Friday, May 04, 2007
Hey, I didn't tell you to do that
Yesterday, a caller got really frustrated at me, and she almost had a good point. Her contention: her monitor was working fine before she called, and now it isn't.
As any good statistician knows, the fact that one event follows another does not necessarily mean that the first caused the second. In this case, it's a bit more complicated than "you messed up my monitor!" Let me explain.
The caller was having connection problems. After a couple of basic steps, things still weren't working, so I had her open a command prompt to try to ping a couple of sites. By default, the command prompt is a black window with grey text. The caller couldn't read the grey text, so I asked her to turn up the brightness on her monitor. She wasn't sure how to do that, so I explained that her monitor will probably have a few buttons on the front, and those buttons would allow her to change her monitor's settings.
Now, in retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. People sometimes get frustrated with tech agents who refuse to help them with anything outside of the immediate problem that they'd called in about, but this story is a perfect example of why we often won't help.
The caller said that she couldn't make out the items on the monitor's menu. This tells me one of two things: either the monitor's color is fading (remember that she also couldn't read the command prompt) or her eyesight is. I let her know that if she couldn't read the command prompt, we were at a bit of an impasse, and if she could turn up the brightness, we could proceed.
Perhaps I should have approached things differently and explicitly said "don't mess around with settings you can't read", but before too long the caller said she couldn't make out anything on her screen. Apparently she'd found the pincushion setting, as she said that the top and bottom of her screen were narrow and the middle was fat... then she said that the color was screwed up, then she said that the monitor menu was completely black. This also offers up two possibilities that I can think of: the monitor is shot or she managed to change a setting that affects the monitor's menu.
Now, in my experience, most monitors will let you change settings, but those settings won't change the way that the monitor's menu displays. There's a reason for that: if you render it illegible, you're screwed. I suppose if she changed something like the monitor's display timing, it might have made even the menu unreadable, but usually if a monitor can't do a timing setting, it reverts on its own.
Anyway, the point is that her monitor ended up being messed up, but I didn't ask her to mess with settings she can't read. Blindly pushing buttons is often a bad idea. Making educated guesses is fine, but it's hard to make those kinds of decisions about things that you can't read. One of two things appears to be at fault: she changed stuff, or she's got a dead/dying monitor.
She was pretty upset by the end of it, blaming me for making her change stuff, and I can see why she'd think that, but if she replays events in her mind, she'll realize that I didn't ask her to fiddle around. I didn't discourage her either, but it was entirely her doing. The alternative was for us to be stymied and unable to do anything, so I thought that if she was comfortable trying to adjust the brightness it was fine to let her try.
Obviously in the future I'll be more abrupt. "Can't read the text? OK, call back when you can. Thankshaveanicedaybye."
As any good statistician knows, the fact that one event follows another does not necessarily mean that the first caused the second. In this case, it's a bit more complicated than "you messed up my monitor!" Let me explain.
The caller was having connection problems. After a couple of basic steps, things still weren't working, so I had her open a command prompt to try to ping a couple of sites. By default, the command prompt is a black window with grey text. The caller couldn't read the grey text, so I asked her to turn up the brightness on her monitor. She wasn't sure how to do that, so I explained that her monitor will probably have a few buttons on the front, and those buttons would allow her to change her monitor's settings.
Now, in retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. People sometimes get frustrated with tech agents who refuse to help them with anything outside of the immediate problem that they'd called in about, but this story is a perfect example of why we often won't help.
The caller said that she couldn't make out the items on the monitor's menu. This tells me one of two things: either the monitor's color is fading (remember that she also couldn't read the command prompt) or her eyesight is. I let her know that if she couldn't read the command prompt, we were at a bit of an impasse, and if she could turn up the brightness, we could proceed.
Perhaps I should have approached things differently and explicitly said "don't mess around with settings you can't read", but before too long the caller said she couldn't make out anything on her screen. Apparently she'd found the pincushion setting, as she said that the top and bottom of her screen were narrow and the middle was fat... then she said that the color was screwed up, then she said that the monitor menu was completely black. This also offers up two possibilities that I can think of: the monitor is shot or she managed to change a setting that affects the monitor's menu.
Now, in my experience, most monitors will let you change settings, but those settings won't change the way that the monitor's menu displays. There's a reason for that: if you render it illegible, you're screwed. I suppose if she changed something like the monitor's display timing, it might have made even the menu unreadable, but usually if a monitor can't do a timing setting, it reverts on its own.
Anyway, the point is that her monitor ended up being messed up, but I didn't ask her to mess with settings she can't read. Blindly pushing buttons is often a bad idea. Making educated guesses is fine, but it's hard to make those kinds of decisions about things that you can't read. One of two things appears to be at fault: she changed stuff, or she's got a dead/dying monitor.
She was pretty upset by the end of it, blaming me for making her change stuff, and I can see why she'd think that, but if she replays events in her mind, she'll realize that I didn't ask her to fiddle around. I didn't discourage her either, but it was entirely her doing. The alternative was for us to be stymied and unable to do anything, so I thought that if she was comfortable trying to adjust the brightness it was fine to let her try.
Obviously in the future I'll be more abrupt. "Can't read the text? OK, call back when you can. Thankshaveanicedaybye."
Labels: communication, pebkac
# posted by Terry @ 6:10 AM 
