Wednesday, February 28, 2007
The logical order of things
Earlier today, I received a call from a customer who wanted to suspend her account while she gets her computer fixed. OK, no problem, I'll put you through to the right folks. Half an hour later, she called back. She wanted to troubleshoot a connection problem.
Well, here's the thing, ma'am, you can't connect to the internet now because you've just put your account on hold. "Oh... I put it on hold because I can't connect. Can we troubleshoot that?" Well, right now you'll be getting an error with the username and password because your account isn't active. If the problem is anything else, we won't really be able to look at it yet. "Oh... well can you go through all of the options in 'advanced' and we can see if they're right?" The particular section that she was looking at has more than 60 options. I'm not about about to go through all of those with someone unless it's actually necessary. I suggested she just hit the restore defaults button, as that won't hurt anything and will set all options to their Windows defaults. She said she'd already done that.
"Well then, I'm not sure what we can really do with this. If you were having a connection problem, you'd need to be able to connect for us to try to fix it, and if your account has been suspended, you won't be able to connect."
"Oh, that's ok, I'm pretty much on my way to take the computer to a technician anyway."
What?! ARGH.
Well, here's the thing, ma'am, you can't connect to the internet now because you've just put your account on hold. "Oh... I put it on hold because I can't connect. Can we troubleshoot that?" Well, right now you'll be getting an error with the username and password because your account isn't active. If the problem is anything else, we won't really be able to look at it yet. "Oh... well can you go through all of the options in 'advanced' and we can see if they're right?" The particular section that she was looking at has more than 60 options. I'm not about about to go through all of those with someone unless it's actually necessary. I suggested she just hit the restore defaults button, as that won't hurt anything and will set all options to their Windows defaults. She said she'd already done that.
"Well then, I'm not sure what we can really do with this. If you were having a connection problem, you'd need to be able to connect for us to try to fix it, and if your account has been suspended, you won't be able to connect."
"Oh, that's ok, I'm pretty much on my way to take the computer to a technician anyway."
What?! ARGH.
Labels: futility
# posted by Terry @ 6:45 AM 
