This reminds me of when we were the first ISP in France (we had a thing that was basically Compuserve with Internet bolted on — now some people will know what that was :-/).
We were at some kind of expo, I was the tech guy, I was with the cute sales girl. For historical reasons, we started with mostly Apple clients, then opened to everything else (this was the early 90s in Europe).
Anyway I was playing on my Linux machine (yay, early adopter) and she had a hairy guy that came in that was enthralled with the whole thing. So she spent a full forty minutes with him, explaining the whole local forum things, the Internet, the Usenet, the email, the whole shebang, the guy loves it.
So he really wants to sign on, but when he's filling in the papers, he's stuck.
"Is it ok if I leave that blank?"
"That" was the phone number. The guy didn't have a phone line. At the time all accesses were through a modem. No phone line, no online access. The wonders of the online world were forever beyond his reach.
It took another ten minutes to get this through to him.
As a high school student, I had a job like this for about a week. On my last day, I received this call just like yours and I said “You are quite possibly the stupidest person I’ve ever interacted with” because they were yelling this type of nonsense and screaming over me.
I do not regret my exit to the call center work life. You people have a special type of patience and deserve to be paid far more.
I mean, nowadays you can get wireless internet – via LTE/5G. For technologically illiterate users, I’d put the blame on whoever sold them a WiFi router.
Unfortunately, sometimes they can't determine reproduction steps because it's rare to happen and required multiple things, or they just didn't catch it. I definitely don't blame them, at least not in a lot of cases.
And sometimes logs or crash dump or whatever is all you need to figure out the bug anyway. In fact, ideally it should be more often than not.
That's true. I work in QA, so I'm all too familiar with the experience of "wait, wtf just happened". I don't fault users in that situation. My problem is when it's "I crash every time on this level", without any explanation
One of the reasons I moved on from IT operations. Management considers your department to be nothing more than a cost center and then goes all surprised Pikachu face when they take an axe to the IT budget and then everything inevitably goes to shit.
Is there a list somewhere of what words end up being "removed" or is it just kind of a case by case thing on lemmy.ml? Always wonder what the person said.
Having worked as a phone monkey and letter monkey previously, this is painfully accurate. The first skill you have to learn is effective questioning, as you only get a certain number of question attempts and the number is different per user.
My first tech job was with a place that did net security mostly marketed to fast food places. Some of the evening shift calls had me questioning reality since most of the people I talked to where fry cooks first, shift managers second, and by default of seniority the tech for a site as needed.
Countless 'the computer won't turn on' calls which ended up being them pushing the power on the monitor.
The one that called up just to listen to our hold music until I answered, which was actually pretty good, sort of an industrial/techno thing.
CS: The system just crashed, can I turn it back on?
Me: Sure go ahead and let me know if there are any errors.
CS: Hold on I can't see the button, the power is still out...
CS: Our internet is being really flakey.
Me: What lights are on at the gateway?
CS: It's hard to tell, it's underneeth the pop machine, by the way the pop won't stop spraying, how do I fix that?
And the one who got so frustrated with trying to fix things they hucked the firewall/gateway into the deepfryer and asked for a RMA.
I heard a story and saw a photo of a literally frozen router (as in, partially submerged in ice) before. Didn't expect a literally (deep)fried one too.
Had a 1st level rep call me once about a ticket I'd submitted (apparently they're required to initiate contact at least once?), say "Right, I see your ticket notes here, does the issue persist? Alright, I'll escalate it to the 2nd level, have a nice day!" and I'm pretty sure I've never heard any rep so cheerful.
Also, submit daily hourly progress reports providing a detailed accounting of the steps you are taking to work on this. But please, no more than half a sentence, bc I won't be reading them anyway.
As someone who’s team has to go on 1st line support rota every few weeks; The ticket queue has a metric shit-ton of these reports that just never get “fixed”. Can relate.