It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
From the perspective of a company wishing to save money on tech support, wasting customers time with tier 1 is absolutely the dumbest thing to do. The process should instead be geared towards an overall reduction in tier 1 calls. These calls are a waste of everyones time. First, examine your call center statistics. What are you getting the most calls about. Look hard and long for ways to modify your product to eliminate these calls. If you're company is getting 100 of these calls a week, its worth paying for an entire engineers salary for a year to fix just that one issue in the new designs. Properly done, the number of customer calls to the help desk will decrease over time saving a great deal of money. There are intangible benefits as well, such as increased customer satisfaction (A customer who never has to call the help desk in the first place is going to be far more satisfied than one who calls, no matter how well the help desk deals with the problem). This translates into free advertising in the form of satisfied customer, and a reduction in unsatisfied customers telling people your company is shite.
That's another ironic truth; the company with the least number of issues is going to have the least experienced tech support people, the ones which have the greatest number of issues are going to have the tech support people who are familiar with your problem since they've seen it a thousand times.
They may be angry at one of the 7 or 8 other customers they are chatting with at the same time as you.
I'm pretty sure I'm not capable of doing their job.
Somewhere there is a tech support which doesn't actually have any employees, just hooks up the customers calling in to each other.
I had a friend come up and visit me. We were stumbling around the property and rather drunk. We discovered a couple of trees that needed to be trimmed and I really did not want to work around power lines. So I called the power company and told them about the trees. (We have heavy snow and ice storms.)
They did not show up.
My friend returns about a year later and we were talking about the trees - and also drunk again. So we shambled down and took a look at the trees. This was not effective. My buddy, bless his soul, asks me to call the power company on my cell. He gets on the phone and gets an employee. He then uses his thick Bostonian accent and says, "I just moved here from Boston. I may be a little drunk but I have these two trees that need cutting out in front of my property and I just bought a chainsaw. I was wondering if you could give me any advice?"
The tree-cutting service was there to trim the trees on Monday.
for maximum effectiveness, replace "chainsaw" with "shotgun".
Ha. Like on the first episode of Scorpion, where smart guy is looking for a techie via the video feed from the airport air traffic control room; "You there; with the glasses and the short sleeved shirt!"
Based on the behavior of the average ISP, all of the arrogance and and disrespect that those of us can muster here is WELL JUSTIFIED.
Well, we get what we want. Once upon a time, AT&T was a reliable company whose technical staff was highly skilled and took serious pride in their abilities and in their ability to service the customer. The downside of that was that equipment tended to be conservatively designed, and the emphasis was on reliability not on innovation. Well, "we" decided that that was because it was a monopoly and was stifling not just technological innovation, having given us nothing more noteworthy than Bell Labs, but more importantly business innovation. So now the phone biz with landline and cellular has a bunch of different providers peddling phones from a dozen manufacturers over bandwidth leased from a bunch of different suppliers; we can get whatever color we want in different sizes and a trillion different apps written by all sorts of people with no documentation; and none of it works right. And AT&T is a shortcut for inferior service, and Bell Labs is no longer interested in basic science.
I think that my worst experience with this was with a new HP printer. I was on the phone with one person for 30-40 minutes, until I was transferred to the next level. I spent 30-40 minutes with the next level person answering the very same questions. It was not only a waste of my time, it was also a waste of the technicians' time.
Widening the target pool a bit; all the companies that have you punch in your customer/account number while in the phone tree, so you can then repeat the exact same number verbally when the person picks it up. Haha, jokes on me.
Sometimes that works, not always. One time I was really happy to be an "expert" user to diagnose a problem with my connection.
A few years ago I had a very very weird connection problem. I could browse, download my e-mails (IMAP), and send out small e-mails. I could not send out larger e-mails (more than about a dozen words and the SMTP upload would stall), nor log on to web sites (the login POST would get stuck indefinitely).
Some serious analyses from my side showed that I could only send out about 190 bytes in one go (using traceroute and varying package sizes I found the exact size). Any larger outgoing data amount would fail. Now try to explain that to the phone support (I got them to replace their equipment at my home), or even the support guy that came to replace the equipment. After replacing he used his laptop to show browsing works - the standard test, and usually just fine.
