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RFC2324 posted:There is a reason the reboot trick has so much traction in the support world, and its public facing support. When you need to keep your handle times below 7 minutes if you don't want to be pulled aside, you learn things that will make it easier to get people off the phones, and thing to make it look like it worked once so you can close the ticket. I retain a small amount of shame from my stint at an ISP long ago when I would occasionally get rid of problem customers by telling them they needed to turn off their router, wait 20 minutes, then turn it back on and call back if it's still not working. While that is a genuine troubleshooting step, the main goal was to play the odds that they'd get someone else when they called back.
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Oct 21, 2020 00:13
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Jaded Burnout posted:I retain a small amount of shame from my stint at an ISP long ago when I would occasionally get rid of problem customers by telling them they needed to turn off their router, wait 20 minutes, then turn it back on and call back if it's still not working. 75% of calls at EA ended with something like that. I worked at a wireless ISP where I would just tell them I was rebooting their WAP
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Oct 21, 2020 01:14
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RFC2324 posted:75% of calls at EA ended with something like that. I worked at a wireless ISP where I would just tell them I was rebooting their WAP Rebooting customer poo poo fixes it like a solid 75% of the time The remainder is "top of the line" netgear router that the customer added is the source of all their problems Maybe a grand total of 1% of the time it's an actual thing somewhere else
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Oct 21, 2020 01:26
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RFC2324 posted:75% of calls at EA ended with something like that. I worked at a wireless ISP where I would just tell them I was rebooting their WAP Cardi B intensifies
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Oct 21, 2020 01:39
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Oh man, I had a caller rip me up one side and down the other because "all you ever do is tell me to reboot. You never actually fix ANYTHING! " It was loving Windows 9x, that's how you fixed 99.999999999% of issues.
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Oct 21, 2020 04:23
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sfwarlock, how did you end up going with Gentle Ben and his Incredible Buffoonery?
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Oct 21, 2020 04:24
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I definitely have severe phone PTSD from being a call center jockey for 11 months. I haven't made a doctor's appointment in over 3 years because I can't find a way to set one up without calling, and it's nothing urgent, so gently caress it. If I'm actively dying, I'll think about calling. On the upside, my dad used to use Boomer Business Tactics on call center folks. Y'know, defaulting to demanding a manager, refusing to take any answer at face value, giving them crap for not being able to solve something off script...when I went home and gave my parents the realtalk about my job, my dad immediately started filling out every survey when asked, and always giving 5/5s, even if he had complaints. "I give them the score and then make the complaint a suggestion," he said. Bless you, Papa Junglist. You're still a trainable Boomer. Arquinsiel posted:My favourite 1 review was in Xbox when the complaint was "postman shoved console through letterbox and broke it". I'm sorry that the postman who isn't the DHL contractor that Xbox used did that, I suppose? Christ, I used to get those kind of reviews a lot. "3/5, technician took weeks to get back to me." Oh, because you misfiled the ticket by picking the wrong technology and department, and it languished in a dead queue for 3 weeks before someone randomly found it and re-filed it correctly instead of closing it (and possibly telling you to eat a dick, in so many words)? That's my fault? Cool, thanks for making me wait sweatily two more months to get promoted out of contracting into full time employment, you cock. Arquinsiel posted:Same job as above, HR accused me of hacking when I took the in-person typing test at their mass recruitment day to bring the contract online. Apparently 120 WPM was unacceptable for a 24 year old IT nerd in 2010, because "nobody types above 80 WPM. It's not possible" lol, my dad taught me to type before I could read (he started teaching typing on electric typewriters, so by the time I was able to follow instructions, he had my hands on the home row), so I've been cruising at a casual 120wpm since I was a literal child. My co-workers at the engineering firm when I was in my mid 20s used to accuse me of faking it by bashing my fingers on the keys to make noise and impress people, until I started typing down everything they said while they made fun of me and then showed it to them when they stopped talking. Punctuation and all. One guy felt bad and gave me a bottle of wine and a gift certificate to the local Chinese place to apologize  RFC2324 posted:When its an internal help desk, there is a certain minimum of courtesy from most of your users because the org might fire them for being unprofessional. Getting a customer fired is WAY harder I was internal help desk at  when I was on the phones in the above stories. We did have a little bit of authority to tell our "customers" that they were actually our co-workers and couldn't talk to us like that. Then they tried to shift our call center to India without warning anyone, and everyone assumed the new Indian accented call center employees were outsourced, not internal, and treated them even worse than they treated us. What a godawful shitshow for that team.
