McFeelme's Support Helpdesk: 2

IN THIS, THE the second installment of the series, we will focus on the customer. Less you think we are going to focus on the customer all the time, I assure you that in future installments we will be examining the phone support engineers. Stupidity is a two way street.

As a preface, I feel it is important to know that in the products that I service it is important to have the keyboard installed. The computer will function without the keyboard, however it will not output any video to the primary display adapter. Instead it will output to the serial port.

12:30 PM call comes in to me queue, it's a callback customer. The summary line reads, "System will not boot." Customers like to use this line. It can mean anything from smoke coming out of the power supply, to forgetting their password.

1:00 PM I call customer and leave message.

1:20 PM Customer calls and leaves message.

1: 45 PM Call customer and leave message.

2:01 customer calls and reaches me. She states that she can hear the computer starting up, all the hard drives are spinning. She replaced the video card once, but still she gets nothing on the screen.

Me: Can you try booting the machine while holding the "stop" key and the "N" key.
Cu: I don't seem to have a "stop" key.
Me: All of our keyboards have a "stop" key.
Cu: We are hooked up through a KVM switch with a (large TX PC manuf) monitor and keyboard.
Ahhhhhhhhh So we come to the crux of the problem.
Me: Ok, that's fine, but before we go further, you're going to have to hook up one of our keyboards.
Cu: We replaced the video card.
Me (?????) Right, that doesn't matter. What you need to do is plug in one of our…
Cu: The monitor has the same kind of plug, as the video card so I figured it would work.

Cu: The guys that had it before said it worked fine.
Me: I'm sure it did, and it still does. If you get a keyboard, and restart the…
Cu: We only need to see it once. If I enter the IP address, it won't matter anymore.
Me: Perfect! If you just get a keyboard and plug it in…
Cu: But I don't have one of your keyboards.
Grrrooooaaannnn Cu: The video connectors are the same so I figured that it would work fine.
Me: Yeah, the video connector. Do you have any of our keyboards lying around somewhere?
Cu: I don't think so.
Me: I can send you one. They're consumables, so you won't even get charged for it. I can send it to you 3-day delivery.
Cu: Does that include the weekend?
Yeah I'm going to send you a FREE keyboard overnight
Me: No, three business days.
Cu: I kind of need it overnight.
Yeah and I kind of need a real job.
Me: If you need it faster you'll have to call sales.
Cu: Then I would have to go through all that purchasing stuff. Maybe I can find one around here.
Yeah if it's important maybe you can.
Me: That would be great.
Cu: I'll try that and call you back.
Lucky me Me: Great! Call before three or I won't make shipment for a new one today.

2:30 PM Customer calls and leaves message. She found a keyboard and plugged it in; still it doesn't work.

2:40 PM Call customer and leave message.

2:50 PM Customer calls back.

Cu: I plugged it in, I still can't see anything.
Me: right no we need to re-start the…
Cu: All I need to do is put in the IP address
Me: Yeah right, the IP address. Okay if we can just…
Cu: This is a really important project; it would be nice if we can get this running by Monday.
Me: Monday, sure. Okay if you can just re-start the computer while holding the "stop" key and….
Cu: Ok, I re-started the computer.
Me: You should be holding….
Cu: HEY!!! It's working!!!!
Me: Have a nice day.
Cu: Thank you

The pay sucks, but at least the callers are annoying.

McFeelme Johnson µ

(McFeelme Johnson, has a real job working for a real IT firm in a real country called the US.)