Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Service Providers When You're an IT Pro?

New submitter username440 writes: So, a lot of us will have been here: You have a problem with your ISP, cable TV, cellphone whatever technology and you need to call the provider. Ugh. Foreign call centers, inane fault-finding flowcharts (yes, I have turned it off and on again) and all the other cruft that you have to wade through to get to someone with the knowledge to determine that YOU in fact also have a degree of knowledge and have a real problem.

Recently I had a problem with my ISP, where the ISP-provided "modem" — it's a router — would lock up at least 3 times per day. I had router logs, many hundreds of Google results for that model and release of hardware showing this as a common problem, and simply wanted the ISP to provide a new router (it's a managed device). I replaced the router with a spare Airport Extreme and the problems disappeared, to be replaced with a warning from the ISP that they could't access my managed device" and the connection is provided contingent to using THIER router. However my point was to prove that their router is at fault.

How do you fare when trying to get through to a service provider that they actually DO know something in the field? How do you cut through the frontline support bull*hit and talk to someone who knows what they are doing? Should there be a codeword for this scenario?

Comments

Re: Codeword

[geoskd]

I am an IT professional, and even I make simple mistakes sometimes. There is a reason rubber-duck debugging is a thing. Tier 1 is a rubber duck. Deal with it, you self-important asshole.

I met a jackass like you once. I told my CIO to do a little house cleaning because if I ever ran into him or another like him it was the CIOs ass I would put on the street. IT is a cost center. If they cost me a little more than they need to, nobodys perfect, If they cost me my time, I get very unhappy. If they cost me customers, thats unforgivable.

My time, my managers time, and especially operations time is vastly more important than your time. If that weren't true, I would fix problems myself, or hire for operations positions that could do so. The whole point of having an IT department is so that I can save money by *not* having my operators and managers dealing with IT related problems. When they have to spend their time anyway on the phone with some dumb shit like you, then what benefit am I getting by having two peoples time spent on a simple problem?

OTOH if one of my managers is so incompetent to be repeatedly calling the help desk for dumb ass tier 1 shit, then I have to wonder why I employ them at all. I expect my managers to be at least functionally literate with a computer. If by some chance they aren't, they better have one hell of a talent for something else that I need a lot of...

The entire point of employees is to get the job done as quickly, effectively and cheaply as possible. When a tier 1 tech goes through a dumb ass script without showing the least ability to trouble shoot on their own, then they are costing me more than they save. I could just hand the damn script out to all of the manager, have them read it themselves, and fire the whole damn IT department. You dont have a fucking clue how business actually works do you?