First off, I'd like to say Support Technicians are the most underrated workers of the IT industry. Who deals with the mass of phonecalls and angry customers, convincing them to stick with their ISP, when the boss won't listen to reason, won't purchase a backup server, and decides the server needs to be "upgraded" in the middle of the day (Yes, true story). Tech support deals with the most crap and get's paid the worse. Of course, the technical expertise between a programmer and a support technician is usually pretty far, but you don't hire a support tech for their technical skills, but rather their people skills. Sure, any idiot can learn how to use a piece of software, but you've also got to have patience, creativity (to come up with another way to explain a concept or task), patience, teaching skills, and yet again, patience.
Second, there is a difference between User Friendly and a tech sitting there telling a user to "RTFM". What User Friendly (and the old Bastard Operator from Hell) fulfills, is our need to vent our frustration of helping these people day to day! It get's to you at times, and how often has a tech just wanted to tell an user to pack up their computer and just return it? Teacher's would never make fun of their kids right in front of their face (well, then again..), but after class, you can hear all kinds of stories! (Having a elementary school teacher for a mother, I've heard plenty). People need a release, and just how often have you gotten away from someone/people from work, home, school, etc. and just let go and tell all kinds of anecdotes and stories about them?
Also, there is a difference between a clueless user and a stupid user. The user who doesn't realize that computers run on electricity is truly, stupid (well, I guess we can maybe forgive them if their from the bush and don't understand the concept of electricity itself). A lot of the time, clueless users will laugh at themselves along with you, once they realize their mistake.
The only other point I'd make, is about users who DON'T want to learn. They just expect it to work, and have no patience or willingness to put a little bit of time into using a computer and understanding just how it works. These are the people that truly disgust me, and make tech support more of a pain in the ass, than a frustration. I just remember the guy who was all upset because his netscape wasn't maximized, so he could see a window outlined behind it. When I told him he needed to pick up a book on how to use windows, since as an ISP, we didn't support the OS, he got really angry and started spouting off about how much he paid and that all he wants to do is get stock quotes, and otherwise he would't have the damn computer. Since his connection was perfectly fine, I should of just told him to go return his damn computer if he couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
Oh, and I also hate old men who've been programming microchannels for 15 years or something, and explain to YOU (the technician), how YOUR service must be broken since he couldn't of possibily made a mistake, while your sitting there staring at a whole wall of modems running smoothly, and his is the only phone call in the last hour. Arrogance breeds incompetance.
Either way, I'm just glad I'm not doing tech support anymore.
Feynman is one of the most underrated physicists (well, at least in the sense, that not many people know who he is). Einstein was a great man, but Feynman rates higher in my book (hell, on top of being a great physicist and an amazing lecturer, he was a damn good social engineer).
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First off, I'd like to say Support Technicians are the most underrated workers of the IT industry. Who deals with the mass of phonecalls and angry customers, convincing them to stick with their ISP, when the boss won't listen to reason, won't purchase a backup server, and decides the server needs to be "upgraded" in the middle of the day (Yes, true story). Tech support deals with the most crap and get's paid the worse. Of course, the technical expertise between a programmer and a support technician is usually pretty far, but you don't hire a support tech for their technical skills, but rather their people skills. Sure, any idiot can learn how to use a piece of software, but you've also got to have patience, creativity (to come up with another way to explain a concept or task), patience, teaching skills, and yet again, patience.
Second, there is a difference between User Friendly and a tech sitting there telling a user to "RTFM". What User Friendly (and the old Bastard Operator from Hell) fulfills, is our need to vent our frustration of helping these people day to day! It get's to you at times, and how often has a tech just wanted to tell an user to pack up their computer and just return it? Teacher's would never make fun of their kids right in front of their face (well, then again..), but after class, you can hear all kinds of stories! (Having a elementary school teacher for a mother, I've heard plenty). People need a release, and just how often have you gotten away from someone/people from work, home, school, etc. and just let go and tell all kinds of anecdotes and stories about them?
Also, there is a difference between a clueless user and a stupid user. The user who doesn't realize that computers run on electricity is truly, stupid (well, I guess we can maybe forgive them if their from the bush and don't understand the concept of electricity itself). A lot of the time, clueless users will laugh at themselves along with you, once they realize their mistake.
The only other point I'd make, is about users who DON'T want to learn. They just expect it to work, and have no patience or willingness to put a little bit of time into using a computer and understanding just how it works. These are the people that truly disgust me, and make tech support more of a pain in the ass, than a frustration. I just remember the guy who was all upset because his netscape wasn't maximized, so he could see a window outlined behind it. When I told him he needed to pick up a book on how to use windows, since as an ISP, we didn't support the OS, he got really angry and started spouting off about how much he paid and that all he wants to do is get stock quotes, and otherwise he would't have the damn computer. Since his connection was perfectly fine, I should of just told him to go return his damn computer if he couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
Oh, and I also hate old men who've been programming microchannels for 15 years or something, and explain to YOU (the technician), how YOUR service must be broken since he couldn't of possibily made a mistake, while your sitting there staring at a whole wall of modems running smoothly, and his is the only phone call in the last hour. Arrogance breeds incompetance.
Either way, I'm just glad I'm not doing tech support anymore.
Feynman is one of the most underrated physicists (well, at least in the sense, that not many people know who he is). Einstein was a great man, but Feynman rates higher in my book (hell, on top of being a great physicist and an amazing lecturer, he was a damn good social engineer).