it" at a
deeper level than I think is generally realized.
Your post shows the amount of experience you have. It's very low.
Here's what I do:
Me: Hello, helpdesk.
user: I can't get on the internet.
Me: Okay, what happens when you try to get on the internet?
###
Notice I don't try to ask anything technical here, about anything the user probably doesn't know, like the operating system they use. My response gives much better results.
###
user: Um, it gives me an error
###
Responses vary. Sometimes they'll actually give me the error. If I wanted to know what the operating system was, I would know from the error. Like if they said "It says 'error 691'" I would know right away both that they're using windows, and that their password is wrong.
###
Me: What does the error say? I'd need that information to find out the problem.
### again, no technical knowledge required.
user: I don't have it in front of me right now, I closed that window.
Me: Okay, can you try to connect to the internet right now, or do you have to hang up the phone first?
user: I've got a second phone line. Lemme try this again.
###
It's not always this way, but I want to be somewhat brief. If the user answers that he has to hang up first, then I tell him that he should write down any error message he gets and call us back. Sometimes this is where he reveals he has ADSL, which again, is very helpful.
###
user: it says "The computer you are dialing is not answering" And I can hear a voice coming from the computer. Oh, it's starting to dial again.
###
Here we see why we didn't get the error message earlier. Oftentimes, the user will leave the error message on the screen before calling us, because they know they'll need it.
###
Me: Okay, click cancel, we don't need this window anymore. Can you see your "My Computer" icon?
###
Notice I said "your 'my computer' icon" not "my computer." Microsoft has always irritated me with that little naming convention.
###
user: No, I just see "This page cannot be displayed."
Me: Okay, close this window. Umm, for that matter, close anything you have open right now.
user: okay, all I can see now is my icons.
Me: Okay, double-click on the My Computer icon, and then open Dial up networking.
###
Two steps at a time, max. Even YOU couldn't follow instructions much more complex than that unless they were written down.
###
user: Okay. Now I've got "Make new connection," and "Internet Foo"
###
See, we've just established that the user has windows 95 or windows 98. If he had Me or XP, he wouldn't get this, and I would ask him what he *does* have in this window, and I could figure it out from there. At any rate, I now have the information in our database so we don't have to guess next time.
###
Me: Okay, now right-click on the "Internet Foo" icon...
user: right click?
Me: click with the button on the right side of the mouse. It should pop up a menu.
user: Okay, it says 'connect', blah blah blah
Me: Alright, now click properties at the bottom.
user: right click or left click?
Me: Unless I say otherwise, I always mean left click.
user: okay...
Me: we should see the phone number here. More than likely, we've got the area code in the area code box. Windows will just assume you don't need to dial that unless you're dialling long distance. Just type '604' at the beginning of the phone number in the phone number box.
###
Finish up the call, various troubles getting user to edit text snipped, close windows, haveaniceday.
The user I just walked through here is pretty typical, although perhaps a bit on the slow side and certainly not clued when it comes to computers. You'll notice there's no yelling, no frustration on my part, and most of all, it's not that hard.
I hope this helps.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Often enough they're considered "literate" if not even "power users". Why? Because someplace along the road they learned how to use MS Word or Excel.
To complicate things, they're usually considered computer "literate" by someone - completely on the basis of having once put together a tiny spreadsheet in Excel and changed a font or two in Word.
To me this is literacy in the small - about fourth grade level in literacy-as-reading terms.
The analogy is always made with cars. Many people drive and drive well - but they are often said to be "car illiterate" because they don'tunderstand the internal combustion engine and can not adjust a cars timing with a yardstick and an alarm clock. So, the argument then goes, why should anyone need to know anything more about computing?
I find this analogy unpersuasive. Think about it - almost everyone who drives is "driving literate" in some sense. They know the basics of how to drive a car (not entirely simple) and how a car works (enough anyway to know that you need to put gas in it and change the oil ) and usually things like how to change tires. They also know the basic mechanics/physics of driving, the general rules of the road, basic road etiquette, how to read a map (well, mostly) and so on. "Driving literacy" is really pretty complicated. A good driver who's had some years of driving experience in a variety of conditions knows a whole lot. (Admittedly, much of this is not usually taught - Driver's Ed notwithstanding.)
But even so, a car is a pretty simple device compared to a computer. Cars do one basic thing - carry their contents from one place to another (serious reductionism here!). Computers are complex and very flexible in comparison to cars. Most computers can run software that does many different (and sometimes very different) kinds of things (think Word vs Excel vs Blender vs Mozilla vs Big Complicated Game).
So, counting someone as "computer literate" because they can turn on a windows machine and use a specific version of word (or whatever) just doesn't work for me.
Computer literacy for me is much more. I'm not sure what I'd consider computer literate, but at a minimum it would involve :
The most important parts for me are the meta knowledge. Not knowing how to change a font, but knowing how to approach finding the information about how to change a font. This can not be taught simply by teaching a couple simple applications.
I've proposed "computer literacy" requirements in a couple of different universities that would at least go a step or two beyond MS Word (even if not to the meta-knowledge I mentioned above) and the bulk of the faculty have responded predictably. Most common is the attitude of "We dont know that. Our students don't need to.", next is "But why? All anyone ever needs to know