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Me and a few other goons (well, at least one or two at this point) work in an outsourced call center. We are, generally, a pretty awesome call center. We only have occasional quotas when the bossman decides to go militant for a few weeks and you don't usually get yelled at unless you did something really loving stupid. That being said, customers can still be the worst people you could ever speak to. Earlier today I spent an hour teaching someone how to drag and drop and create a new folder on an external hard drive. I had someone demand electrical diagrams of a power supply I have no access to and cannot hand out because his AGP card rarrgh has to run on separate 12v rails rarrgh. I, more often than I would like to admit, have people request to speak to A MAN or SOMEONE EXTREMELY TECHNICAL at which point I have to insist that yes, I am the most senior tech on the floor and I was an overnight supervisor for two years and you can eat a dick and maybe, just maybe, I will transfer you to the other guy so he can come ask me questions about your asinine problem. There's a few idiots here, there's idiots everywhere, I am not automatically one of them because of my genitalia. We had a (lady/man?) that would demand to be called SIR (even though it sounded like a woman) because we were sexually discriminating against her/him who flew off the handle at someone for asking her if it said "querying" on a router configuration page and said something to the effect of DID YOU JUST CALL ME QUEER? WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME? I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS! WHAT KIND OF HOMOPHOBIC PEOPLE STAFF THIS PLACE, etc etc. The person she/he flew off the handle that was quite homosexual in fact, so mostly he just laughed. We had the mentally disturbed man who called us with government conspiracy theories - we'd occasionally call his doctor for him because he had gone off of his meds. Hooray! 90% of us are driven to smoke to get away from the phones and in some futile attempt to make us hate callers less. I have been called "the problem with American customer service" because I wouldn't send a guy a prepaid label for his RMA while screaming at me. I informed him that I was indeed not customer service, however I am technical support.  How does cancer prevent you from printing an RMA form? "I can't do that. I have cancer." You can't argue it really because then you'd be a horrible person, but it doesn't make it make any more sense. Simply telling me you don't have a printer would do, but no, the cancer. I can flesh out any more of these stories, but they're all lovely horrible people. Some people are really very nice and I will help you for as long as I can without screwing over the other techs on my shifts but it always blows my mind how everyone can be such a huge dick and decide they can walk all over me because I work in a call center/am a woman/YOU PUT ME ON HOLD YOU JUST GOOGLED THE ANSWER DIDN'T YOU.  I know I have a relatively good working environment relative to a lot of call centers but people are just horrible sometimes. The people who actually give me e-mailed compliments (we generally can't forward you to a supervisor for that, they handle calls too) give me the biggest warm fuzzies. We don't even have an incentive program, I just feel slightly better about my miserable day. That and sometimes the beer helps.
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May 29, 2010 04:10
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:39 |
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I tell people to check Wikipedia and Google a lot (notably about good descriptions on how RAID arrays work or obscenely strange BIOS settings that nobody can handle) if they want more than a brief description because I am tech support, not an educator on the intricacies of RAID5 versus RAID1+0. Or to go to Google to download things or try to look up things that I cannot strictly tell them to do. However, I had one guy yell at me for 99:99+ minutes about different ways we could go about trying to rebuild RAID arrays. He had "priceless, invaluable" data (family photos, movies, music) "backed up" (not backed up) on a RAID array he switched the drive order in. I managed to command line map him into the drive and told him to back it up and he spent the next 90+ minutes bitching about how long it would take to back up the data and why can't we do it this way and blah blah blah and how he didn't have the room to do it. I could have gone about doing this any number of ways, but any configuration changes and I couldn't possibly guarantee that he would be able to recover the data I managed to get him access to. Eventually he capitulated (and if it's that invaluable, go buy another external hard drive - it's lovely but if EVERYTHING ON THAT DRIVE IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY AND INVALUABLE you shouldn't be afraid to plunk down for that). And I was Googling every answer. Hururrururur. And then he called back and got a coworker who essentially told him everything I said all over again. Turns out none of the RAID arrays could be fixed anyway.  P.S. The other for-sure-goon that works here could get away with murder on the phone. "Are you literate? Then you obviously didn't read the manual. And those are just pictures, those aren't even words." I just sat there going  And hi-fived him. He never gets in trouble. It's amazing. Caitlin fucked around with this message at 05:25 on May 29, 2010 |
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May 29, 2010 05:23
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