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Oct 21, 2020 04:27
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:I was internal help desk at At my first call center job(PeoplePC!!!) I shared a desk with a dude from India. He also had a masters from MIT, and new his poo poo. His handle times sucked because he spent the first several minutes of every call explaining that he really was in america, and he had a degree, and once or twice I had to vouch for him. I felt bad.
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Oct 21, 2020 04:40
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:lol, my dad taught me to type before I could read (he started teaching typing on electric typewriters, so by the time I was able to follow instructions, he had my hands on the home row), so I've been cruising at a casual 120wpm since I was a literal child. My co-workers at the engineering firm when I was in my mid 20s used to accuse me of faking it by bashing my fingers on the keys to make noise and impress people, until I started typing down everything they said while they made fun of me and then showed it to them when they stopped talking. Punctuation and all.  " after they supervised a re-test.RFC2324 posted:At my first call center job(PeoplePC!!!) I shared a desk with a dude from India. He also had a masters from MIT, and new his poo poo. His handle times sucked because he spent the first several minutes of every call explaining that he really was in america, and he had a degree, and once or twice I had to vouch for him. I felt bad. 
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Oct 21, 2020 09:38
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I've never worked at a call centre, but I work in a prison. The alarms go off all the time during the day and you are alert to it but you are trained not to over react for obvious reasons. (well, they did pre-covid, it's very quiet these days) One day there was a documentary about another prison with the same alarm system. When I heard work alarms coming out of my TV, I discovered that upset me somewhat.
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Oct 21, 2020 12:37
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Shugojin posted:Rebooting customer poo poo fixes it like a solid 75% of the time Best one I got ... "oh, wait, your router self-identifies as vmware?"  (The problem was on their end, and they didn't argue  )
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Oct 21, 2020 13:14
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Wibla posted:Best one I got ... "oh, wait, your router self-identifies as vmware?" what?
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Oct 21, 2020 14:36
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angry armadillo posted:One day there was a documentary about another prison with the same alarm system. When I heard work alarms coming out of my TV, I discovered that upset me somewhat. For a long time I had the iphone "klaxon" alarm as my ringtone, which used to screw me up all the time because TV and films often use the same sample which I guess is in some sound library somewhere.
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Oct 21, 2020 14:39
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Fried hardware can act WEIRD, up to and including deciding they are not hardware anymore
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Oct 21, 2020 14:52
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ConfusedUs posted:Oh man, that was you? We were not kind. Heh. Yeah I got pretty roasted, but deservedly so. Just because Comcast (and most call-center-owning companies) is/are poo poo is not an excuse to bash on helpdesk phone jockeys. This thread has certainly showed me that helpdesk support has basically zero agency over the conditions they work in.
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Oct 21, 2020 16:00
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Agrikk posted:Heh. Yeah I got pretty roasted, but deservedly so. Just because Comcast (and most call-center-owning companies) is/are poo poo is not an excuse to bash on helpdesk phone jockeys. This thread has certainly showed me that helpdesk support has basically zero agency over the conditions they work in. If you still need to mess with them, try to get them to agree with you that the company sucks. They agree completely, but probably aren't allowed to say so, and, in my experience, will be suppressing the snickers as hard as they can. Unless you get the one true believer dude, but he does deserve to be hosed with
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Oct 21, 2020 16:06
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Jaded Burnout posted:For a long time I had the iphone "klaxon" alarm as my ringtone, which used to screw me up all the time because TV and films often use the same sample which I guess is in some sound library somewhere. I had the same thing happen in the opposite direction: I set up my work phone's notification sound as the "doorbell" from Star Trek TNG. At first it was cool and funny, but pretty soon I discovered that I couldn't watch an episode without getting a quick shot of anxiety every time someone wanted to talk to the captain in his ready room and the doorbell went off.