I wasn't so sure, so did my own testing before I let him go, and quickly found out it still was not working. Then I actually showed the guy my traceroute problem using my own laptop, that one packet size works but add a byte and it fails, and then he finally understood the problem was not solved.
The next day I saw a van of the ISP parked at the connection box across the street for a few hours. After that, everything worked again. I have still no idea what could possibly have caused such a problem to pop up.
My personal nightmare complaints (sometimes reality) involve the deteriorating and aging copper which is the major asset of the cable company, and the landline phone company too. Not an easy to diagnose hard failure, but intermittent crappy connections, like static on the phone lines once in a while, that in my fevered imagination result from a particular condition of wetness or dryness or temperature in the deteriorating insulation, or connections, or something similar in the lines that comes and goes......
I have actually worked in support. A phone call is the worst possible medium for resolving a technical issue. Either email or chat is far superior. So the reason you are treated like a moron when you phone in, is because you are a moron. Furthermore, since dealing with morons is unpleasant, only the dregs and newbies work the phone lines, and are quickly promoted to chat/email as soon as they display the least bit of competence. Nearly all companies offer chat as an option, since is both cheaper and more effective. So stop using the phone.
One problem is that there are actually a lot of calls which are most effectively answered by a moron, the RTFM type questions, hypothetical questions of the type "if I leave my laptop plugged in all the time will the batteries explode?", etc.; the real lack of acuity is the ability of the first line personnel to recognize quickly that the problem needs to be escalated.
Honestly, as a last resort, it's not a bad idea. I have a fair amount of ESD test gear at work, including a bunch of static discharge guns and the like that can be dialed up to some crazy levels. I was once stuck in a situation much as you - they controlled the modem/router and it was crapping out every few hours, and they were the only game in town for non-dialup access (this was 15ish years ago). I'd already replaced it with a spare that did not have the issue, but since it wasn't provisioned, the only place I could go was their internal pages.
I spent probably two hours going through L1 support, L2 support, and then had them tell me that "oh, sometimes the boxes just do that". So I took the box to work, fried the shit out of it, plugged it back in to let it power up and do real damage to itself now that half the fet gates were probably cooked, and then called them back to tell them that the box had finally crapped out and started smoking. They promptly sent me a new one, and told me "must have been lightning or some sort of power surge."
Yup, a power surge indeed.
That kinda thing happens in the automotive biz a lot. Electronic ignition modules on Fords way back when that would crap out when they got hot, for instance, but the company was strongarming the dealers on warranty replacement. A little creative wiring to the wall socket and the intermittent fault becomes much less intermittent.....
I believe you overestimate the dedication of a tech support drone at any level.
Certainly there isn't as much motivation for a company to supply copious easy to access competent free tech support after the purchase as the user would like to see.
open the box up, find a likely looking component, apply 110 volts, call up the company and complain it suddenly stopped working. That's probably overkill, you could probably just open it up and cut all the wires, they probably don't autopsy each one.
It isn't YET a police state. We are close, but we haven't reached the point of no return. When the US actually becomes a police state, it will become illegal to even question authority. I can still question authority without going to prison. And, that is what all the "terrorism" bullshit really is. We are some indeterminate distance from two or three laws finally being passed that permits the local prosecutors to set up a kangaroo court, declare us to be terrorists, and have us shipped off to the FEMA camps that the militia groups are so concerned with. It's one thing for the feds to do it in rare instances, and cover it up. It is quite another thing for local prosecutors to do it brazenly.
Secret agents in Russia didn't prevent a nuclear war. That's ridiculous! The decision to attack or not attack was a political decision, made by politicians in the public performance of their roles. What, we think a spy dropped something in a politician's drink to make them feel more friendly to their enemies on the day they were set to deliver the "blow them up" command? Sheesh.
Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear war once. And he was not a secret agent.
"Good job Mr. Bond, once again you have averted nuclear oblivion and saved the world!"
I will withhold my judgement on this until they release verifiable proof. It seems like their even disclosing the fact they know if the Russians and Chinese had access would be considered a state secret.
