I am a real live tech support person. And I live in Tech Support Hell. SAVE ME!!!! UPDATE: I have been saved!
Wanted: Techs in Support Hell needed to help keep this blog alive!
Here at the tech support help desk, we have all sorts of names for the types of problems that we see. For instance there are special ID-10-T forms that we have to fill out for extreme cases and then there are those customers who have all sorts of PEBKAC issues? What is a PEBKAC issues, you ask? That is where the Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair!
Blogging on the Internet is serious business. It seems that the NYPD has a rogue blogger amongst its troops... Brooklynbacon has written some things that may in the end cost him his j-o-b. I mean if Newsdayis onto him, the boss can't be much farther behind...
Me: Did level one give you a ticket number?
Clueless Customer: No
Me:Well, I can pull up the account anyway.
Clueless Customer:OK
Me:and what is the phone number?
Clueless Customer:Mine?
Me:Uhm, Yes
Whose phone number did she think I wanted? Level one's?
Well, I finally did it. I gave my manager notice that I plan to move on, "to explore other opportunities" and he reacted better than I thought he would.... He didn't get on the floor and beg me to stay, like I had secretly hoped he would, but he did say I only need to give one week's notice!
Here is the dilemma.... < ISP.net > gives out a yearly bonus when the call center keeps certain numbers below pre-determined levels (presumably to keep the costs down). We, the reps, don't get that bonus till sometime after the new year.
Depending on when they give it out, I may or may not be here for it. If I am not employed by the company at that time, I get no bonus. Even tho I was here for the WHOLE year helping keep those levels down (well not really, since I suck at that...) So, Daryl said that if I wanted to wait till after the first of the year to give my notice, I could give a week's notice and not burn any bridges... So I think I will do that...
I was planning on making Jan 5th my last day, but I may have to push that back to get this bonus.... Well, it's kinda funny that this bonus is gonna be like somewhere between 20 and 100 times smaller than the signing bonus I am getting from my future employer.
Update: A federal appeals court on Friday handed a major setback to the record industry's legal tactics for tracking down and suing alleged file swappers
"It is a pretty big setback," said Evan Cox, a copyright attorney with law firm Covington & Burling. "At the end of the day, it's a practical issue. It's mostly going to mean considerable extra expense and a fair amount of additional paperwork and formality."
It's sad, but it looks like my work is blocking the Dirty Whore Diary... This is a new development since up till recently I have been able to get there, but just the other day I got blocked by Websense (those damn bastards...) It's not like there are pics there or anything, just stories... And I am probably to blame for getting that site blocked since I link to it from here.... Oh well, guess I'm gonna have to read it at home....
Me: Do you have any other computers?
Clueless Customer: No I don't.
20 minutes later after we come to a point where it is time to roll a truck, I go over his options (customers like to have options):
Me:You can try installing a new Network Card (NIC) in the computer or if you had another computer we could hook that up to test if the problem is with the modem or computer. You said you don't have another computer....
Clueless Customer: I have a laptop
Me:Well, that's another computer!
Sheesh!!!!
I should probably have a link to this blog in there...
Call Centre Confidential, is the story of my life as a Team Manager in a Call Centre. Next Stop Bombay. Highly Commended in The Guardian Unlimited, "Best British Blog about life in a Call Centre" category, 2003 - the backlash starts on Monday.
I am just going thru the blog and undrafting all the posts I started but didn't have the time or energy to finish... I will also be posting here with the notes I have jotted down on all those slips of paper I have been accumulating over the years....
I started this back in October (that should give you an idea of how far behind I am....) and it is still relevant:
It's hard to believe it's been over a year that I have been blogging this thing... And the customers have not really changed much....
Me: Do you have a router or a firewall
Clueless Customer: Uhm, I don't know what that means
Me: Is there a box connecting your computer to the modem?
Clueless Customer: What's the modem?
Me: The box with lights on it that we left with you when we installed your service.