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Oct 21, 2020 16:38
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Powered Descent posted:I had the same thing happen in the opposite direction: I set up my work phone's notification sound as the "doorbell" from Star Trek TNG. At first it was cool and funny, but pretty soon I discovered that I couldn't watch an episode without getting a quick shot of anxiety every time someone wanted to talk to the captain in his ready room and the doorbell went off. My notification sound is a death knell. If I am going to gey a shot of anxiety, so is everyone else
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Oct 21, 2020 16:54
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This remains on point https://twitter.com/alex_engelberg/status/1057659128707829760?lang=en Scariest costume in fuckin years
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Oct 21, 2020 16:59
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My work email notification sound is the Reaper Honk from ME3, since it needed to be loud, piercing, and invoke a sense of dread.
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Oct 21, 2020 17:02
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RFC2324 posted:If you still need to mess with them, try to get them to agree with you that the company sucks. They agree completely, but probably aren't allowed to say so, and, in my experience, will be suppressing the snickers as hard as they can. NOTHING makes a call center person's day more than acknowledging their struggle. I've said variations of this many times: "Look, I recognize you do not have the power to do what I'm asking. So let's go through the motions required of you, with the understanding that I'm simply not going to bite on any of it, and get me escalated to someone empowered to help me as soon as possible."
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Oct 21, 2020 17:08
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I've responded "nice script!" and then moved on with my question for the ones who have punishingly bad and long opening scripts and it's never failed to get a chuckle.
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Oct 21, 2020 17:18
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Motronic posted:I've responded "nice script!" and then moved on with my question for the ones who have punishingly bad and long opening scripts and it's never failed to get a chuckle. A lot of the call centers I interact with have started to anticipate these sorts of issues with "I've got a whole spiel I have to give you now" which is ironically now part of the script, I guess.
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Oct 21, 2020 17:45
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Whoops
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Oct 21, 2020 21:58
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My router at the time was a VM running on an ESXi host.
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Oct 21, 2020 22:08
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I have notifications straight up shut off on my phone. No vibration, no sound, completely silenced. If I do turn the audible alerts on, ringing is the bassline from Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain," and messages are an F1 downshift sound, and that poo poo only goes on if I'm waiting on an emergency call. Otherwise, it's either I check my phone when I drat well want to, and maybe I'll have an alert on my smart watch. Maybe. Probably not. For a while, the "ding" sound doors at businesses make when you walk in would give me a twitch, because at Blockbuster we were expected to greet everyone who walked in. It took years to un-Pavlov that reflex.
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Oct 21, 2020 23:03
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I got a fun email asking for "a cable to connect two monitors together". They were of course trying to get a dual-monitor setup, but I had a good half-second or so of my brain short-circuiting by envisioning connecting the various ports on monitors together and trying to figure out what it would do. Also AlexDeGruven posted:It
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Oct 21, 2020 23:28
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Knormal posted:I got a fun email asking for "a cable to connect two monitors together". They were of course trying to get a dual-monitor setup, but I had a good half-second or so of my brain short-circuiting by envisioning connecting the various ports on monitors together and trying to figure out what it would do. https://www.dell.com/support/articl...ort-mst?lang=en 
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Oct 21, 2020 23:30
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Knormal posted:I got a fun email asking for "a cable to connect two monitors together". They were of course trying to get a dual-monitor setup, but I had a good half-second or so of my brain short-circuiting by envisioning connecting the various ports on monitors together and trying to figure out what it would do. 
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Oct 21, 2020 23:45
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I spent 8 years in call centres doing customer support for 3 and then 5 in debt collection. The condtions were pretty good compared to what some of you are describing, but still suffered from many of the same call centre problems. I also suggest that debt collection is probably the worst job you can do while sitting down at a computer. Looking back, I'm amazed I'm still alive. I lost a marriage and am enjoying years of therapy and medication afterwards, but I don't fear a ringing telephone. I'll never, ever go back though.
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Oct 21, 2020 23:51
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I used to always wonder what these were for. I still to wonder why some monitors have two VGA ports.