Yeah. In any such situation, in any organization, whenever something like this happens, every person or department that has some embarrassing skeleton squirreled away in the closet trots it out and blames it on whatever the current crisis is.
As nice as that all is, I still don't see the part where anybody claims to have been refused research grants because of not believing in AGW. All the indirect debates between Krauthammer and Bill Nye, etc. are irrelevant towards proof of that one simple assertion.
Are you suggesting that the only threats we should see as real are those that can be perceived by common plebs with inferior mental capabilities?
Ah, what a beautiful statement of totalitarian ideology: people should be governed by their superiors for their own good.
To answer your question: you can "see" whatever threats you like. However, centuries have shown that it is better to let those with "inferior mental capabilities" make their own mistakes than to give too much power to a ruling elite.
And you should be grateful, because I guarantee you, you wouldn't be part of the ruling elite.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's wrath, was the rise of Naziism in Germany forced upon the masses by a ruling elite, or was it the product of mistaken decisions by the less-than-elite masses? (Not a rhetorical question, I could argue both ways, like to hear other's thoughts)
Apparently the human mind is also lacking in the grammar department. " bequeathed unto we humans" contains a prepositional phrase, the object of which should be in the... wait for it.... objective case. Thus the correct version is "bequeathed unto us humans". Get the simple stuff right and the more complex will follow.
How do you know it wasn't supposed to read "wee humans"?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The "the climate has gone through rapid change before therefore AGW is bogus" argument is parallel to "grizzlies have been known to be prone to sudden unprovoked violent attacks on humans before, so there is really no additional risk if you go ahead and kick one"
A transit from an icehouse to a greenhouse phase would likely involve profound (and potentially destructive) changes for human civilization, but the planet has undergone this cycle many times before, and we are profoundly foolish to think that our impact has been significant - it has not.
Well, thanks for telling us. I'll inform the IPCC.
I'm not anti-science, am a creationist, never owned a gun, am very good with math and independent politically.
The earth's temperature has NOT been going up the last 15 years. But otherwise I agree with your post. We are getting there as far as stopping the burning of fossil fuels which aren't unlimited and are dirty to burn. But a recent study showed that those who are railing about all this stuff typically have the highest electric bills and tend to drive large SUVs. Al Gore has been accused of this as well, so most of them seem to be hypocrites that want control over others rather than wanting a solution.
You mean that people who are concerned over a credible threat to society and civilization are more interested in a global solution that might actually do something to solve the problem than in sacrificing themselves with no discernable effect, just to prove their credibility and to get some of that "holier than thou" feeling that is more often felt by those who feel actually holier? Gee, what a lower form of humanity.
As for Gore, he buys carbon offsets, drives hybrid vehicles, and retrofitted his Nashville mansion to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification by upgrading windows, lighting, appliances, insulation, etc. and installing a geothermal system and 33 solar panels. Not sure what any of that has to do with the reality of AGW as a threat, but if that doesn't dispel your skepticism, then perhaps the fact that Ed Begley Jr. does live an extreme energy conservationist life style will presumably convince you to believe. Not to mention the famously conservationist construction of Bush's ranch in Crawford.
Also to your point about nuclear being finite... Yes, but not in any meaningful time period. If you go out to when we would run out of accessible nuclear material on earth, you might as well point out that there is no such thing as a renewable energy source as the sun itself is finite.
That's what they were saying about petroleum a hundred years ago.
Sadly the way it works is that Bill Nye goes on TV to explain why a snowstorm in Boston isn't evidence against global warming, but then tweets a mountain in the Rockies that doesn't have snow on it as evidence FOR global warming. You can't have it both ways. Science doesn't accept anecdotes as data regardless of it supports or refutes your hypothesis. If you want to say "weather is not climate" than you shouldn't be using weather as a rallying point for your climate cause.
True, but..... the plural of "anecdote" is "data".
