techsupportrants-blog

[techsupportrants-blog]

Weeks have themes

I swear they do.

This week the theme was truly irrational tech-idiots. I had someone asked me why she paid for a $900 phone, when she can’t change the background on her text messages?  She only found out about the feature recently and has had the phone for months.  Somehow I don’t think the ability to change the background was why she originally bought the phone. The truly mind-boggling thing was - her phone had another issue that was actually more serious and she wouldn’t let me troubleshoot that because she felt that it was more important to have a different background in her texting app.  We ended up reseting the phone to factory settings.

Both my manager and myself were screamed at because we insisted on trying to get a customer to read their call details online. And it wasn’t even the same customer. I don’t know what the deal with my manager’s customer, but mine  was someone who relied on her recent call list to give her the numbers she needed. She had NEVER set up a contact list in her life. WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO GIVE THAT INFORMATION OUT OVER THE PHONE PER LAW, FOLKS.  It’s not worth losing my job and/or being prosecuted just because you’re are too lazy or dense to figure how to access information online.  

And when I say I don’t have the technology in place to do this magical thing you want, I F-ING MEAN IT. Your little hissyfit is completely pointless and will solve NOTHING.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Technology doesn’t care who you are.

And stop telling me that you think you are paying too much for your service. Most of you are the ones who agreed to the price in the first place.  You should have figured that whether or not you could pay that much then.  (Yes, I know, some of you had life changes, but some of you shouldn’t be allowed to buy stuff without guardian who knows basic math.)

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The internet hasn’t made people dumber. It’s just allowed us to see all of them.

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Work with me, B!tch.

Customer: My son locked me out of my phone and it says I have to wait eight minutes to try again.

Me: Well, unless you figure out what the password is, we will have to wipe the phone clean, and restore from a backup.

Customer: But I don't want to lose all of my pictures!

Me: That's why we will need to restore from a backup. Did you have your phone setup to autoback up?

Customer: I don't really like messing with that stuff.

Me: I see. Have you ever synced your phone to one of your computers?

Customer laughs: I stopped doing that years ago. It's just too much trouble.

Me, taking a deep breath to steady myself: I see. Well, do you have anything set up to track your phone if it's lost.

Customer: I might, but I don't remember.

Me, after naming some possibilities and finally figuring out what may have been used: It's okay, we can log into that site and see what you have saved to it. Are you near a computer? We just need to login with your ID and password.

Customer: I'm not going to get on it. It's in another room, and I don't remember my ID and password.

Me: I can walk you through resetting it. We're going to need it anyway to restore your phone.

Customer: I don't want to do it.

Me: Ma'am, you not leaving me any options here. We provide all these things so you can recover your data. There isn't anything we can do if you don't use them.

Hopefully she remembers her password the next time the phone gives her a chance to enter it. I sent her the manufacturer's instructions, just in case. But it really annoys me when people act so f-ing irresponsible and then expect me to work miracles. You're an f-ing adult, not an infant that needs to be spoon fed. Take some damn responsibility for your own data.

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Know your audience

Someone recently told me that they hated young people because of all the stuff old people with bad memories usually complain about.

I told him that I hate everyone. I work tech support.

I’m now reading a coworker’s rant about work. He hates everyone too at the moment.

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Windows is like the dude in a group of friends who isn’t exactly intolerable, but you only hang out with him because Apple is stuck up and Linux is a loner.

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Definitely

Even if anti-vaxxers are right (they’re not), having autism sounds way better than dying of polio

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Accents are just fonts for the voice

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Heavy sigh

It has been my experience that if you work tech support long enough, sooner or later, you get a gunho executive who simplifies the whole cost analysis system and decides that your department needs to make money instead of costing money. The concept of indirect profit or added service value barely registers with them, and only gets lip service, if acknowledged at all.

There are two ways these execs try to make direct profit from tech support. 1) charge for it or 2) try to push their tech reps to make sale pitches for new stuff.

Now, most of us are okay offering customers services that will help solve certain customer needs. But more often than not, someone who prefers doing tech support hates doing sales. But more importantly, it comes off as being really tacky, and damages the trust our customers have with us.

I worked with a woman this morning who had to talk to four people before me. They all tried to sell her stuff, but not one of them actually looked into her issue. I found the problem within a few minutes. Then I helped her register complaints about the other reps. On one hand, they’re doing what they’re were told to do, but on the other hand, fixing the issue should have came first.

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“Slang” is slang for “shortened language”

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So very true

You don’t realise just how much nonsense the media talk until they report on something you know a lot about/have a career in.

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Kill me, please.

It never fails. I get urged by management to control one aspect of my calls more tightly, and then I get a customer who completely subverts all my attempts to do so.

Really, folks, you shouldn’t be working with tech support when you are still under the influence of heavy medications. You should just go lay down and focus on letting your body recover.

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Encryption Support

Just a word of advice, if you're going to insist your employees have heavy encryption on their phones, make sure you have tech support from either the company who developed your encryption protocol, or an in-house IT person who knows their phones. For the love of all that is holy, don't expect the carriers or the manufacturers to be able to troubleshoot the phones you've complicated with your security needs. We have no effing way to know which system you're using, and even if we did, we're technically not supposed to tweak it.

What we are allowed to do - in fact, are expected to do - is fix your corrupted operating system with a factory reset and restore.  Which, guess what, removes your encryption protocol because we don't have the means to access it. And there is like a 90% chance that it's the encryption software screwing things up. Because usually the software bugs I see with this are things like your contacts displaying weird. Why? Because that's the damn stuff the encryption protocol is trying to protect and the fact it's messed up is THE ENCRYPTION DEVELOPER'S FAULT! (Or the user, but heaven forbid you ever suggest that, even when it’s quite obvious.)

I wanted to smack a woman this week because she kept griping about how we and Apple kept crashing her phone, when all we were doing was trying to get the original software back on the device, because her contacts weren't showing the names, just the numbers. Ironically, I was able to fix the issue by having her logout and log back into iCloud.

Yeah. Several of you are now shaking your heads in disbelief, I know.  If you're like me, you're not allowed to save ANYTHING to iCloud or Google Drive or any other outside cloud service from your work device. Why anyone who would go to the trouble to "heavily encrypt" their phone and then go ahead and sync to an outside cloud server, no matter how secure that server may be by itself, is almost beyond me.  It just smacks of incredible ignorance of security liability.

You know, I would just be happy if these companies actually trained their people on security.

On a side nore, I found the iOS Security Guide: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

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I think people forget that at one time you could only rent phones.

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Totally affordable at $1400 in 1987

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$800 phones are nothing new.

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Where I had to repent of my words today...

Me: I swear these people are toddlers!

Supervisor: Hey! Don't insult toddlers like that!

Me: Yeah. They're cute, at least.

Supervisor: They are innocent. They don't realize what they are doing. But these people do. They know they're being unreasonable.

Me: And they are our ages.

Supervisor: And they walk among us. We are around them all the time. I probably said 'hi' to three of them while getting gas before work.

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Remember folks, technology doesn't give a crap who you are.

Me

Thought I should give it its own post.