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The Frustrations of Supporting Users In Remote Offices
Esther Schindler writes "You're not alone in your struggle against people who think a shell is something you hold to your ear," writes Carol Pinchefsky. "Other techies are out there supporting users in remote offices, fighting the good fight against computer- and user-related mishaps – or at least tolerating user frustration with a modicum of grace." One example she gives is a tech support person whose systems in Brazil went down — during Carnival: "...We had to wait more than a week for the locals to sober up enough to reconnect the line. In the end, I had to walk a tech (who did not know the system) through the process step by step via an interpreter. Of course, the interpreter was not technical. So it was kind of like explaining to your mom to tell your grandfather (who is hard of hearing) how to do something while she is on the phone and he is across the room from her."
Users in remote offices are the best users! They can email, they can call, and they all get a ticket opened for their issue. But they can't come make a scene in your department (or worse, at your own desk) because "the data pull I asked for last week is clearly out of date, my customer from yesterday isn't listed" etc. I would much rather support users via email, via ticketing, and via phone if necessary, than support them in person.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Brazilian-style may be better
IT needs to let go of PEBKAC and ID-10-T errors. Your users have difficult jobs and they probably don't want to deal with you any more than you want to deal with them. They probably aren't "bothering" you for fun. If they are, you're doing your job well.
Yes, they can be dense. But guess what -- they are human and so are you! They make mistakes. So do you!
I enjoy The IT Crowd and BOFH, but those are fantasies and should remain such.
There are many reasons to show appreciation for the work your coworkers do. The most important is that without them, you may be lucky enough to find yourself in their shoes.
What a useless and whinging article! You find remote support frustrating? Some of us recall the days before remote support was an option, having to hop in a car and drive somewhere every time a problem occurred. Remote support is a f*cking godsend. Don't work in support if you can't handle a bit of frustration.
For me it's important to keep in mind, I get paid the same regardless, so it's not worth getting twisted up about it. Communicate slowly and clearly, use simple instructions, ask politely for feedback (what do you see on your screen now?) and you'll eventually get there. Unless your remote user is trying to defuse a bomb, how long this takes probably doesn't matter much in the long run. So relax.
Once, at 3AM or so, modem out of commission, no way to log in, I talked an operator through editing a backup script that another admin had broken. (Made a change, didn't test it.) It took a long time, but we got it done and I didn't have to drive in. In his favor, the operator was excellent at following instructions and telling me what exactly he was seeing on the screen.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
all major cities have some form of IT support available on an adhoc basis for remote hands - what is the problem? ping off an email to the local LUG for supplier recommendations...
What a useless and whinging article! You find remote support frustrating?
It's more than that. these "support" people find their "users" objectionable - the people for whom they serve and the reason they have a job.
Many if not most people use computers for a varying scale of applications. Most of these people are not "computer professionals". If you are in "support", your job is to "support" these people. If you can't handle that, it's time for a new job.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No, your problems are not "people who think a shell is something you hold to your ear"; your bigger problems are people who *think* they know something, specially when in positions of power, or the miraculous consultants management brings him, that where captured by the consulting firm as rookies (because you know, rookies dont have vices and are better to "reprogram") that think they are the best thing since sliced bread, but only know how to use expensive suits, spew pretty reports and shrink wrap what bobs that hates you tells them during the "discover/gathering facts" phase.
Not just for wielding the clue bat. A camera to obviate the endless "what's on the screen" back-and-forth would often shorten the pain drastically.
So it was kind of like explaining to your mom to tell your grandfather (who is hard of hearing) how to do something while she is on the phone and he is across the room from her.
This assumes that your grandfather is technical and your mom is not. Even then, your mom can just repeat what you say word for word loudly enough for grandpa to hear. I think a better analogy is to say it's like trying to work with someone that speaks another language, when the interpreter is not a technical person.
When conducting remote support, the cell phone is an invaluable tool. For one, you can talk to someone directly as you walk them through the wiring closet / rack if needed. Most importantly, is the ability for them to take photos and send them via SMS. Video capture can be important if you suspect activity lights are wonky (failing switch, rare but happens). But most important, you are providing them to tools to help you dive remotely and be self-sufficient. Remember the phrase "help me, help you".
Life is not for the lazy.
but consider yourself lucky someone wants or needs your help. This industry and capitalism's desire for endless efficiency and profit means a fair few of us reading your post are sitting at home without a job at all.
I'd gladly sit on the phone through a translator to fix something, infact I'd be inclined to think you're probably at a medium sized business or smaller if you're dealing with something like that, so it's probably within your power to do some pretty interesting and dare I say "cowboy-ish" stuff. Once a business reaches a certain size, your hands are constantly tied for experimenting or learning.
Meanwhile, yeah I'm here in my pajamas still at midday but my bank account won't last forever.
This article really brings to light the fact that some people seem to require perfection to the extent that they cannot see life as it is, but only how it's supposed to be. There is no way to ease their frustration.
If you work in support, you're going to eventually end up in a situation where there is a server that needs to be addressed, but there is no phone in that room, and so you end up with this same sort of scenario (talking through someone). You should probably just express your frustrations with your work mates, blow off some steam, try to laugh, but then forget about it.
Lots of people in the IT world seem to feel that their ability/knowledge should allow them to get frustrated when things don't go smoothly. Hell one reason that I have a successful IT business is due to the fact that I'm able to cope with people who need my services. I make sure that I do it in a way that makes them feel better. That way whenever there's some PC problem at a site, no one there hates to have to call me, and then bombard me with criticism once I get there.
