Tuesday, May 22, 2007
You know it, huh?
One of the frustrating things about having a massive server problem is that invariably some people assume that their problem is related to our issue and it's not, or we hear the customers describe a problem and assume it's related to our issue and it's not. Some of those will be problems we couldn't have done anything about anyway until our issue was resolved, but others are issues we definitely could have.
Let's look at the know-it-all lady I just talked to! She had a problem receiving mail, but as it turned out her account wasn't one of the affected ones. Her issue was really large email, which was too big for Outlook Express to take in on a dialup connection. One of the oddities of OE is that when it encounters large email, it sometimes prompts the user for their username and password over and over as it stops and restarts its attempt to retrieve the messages. However, the mail server issue we were having was an authentication problem, so when an agent heard this woman's description of the problem, it sounded exactly like the server problem, and let's face it, when everything's broken you don't have time to investigate whether every single problem is actually a user issue or a server issue.
And so her issue lingered a bit until we'd mostly fixed things on our side, when she called back. When I talked to her, I checked her email account and noticed a couple of very large emails. I also noticed that her email account didn't appear to have been on the problem mail server.
I let her know that our issues appear to have been resolved, and her issue at the time appeared to be a couple of really big messages. The woman protested, saying that they were just paintings and that they'll be fine and that the problem was probably still on our end. I let her know that the messages were too big to easily come in via OE on a dialup connection, and that even if they did they'd take hours. She again repeated that they'd be fine, they were just paintings, and they've always come in alright.
This starts to get exasperating. When the problem is very clear but the caller refuses to accept that it might be the issue and assumes some knowledge that they can't possibly have yet, I often find I have to get a bit more blunt.
Me: "You haven't actually seen these emails yet, so I'm not sure how you can be sure that they're paintings that will come in properly when they seem to be too big."
Caller: "I know it. They're paintings. They're always paintings. They've always come in properly before."
Me: "The larger of these two problem emails is an MP3 file, which means it's a music file."
Caller: "Oh. It's not a painting?"
Me: "No. It's a music file."
Caller: "What's the other large file?"
Me: "It's an MPEG, which means it appears to be a movie."
Caller: "Is it a movie with paintings?"
Me: "I'm not sure. I don't really have a way to view it from here."
Caller: "Oh. OK. Can you delete it?"
Yes, yes I can. And I hope this has proved something to you: when you assume, you make an ass out of ume, which is apparently a species of Asian plum in the family Rosaceae.
Let's look at the know-it-all lady I just talked to! She had a problem receiving mail, but as it turned out her account wasn't one of the affected ones. Her issue was really large email, which was too big for Outlook Express to take in on a dialup connection. One of the oddities of OE is that when it encounters large email, it sometimes prompts the user for their username and password over and over as it stops and restarts its attempt to retrieve the messages. However, the mail server issue we were having was an authentication problem, so when an agent heard this woman's description of the problem, it sounded exactly like the server problem, and let's face it, when everything's broken you don't have time to investigate whether every single problem is actually a user issue or a server issue.
And so her issue lingered a bit until we'd mostly fixed things on our side, when she called back. When I talked to her, I checked her email account and noticed a couple of very large emails. I also noticed that her email account didn't appear to have been on the problem mail server.
I let her know that our issues appear to have been resolved, and her issue at the time appeared to be a couple of really big messages. The woman protested, saying that they were just paintings and that they'll be fine and that the problem was probably still on our end. I let her know that the messages were too big to easily come in via OE on a dialup connection, and that even if they did they'd take hours. She again repeated that they'd be fine, they were just paintings, and they've always come in alright.
This starts to get exasperating. When the problem is very clear but the caller refuses to accept that it might be the issue and assumes some knowledge that they can't possibly have yet, I often find I have to get a bit more blunt.
Me: "You haven't actually seen these emails yet, so I'm not sure how you can be sure that they're paintings that will come in properly when they seem to be too big."
Caller: "I know it. They're paintings. They're always paintings. They've always come in properly before."
Me: "The larger of these two problem emails is an MP3 file, which means it's a music file."
Caller: "Oh. It's not a painting?"
Me: "No. It's a music file."
Caller: "What's the other large file?"
Me: "It's an MPEG, which means it appears to be a movie."
Caller: "Is it a movie with paintings?"
Me: "I'm not sure. I don't really have a way to view it from here."
Caller: "Oh. OK. Can you delete it?"
Yes, yes I can. And I hope this has proved something to you: when you assume, you make an ass out of ume, which is apparently a species of Asian plum in the family Rosaceae.
Labels: assume, communication
# posted by Terry @ 9:21 AM 
