Divisions and Precisions

How tech support really works

Nothing makes a tech support rep more determined to solve your problem than impugning their ability to do so. Particularly if you understand how tech support works. Their job is to fix your problem without ever really telling you what the problem was, lest you get the idea that their service or product is unreliable.

Our charter.net email has been down for over a week. First they said they were doing an upgrade, then they said that the upgrade was finished, and everything was fixed. Except it wasn't. Our email addresses no longer existed. Worse, we couldn't log in to set them up again. When I called and talked to "John" this afternoon, my patience was pretty well worn away, particularly after nearly ten minutes spent listening to a message apologizing for their "high call volume". Folks, I worked tech support. When you get a message apologizing for "high call volume", that's management-speak for "we broke something big, and the whole world is calling us about it".

John asked for our email logins and passwords. I said, "Are you going to go set the email accounts up again? Because I just tried that and we can't log in to our main account."

"Oh," he says, clearly planning to go do just that and not tell me that the email addresses got deleted in the first place. "Please hold." ("Please hold" is tech support-speak for "fuck, I'm in over my head".) After more messages apologizing for breaking their system, he comes back to tell me that he can't fix the problem, but he emailed someone who can, and it should be fixed soon.

Me: "Can you define soon for me?"
John: "No, I can't."
Me: "Are we talking an hour, a week?"
John: "I don't know."

Here's where I start getting pissed. I ask if this mysterious person is the only person in all of Charter Communications who can fix this problem. He says yes. He proceeds to give me a bunch of technical jargon about the problem in an attempt to intimidate me. Unfortunately for him, I understand very clearly that his jargon means, "We did an upgrade and the database didn't transfer properly and we lost some accounts." I waste no time in translating it back to him. Here's where he starts getting pissed.

I ask for this mysterious miracle guy's name. He won't tell me. I ask for his name, and he tells me, unwillingly. I ask for his manager's name. Again, he tells me unwillingly, and offers to transfer me to "Ram", the manager. I say no. We hang up, unhappy customer and unhappy tech support guy.

Fifteen minutes later he calls back and tells me the problem is fixed.

You know, when I did tech support, I always hated the customers who were actually computer savvy. Worse than the morons who didn't know their CD drive from their floppy drive. Because you could snow the morons and the mediocre. You couldn't snow the ones who knew a little about computers. I have become what I hated. Mwahaha.