Focus on the solution and the problem goes away. Make sure that the client is focused on what's going right, and not what's going wrong.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
My first experience of remote tech support was in 1986, when one of our systems in Bahrain needed support. The only communications available were phone or Telex. With timezone differences, we used Telex. I had to anticipate what might happen, describe what to look for, detail what to type, etc. without knowing if they'd get it right until the return Telex the next day. One of the trickier bits was describing what keys to press, as Telex had a far more limited character set than the computer keyboard. I would spend the first half of a message defining what keys I meant. Later experience showed me that users tend to lie: "Would you check that the cable is plugged in, please?" 3 microseconds later "Yep!" So I started resorting to "Please unplug the cable" 10 seconds later "OK". "Now plug it in again, please, and make sure it is the right way up and all the way in".
One example she gives is a tech support person whose systems in Brazil went down — during Carnival: "...We had to wait more than a week for the locals to sober up enough to reconnect the line. In the end, I had to walk a tech (who did not know the system) through the process step by step via an interpreter. Of course, the interpreter was not technical. So it was kind of like explaining to your mom to tell your grandfather (who is hard of hearing) how to do something while she is on the phone and he is across the room from her."
Ok, that's just... I don't even know what it is... ethnocentric? It's stupid... not everyone in Brazil gets wasted during carnival. Businesses still run, things still work. If you had a line go down for a week without repair, that wasn't your remote users fault. That was your businesses fault for having a shit contract. Where we work we have tens of thousands of data and voice connections in every remote area you can imagine and there's no way something could go out for a week without a very good excuse like the building burnt down, or there was a flood. Even then we'd find a way around the problem temporarily. It's been more than one time I've kept a company in business with Cat5 strung through some trees.
And the language thing? Give me an Fing break. I had to support a doctor in India that did not speak english, so I made a wild guess, hit the directory of the hospital and looked for an American sounding name. Sure enough it was an American and he was nice, helped translate. I sent him detailed instructions and he helped walk the other doctor through it. That's our Job If I'm a window washer, I'm not going to complain when I come across a dirty one.
We may have to reboot it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Is this stuff that matters?!
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Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Applecare tech support, with a phone call from a tele-sign language interpreter.
Talking to someone who is being filmed turning your words into sign language, which is sent over a shitty connection to a user looking for support on the computer that happens to be running the sign language call software.
Exercise in futility. And illegal to hang up.
Calmly try your best for 40 hours/week or whatever you agreed to. Explain limitations and possible solutions, like user training and shifting parts of infrastructure to where you are in a better position to maintain it. Then set the limits, but don't be rude. You don't pay the company's bills, your users do.
to explain that the blue cable goes into the port with the nice big blue sticker, the yellow to yellow and green to green. In person because the email, phone calls and skype were apparently not enough.
Then back to the airport and another 12 hour return home.
... for not having contacted a local tech contractor with some english speaking skills that could help. Someone that comes in a couple hours now and then to solve any issues.
Remote tech support is all fine and dandy, but sometimes you do need (technically literate) hands and eyes on the ground. I've taken care of servers on a different continent - 99% of the time I just ssh-ed in. The 1% I've had someone local - and technical! - drive in with a laptop and help.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Many, many years ago (1986 or so?) we had a branch oil exploration office in Iran, surveying new oil fields close to the border with Iraq.
Getting any kind of computer gear in or or out of the country was "difficult", and the best possible data connection was an extremely expensive 256 kbit/s satellite line.
One day I was told to help, over a bad phone line, a guy down in Teheran whose PcDos computer had crashed:
I was able to figure out that his crash had modified/overwritten the Boot Block on his hard drive, but that he did have a bootable Dos diskette available, so I sat for about 45 minutes on the phone, talking him through the DEBUG commands needed to load the boot block and manually modify it back to how it should have been, then write it back.
It worked on the first attempt. :-)
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
She works with a whole system in Brazil via an non technical interpreter? Did it ever occur to her to learn Portuguese language?
This is the NEW economy, pal. There's no support. But no one cares either because all executives are compensated according to how LITTLE they spend even if, especially if, the job done is shit.
Sounds like you missed a chance to go to Brazil for carnivale
I had to deal with a remote customer whose person on site does not speak English, by getting him to enter UNIX shell commands. His native language (and mine) was Arabic.
What I did was to tell him what Arabic key to press so that the English equivalent would be the one sent to the shell.
We were lucky that his Arabic keyboard layout was the same as mine. That was not a given in those days (Late 80s, early 90s), but we lucked out.
He was describing to me the output in English (vertical bar, vertical bar with a circle at the bottom, ...etc).
It worked out and we solved the problem in less than an hour.
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I disagree.
For your company, remote users are the most expensive to support. It often takes several minutes to try to make the user understand what you want them to do, and to do it PROPERLY, where locally, you could just go to a user's desk and fix the problem in seconds.
When dealing with local users, you get to use *ALL* of your senses to diagnose a problem. Does the computer feel abnormally hot? Does it smell like something burning? Can you see that the little tab on the ethernet cable is broken off?
Likewise, users on the other end of the phone are trying to describe a problem to you using only their voice, and they don't know the jargon: "There is this THING on my browser and it won't go away."
What is this THING that they are talking about? A window? An icon? A toolbar?
All of these factors use up a lot of time, and time costs money.
Also, isolating yourself from the users limits the quality of your work. If you work with them, and see how they use their computers, it will give you a better overall view which helps you support them even better in the future.
... should STFU.
Professionals walk a fine line between dealing with distraught users and causing World War III.
Doing your job in a way where you get invited to lunch with your other coworkers is the right way to do things.
People who call users "idiots" are "jerks".
So it is written, so let it be done.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I got so tired of supporting remote offices that I outsourced that task to a remote office.
Table-ized A.I.