Slashdot Mirror
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
From the perspective of a company wishing to save money on tech support, wasting customers time with tier 1 is absolutely the dumbest thing to do. The process should instead be geared towards an overall reduction in tier 1 calls. These calls are a waste of everyones time. First, examine your call center statistics. What are you getting the most calls about. Look hard and long for ways to modify your product to eliminate these calls. If you're company is getting 100 of these calls a week, its worth paying for an entire engineers salary for a year to fix just that one issue in the new designs. Properly done, the number of customer calls to the help desk will decrease over time saving a great deal of money. There are intangible benefits as well, such as increased customer satisfaction (A customer who never has to call the help desk in the first place is going to be far more satisfied than one who calls, no matter how well the help desk deals with the problem). This translates into free advertising in the form of satisfied customer, and a reduction in unsatisfied customers telling people your company is shite.
That's another ironic truth; the company with the least number of issues is going to have the least experienced tech support people, the ones which have the greatest number of issues are going to have the tech support people who are familiar with your problem since they've seen it a thousand times.
They may be angry at one of the 7 or 8 other customers they are chatting with at the same time as you. I'm pretty sure I'm not capable of doing their job.
Somewhere there is a tech support which doesn't actually have any employees, just hooks up the customers calling in to each other.
I had a friend come up and visit me. We were stumbling around the property and rather drunk. We discovered a couple of trees that needed to be trimmed and I really did not want to work around power lines. So I called the power company and told them about the trees. (We have heavy snow and ice storms.)
They did not show up.
My friend returns about a year later and we were talking about the trees - and also drunk again. So we shambled down and took a look at the trees. This was not effective. My buddy, bless his soul, asks me to call the power company on my cell. He gets on the phone and gets an employee. He then uses his thick Bostonian accent and says, "I just moved here from Boston. I may be a little drunk but I have these two trees that need cutting out in front of my property and I just bought a chainsaw. I was wondering if you could give me any advice?"
The tree-cutting service was there to trim the trees on Monday.
for maximum effectiveness, replace "chainsaw" with "shotgun".
https://xkcd.com/806/
Ha. Like on the first episode of Scorpion, where smart guy is looking for a techie via the video feed from the airport air traffic control room; "You there; with the glasses and the short sleeved shirt!"
Based on the behavior of the average ISP, all of the arrogance and and disrespect that those of us can muster here is WELL JUSTIFIED.
Well, we get what we want. Once upon a time, AT&T was a reliable company whose technical staff was highly skilled and took serious pride in their abilities and in their ability to service the customer. The downside of that was that equipment tended to be conservatively designed, and the emphasis was on reliability not on innovation. Well, "we" decided that that was because it was a monopoly and was stifling not just technological innovation, having given us nothing more noteworthy than Bell Labs, but more importantly business innovation. So now the phone biz with landline and cellular has a bunch of different providers peddling phones from a dozen manufacturers over bandwidth leased from a bunch of different suppliers; we can get whatever color we want in different sizes and a trillion different apps written by all sorts of people with no documentation; and none of it works right. And AT&T is a shortcut for inferior service, and Bell Labs is no longer interested in basic science.
I think that my worst experience with this was with a new HP printer. I was on the phone with one person for 30-40 minutes, until I was transferred to the next level. I spent 30-40 minutes with the next level person answering the very same questions. It was not only a waste of my time, it was also a waste of the technicians' time.
Widening the target pool a bit; all the companies that have you punch in your customer/account number while in the phone tree, so you can then repeat the exact same number verbally when the person picks it up. Haha, jokes on me.
Sometimes that works, not always. One time I was really happy to be an "expert" user to diagnose a problem with my connection.
A few years ago I had a very very weird connection problem. I could browse, download my e-mails (IMAP), and send out small e-mails. I could not send out larger e-mails (more than about a dozen words and the SMTP upload would stall), nor log on to web sites (the login POST would get stuck indefinitely).
Some serious analyses from my side showed that I could only send out about 190 bytes in one go (using traceroute and varying package sizes I found the exact size). Any larger outgoing data amount would fail. Now try to explain that to the phone support (I got them to replace their equipment at my home), or even the support guy that came to replace the equipment. After replacing he used his laptop to show browsing works - the standard test, and usually just fine.
I wasn't so sure, so did my own testing before I let him go, and quickly found out it still was not working. Then I actually showed the guy my traceroute problem using my own laptop, that one packet size works but add a byte and it fails, and then he finally understood the problem was not solved.