Clueless Customer: Oh. I don't know...
Me: Do you have a firewall?
Clueless Customer: What's that?
Me: A software program that prevents unauthorized access into or out of your computer.
Clueless Customer: Oh.
Me: You, or someone else, would have installed it.
Afterthought: Well, things will be changing for me soon enough....
I found some blurbs I have been meaning to add to the blog regarding my new challenges and the exciting things that will be happening in my life in the next couple months and I want to share them with you. They may be a little out of place chronologically, but if you will just play along with me I think we will all be happy.
Written sometime in the middle of October 2003 (I will update when I get the exact date of my scribing):
Well, it looks as tho I will not be doing this tech support thing much longer. This is good news! My wife and I have been pondering and planning on moving for about the last 6 months. We currently live in a little beach community just south of San Diego. We like it very much but there is no family nearby anymore (my sister moved back east about 6 months ago, coincidentally.) All of our family is on the east coast for the most part, and all of the grandparents and great-grandparents live in South Florida, within 1 hour of each other. So we were thinking, lets move there so we can be close to family and they could both help out with the kids (we have 2) and we would get to escape from time to time since babysitters would be reasily available. ;)
Well, we got a curveball thrown our way by a friend in Northern California when she told my wife about an opening at a mutual friend's company. So of course I sent him my resume and surprisingly enough, the company was interested in me! They obviously haven't read this blog lol!
So today I flew up there for the second (!!!!) time (at their expense, tyvm) and they made me an offer that will be hard to refuse - nearly a doubling of my current wage and a SIGNING BONUS!!! I have NEVER gotten a signing bonus! That makes me feel important. Almost like a famous athlete being courted by a few teams.,..
Well, the catch is I am going to be going for an Interview in Florida since one of the companies I applied for decided to call me in as a prospective candidate. Well, I live in San Diego, not exactly nearby... Well, we happen to be flying out to Atlanta this next week for my brother's wedding so I just booked a day trip down there to do the interview. I think I am gonna have some REAL hard choices to make soon...
I will keep you posted, but this blog may be shutting down soon.... Of course I < then I trailed off from here, probably had to catch my plane! >)
Being that I will be moving on from all the glitz and glamour that is tech support, I would like to keep this journal alive and semi current. If there are any tech support people out there who would like to join in this project, please email me and we'll go from there.
I have added an escape button for you, in case you are reading my blog at work or in front of a customer and you need to look like you are on a real website doing real work....
I don't know how many times I have had to bite my tongue when I hear the following line:
Clueless Customer: Basically we have tried everything.
Me, biting my tongue: Well, you haven't tried everything because it's not fixed yet, is it?
Customers hear things and they think that they know what they mean but are often misinformed. If a customer tells me that he is not getting his "ISP" address, the first thing out of my mouth is "What IP Address are you getting?"
I guess the question is too confusing because 9 times out of 10 they respond by informing me that the web page they are trying to view says, "Page cannot be displayed."
Note to self: "ISP address" is a dead giveaway that they know just enough to be dangerous...
Another confusing question is when I ask if they can verify that there isn't anything on the list that says "Client for Microsoft Networks" (knowing full well that it should not show up there after what we did). The customer spends at least 3 mintues struggling over all the things on the list (phrases like Virtual Private Network and Windows Family Logon get mangled into "Visual Pirate Networks" and "Windows Family Lagoon"). When he or she gets to the end, I repeat the question "Is there a thing on that list called client for Microsoft Networks" and they start to read the list again, untill I say, "It should not be there at this point, I am just making sure it is gone." They then tell me the answer I have been looking for. I need a simpler way to ask that question....
I know, I lied, I said I would have something to post on Dec 3rd, but I really enjoyed the time away soooooooooooo much I was not motivated to post... Well, the big news is that I accepted a job in Northern California as a Data Recovery Engineer with an awesome company called Drive Savers. So my family and I will be moving from San Diego to Sonoma County. More to follow...