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Oct 22, 2020 00:07
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Oh, users. A couple weeks ago, in the middle of deploying 400-some laptops to people to support more permanent WfH, one user declined a BRAND NEW 15" laptop with a 6-core CPU and a Quadro T1000 in favor of his four-year-old, out of warranty, still using a spinning disk laptop. The same user today sent in a ticket begging for help updating his old machine to Windows 10 2004, which - after looking into it - has been dropped off the domain for so long it's probably still on 1803. Delicious, sweet irony. Enjoy spending a whole day in the office on someone's unused desktop while your laptop horks down a pile of updates, user!
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Oct 22, 2020 00:12
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:I have notifications straight up shut off on my phone. No vibration, no sound, completely silenced. If I do turn the audible alerts on, ringing is the bassline from Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain," and messages are an F1 downshift sound, and that poo poo only goes on if I'm waiting on an emergency call. Otherwise, it's either I check my phone when I drat well want to, and maybe I'll have an alert on my smart watch. Maybe. Probably not. Way back in the day (2008-2010), I was a dev for sweden's craigslist - basically the biggest website by traffic that wasn't a search engine or a newspaper. We had an on-call phone that we would hand off to whoever was on call, and usually nobody called it. Except when they did, it was usually from the support team or the CEO and the website was down or there were serious production issues and we were losing tons of money by the site not working. It was an old-school Nokia with the default ringtone. Naturally, every dev there got a pavlovian reaction to that ringtone, and if some new person joined and didn't reset their ringtone from that, they'd get jumped by devs yelling "SWITCH YOUR GODDAMN RING SIGNAL" since their adrenaline was rushing thinking we broke poo poo again. We later replaced this with a phone that could accept MP3 ringtones, and promptly configured it to something less default I miss that place.
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Oct 22, 2020 00:41
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luminalflux posted:
 who the gently caress came up with that idea? (or was it just an elaborate ruse to Rick roll the thread? )
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Oct 22, 2020 01:16
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YggiDee posted:I only worked at a call centre for a month, but I knew I had to get out when I started stress-puking every morning. I remember seeing articles about call center employees developing PTSD but I can't find them now. I know I had a breakdown after a year working call center for a hospital IT outsourcing company. We were allowed at most 3 rings before answering, 15 seconds of post call work before going automatically on ready, and average call time should be under 5 minutes. We had to handle 1300-1600 calls a day with a staff of like 30 total taking calls. I switched shifts and eventually up and then out but it took a few years. When I left they company has been bought and they had made all the call center employees temp workers through a staffing agency and cut 3rd shift from 2 people to 1 so if there was ever a call in or emergency everything was hosed. I now work call center adjacent and have to talk to customers from time to time but it is nowhere near as bad.
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Oct 22, 2020 01:28
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Carth Dookie posted:I also suggest that debt collection is probably the worst job you can do while sitting down at a computer.
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Oct 22, 2020 01:33
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This thread has made me appreciate my T1 support line and forgive the spelling mitsakes, poor grammar, horrifying abbreviations and punctuation and otherwise in tickets. Because it's already hell having someone talk at you for 8 hours a day, you don't need condescension from your T2/3 support on top of the shitheap that is the phone.
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Oct 22, 2020 02:36
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Wibla posted:
It was a consensus decision reached in about 5 seconds once we realized it was possible
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Oct 22, 2020 03:06
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Yeah but we have nothing near that fancy at my place, and the user is definitely not technically-inclined enough to be aware of that. Probably half of our monitors are still VGA-only or just VGA and DVI. As an example of the user's knowledge one of the two "monitors" they wanted to connect together was an all-in-one desktop. Arquinsiel posted:I used to always wonder what these were for. I still to wonder why some monitors have two VGA ports. And I always assumed the dual-VGA monitors could do like picture-in-picture or something similar, so you could keep an eye on one input down in the corner in the days before easy remote desktoping?
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Oct 22, 2020 03:10
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Knormal posted:Yeah but we have nothing near that fancy at my place, and the user is definitely not technically-inclined enough to be aware of that. Probably half of our monitors are still VGA-only or just VGA and DVI.
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Oct 22, 2020 04:22
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