Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

Here are some of my more memorable responses to fairly common questions that I ask customers. Many of the questions have had more than one interesting response, so this is almost like a bonus feature! And I'm sure some of my coworkers will remind me of some winners, or I'll remember other winners, so I might actually update this list. And some of my favorite answers are weird non-sequiturs.

Question: Which email program do you use?
"Outlet."
"Incredible Mail."
"Point seven."

Question: Which version of Windows do you have?
"87."
"2000 XP."
"2000 Millenium Edition."
"6."
"No."
"Glass."

Question: What program do you use to look at web sites?
"Internet Exploder."
"Microsoft."
"Email."

Labels: communication

Me: "Well then, the next step that we'd want to try would be to unplug all of your phones and filters so that we can give the modem a chance to try connecting without any devices on the line to potentially interfere."
Caller: "So you want me to unplug every single phone in the house?"
Me: "Exactly. That will let us rule out almost everything inside that might be a problem."
Caller: "No."
Me: "... OK then, I guess that leaves us at an impasse."

I mean, really, what do you say to someone who's called up for help and then just refuses to take a troubleshooting step?

Caller: "What else can we do?"
Me: "Well, there are a bunch of steps that we could try after unplugging the phones, but the thing is that if we try them without this step, we won't know if they're working or not."
Caller: "So you want me to unplug the millions* of phones in this house?"
Me: "Exactly. Once we've gone past that step, we'll have either found the problem or we can move on to other sorts of troubleshooting."
Caller: "I'm not doing that."
Me: "OK then. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

She hung up on me at that point.

*I'm guessing that this was an example of "hyperbole", a linguistic and rhetorical device of which I'm vaguely aware.

Labels: futility, stubborn

...Say the darnededst things.

I just had a little old lady call me about 'missing' emails. It would seem she was getting daily reports from the Weather Network. She didn't like the fact that she was getting them at noon. Fine. I can accept that. I then told her how to work around it by just going to their website and getting it in real time. I explained to her how email sometimes isn't instantaneous. She started to argue with me how email works when clearly she didn't understand. That's not the best part of the story though...

The little old lady then had the nerve to tell me that Mac's were better than PCs and Windows had all sorts of problems (she had a Mac). Nevermind that she couldn't even tell me what program she was using for email on her Mac - or that she didn't know how to view webpages without me telling her. No, nevermind that. Here she was telling me what computer I should own!

Awesome!

So I asked this lady to bypass this archaic set up she had and bypass the surge protector and splitter she had on her line from her modem to the phone jack and instead, just go from the modem to the phone jack. Typically this will make sure the modem connects instead of having to go through 5 different connections and splits before it hits the source where the DSL connects. So that's exactly what I told her...

And then she placed me on hold - for fifteen minutes. She then came back to the phone and said something unintelligible. I tried to tell her to call back when she'd figured out what was going on and what she was doing, but before I even finished my sentence... Guess what? Hold. This time, it was for 20 minutes. I got sick of this and finally hung up.

Moral of the story? If you're going to call tech support, at least keep us informed of what's going on. We still have the power of being able to make you go away by hanging up!

Caller: "Hi, my DSL isn't working."
Me: "OK, what seems to be the problem?"
Caller: "I can't connect."
Me: "Alright, can I please get your phone number to look up your account?"
Caller: "Oh, I don't have an account with you. I'm with ThisCompany."
Me: "So your DSL service that you have through ThisCompany isn't working?"
Caller: "Yeah."
Me: "You'll probably need to call ThisCompany, then."
Caller: "I tried, but I had to wait for a long time."
Me: "... ok, but if you're using their service, then they're the people you're going to need to talk to."
Caller: "Oh. So should I call ThisCompany again?"
Me: "Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

Good call on who to call, buddy.

Labels: obvious