The next day I saw a van of the ISP parked at the connection box across the street for a few hours. After that, everything worked again. I have still no idea what could possibly have caused such a problem to pop up.
My personal nightmare complaints (sometimes reality) involve the deteriorating and aging copper which is the major asset of the cable company, and the landline phone company too. Not an easy to diagnose hard failure, but intermittent crappy connections, like static on the phone lines once in a while, that in my fevered imagination result from a particular condition of wetness or dryness or temperature in the deteriorating insulation, or connections, or something similar in the lines that comes and goes......
I have actually worked in support. A phone call is the worst possible medium for resolving a technical issue. Either email or chat is far superior. So the reason you are treated like a moron when you phone in, is because you are a moron. Furthermore, since dealing with morons is unpleasant, only the dregs and newbies work the phone lines, and are quickly promoted to chat/email as soon as they display the least bit of competence. Nearly all companies offer chat as an option, since is both cheaper and more effective. So stop using the phone.
One problem is that there are actually a lot of calls which are most effectively answered by a moron, the RTFM type questions, hypothetical questions of the type "if I leave my laptop plugged in all the time will the batteries explode?", etc.; the real lack of acuity is the ability of the first line personnel to recognize quickly that the problem needs to be escalated.
Honestly, as a last resort, it's not a bad idea. I have a fair amount of ESD test gear at work, including a bunch of static discharge guns and the like that can be dialed up to some crazy levels. I was once stuck in a situation much as you - they controlled the modem/router and it was crapping out every few hours, and they were the only game in town for non-dialup access (this was 15ish years ago). I'd already replaced it with a spare that did not have the issue, but since it wasn't provisioned, the only place I could go was their internal pages.
I spent probably two hours going through L1 support, L2 support, and then had them tell me that "oh, sometimes the boxes just do that". So I took the box to work, fried the shit out of it, plugged it back in to let it power up and do real damage to itself now that half the fet gates were probably cooked, and then called them back to tell them that the box had finally crapped out and started smoking. They promptly sent me a new one, and told me "must have been lightning or some sort of power surge."
Yup, a power surge indeed.
That kinda thing happens in the automotive biz a lot. Electronic ignition modules on Fords way back when that would crap out when they got hot, for instance, but the company was strongarming the dealers on warranty replacement. A little creative wiring to the wall socket and the intermittent fault becomes much less intermittent.....
2) actually wants to help you solve the problen
I believe you overestimate the dedication of a tech support drone at any level.
Certainly there isn't as much motivation for a company to supply copious easy to access competent free tech support after the purchase as the user would like to see.
open the box up, find a likely looking component, apply 110 volts, call up the company and complain it suddenly stopped working. That's probably overkill, you could probably just open it up and cut all the wires, they probably don't autopsy each one.
If the Opposition had in fact gotten access to this stuff, wouldn't they keep that fact top secret? How did the US/UK find out about it?
It isn't YET a police state. We are close, but we haven't reached the point of no return. When the US actually becomes a police state, it will become illegal to even question authority. I can still question authority without going to prison. And, that is what all the "terrorism" bullshit really is. We are some indeterminate distance from two or three laws finally being passed that permits the local prosecutors to set up a kangaroo court, declare us to be terrorists, and have us shipped off to the FEMA camps that the militia groups are so concerned with. It's one thing for the feds to do it in rare instances, and cover it up. It is quite another thing for local prosecutors to do it brazenly.
Obama! Benghazi! Helter Skelter's coming down!
Secret agents in Russia didn't prevent a nuclear war. That's ridiculous! The decision to attack or not attack was a political decision, made by politicians in the public performance of their roles. What, we think a spy dropped something in a politician's drink to make them feel more friendly to their enemies on the day they were set to deliver the "blow them up" command? Sheesh.
Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear war once. And he was not a secret agent.
"Good job Mr. Bond, once again you have averted nuclear oblivion and saved the world!"
I will withhold my judgement on this until they release verifiable proof. It seems like their even disclosing the fact they know if the Russians and Chinese had access would be considered a state secret.
Yeah. In any such situation, in any organization, whenever something like this happens, every person or department that has some embarrassing skeleton squirreled away in the closet trots it out and blames it on whatever the current crisis is.
http://www.akdart.com/warming5...
As nice as that all is, I still don't see the part where anybody claims to have been refused research grants because of not believing in AGW. All the indirect debates between Krauthammer and Bill Nye, etc. are irrelevant towards proof of that one simple assertion.
Ah, what a beautiful statement of totalitarian ideology: people should be governed by their superiors for their own good.
To answer your question: you can "see" whatever threats you like. However, centuries have shown that it is better to let those with "inferior mental capabilities" make their own mistakes than to give too much power to a ruling elite.
And you should be grateful, because I guarantee you, you wouldn't be part of the ruling elite.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's wrath, was the rise of Naziism in Germany forced upon the masses by a ruling elite, or was it the product of mistaken decisions by the less-than-elite masses? (Not a rhetorical question, I could argue both ways, like to hear other's thoughts)
Apparently the human mind is also lacking in the grammar department. " bequeathed unto we humans" contains a prepositional phrase, the object of which should be in the ... wait for it.... objective case. Thus the correct version is "bequeathed unto us humans". Get the simple stuff right and the more complex will follow.
How do you know it wasn't supposed to read "wee humans"?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
now that you mention that... http://www.jsasoc.com/Family_a...
The "the climate has gone through rapid change before therefore AGW is bogus" argument is parallel to "grizzlies have been known to be prone to sudden unprovoked violent attacks on humans before, so there is really no additional risk if you go ahead and kick one"
It is well-known that the Earth is in an unusually cold period with historically low atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
A transit from an icehouse to a greenhouse phase would likely involve profound (and potentially destructive) changes for human civilization, but the planet has undergone this cycle many times before, and we are profoundly foolish to think that our impact has been significant - it has not.
Well, thanks for telling us. I'll inform the IPCC.
Those people are idiots. A great leader with glowing yellow hair told me that the Universe was, in fact, over 9000 years old.
Jennifer McCarthy?
I'm not anti-science, am a creationist, never owned a gun, am very good with math and independent politically.
The earth's temperature has NOT been going up the last 15 years. But otherwise I agree with your post. We are getting there as far as stopping the burning of fossil fuels which aren't unlimited and are dirty to burn. But a recent study showed that those who are railing about all this stuff typically have the highest electric bills and tend to drive large SUVs. Al Gore has been accused of this as well, so most of them seem to be hypocrites that want control over others rather than wanting a solution.
You mean that people who are concerned over a credible threat to society and civilization are more interested in a global solution that might actually do something to solve the problem than in sacrificing themselves with no discernable effect, just to prove their credibility and to get some of that "holier than thou" feeling that is more often felt by those who feel actually holier? Gee, what a lower form of humanity.
As for Gore, he buys carbon offsets, drives hybrid vehicles, and retrofitted his Nashville mansion to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification by upgrading windows, lighting, appliances, insulation, etc. and installing a geothermal system and 33 solar panels.
Not sure what any of that has to do with the reality of AGW as a threat, but if that doesn't dispel your skepticism, then perhaps the fact that Ed Begley Jr. does live an extreme energy conservationist life style will presumably convince you to believe. Not to mention the famously conservationist construction of Bush's ranch in Crawford.
Also to your point about nuclear being finite... Yes, but not in any meaningful time period. If you go out to when we would run out of accessible nuclear material on earth, you might as well point out that there is no such thing as a renewable energy source as the sun itself is finite.
That's what they were saying about petroleum a hundred years ago.
Sadly the way it works is that Bill Nye goes on TV to explain why a snowstorm in Boston isn't evidence against global warming, but then tweets a mountain in the Rockies that doesn't have snow on it as evidence FOR global warming. You can't have it both ways. Science doesn't accept anecdotes as data regardless of it supports or refutes your hypothesis. If you want to say "weather is not climate" than you shouldn't be using weather as a rallying point for your climate cause.
True, but..... the plural of "anecdote" is "data".
You think cities can grow enough food to feed themselves?
Seriously? You are nuts.
Name one? Name one that comes close?
Sure, play dumb, as if you never heard of Soylent Green.