Tragic Tales From Behind The Tech Support Desk
We have all experienced troubles with technology at least once in our lives. When we are not able to troubleshoot those issues on our own, we turn to tech support.
They’re the people who miraculously know everything there is to know about why your phone and computer doesn’t work when you want it to. These tech support heroes share their most memorable experiences helping those in need.
Taught To Troubleshoot
I spent three awful years working in a call center, two of which I was roped into acting as tech support despite the fact that I’d originally been hired to sell insurance. The calls I got made me weep for humanity. After my son was born, I decided not to return from maternity leave.
I just couldn’t handle staying up all night with a screaming newborn, and then coming in to work and calmly asking people how the heck they can’t see the huge red “CREATE AN ACCOUNT” button smack-dab in the middle of the page, but they can find our phone number in tiny font up in the corner to call and demand that we do it for them.
Well, you guys, my baby is now a toddler, and I just had that misty-eyed, hand-on-heart, proud parent moment that you always hear about. My son was playing with his Brilliant Baby Laptop, which is basically a bright plastic clamshell that plays music when the baby mashes the keyboard.
Suddenly, the music stopped. The baby was confused. Further button-mashing had no effect. I watched from the sofa as my son frowned, experimentally smashing the buttons harder.
Then, as I looked on in amazement and pride, he turned it off and on again. “Welcome”! It announced, the screen lighting up in a joyful display. My son contentedly returned to his button-mashing, and I shed a proud tear.
So what if your kid can say “mommy” and “daddy” and knows how to use a spoon? Mine can troubleshoot!
Meeting Expectations
This happened to a colleague of a colleague, who I’ll call “Hero”. So Hero is happily speeding along in his car, running a few yellow lights because he’s a bit late, etc. Finally, the law catches up to him and pulls him over.
Here’s how the conversation went:
Officer: Can I see your driving license, please?
Hero (with smug grin): Certainly. Here it is, officer.
The officer takes license back to motorcycle and speaks into radio.
Hero: It’s not going to help you any, though.
Officer: (with no reaction): What do you mean?
Hero: (with a wider grin): The server you have to check it against is down.
Officer (still no reaction): And why do you say that?
Hero: Because I’m the guy they called to get on site and get it up again.
Our hero did not get a fine this time.
Doing The Math
I had a customer call me up in mobile tech support with the problem that his data wasn’t working for 20 minutes. Pretty quickly I find out why: He had accidentally turned off his data on the phone menu, which happens a lot and usually the customer goes “oops silly me”.
Except this customer starts demanding compensation for his time without service and being very rude about it.
After a couple of minutes he’s not getting that this is not something we do. So I get an idea. I tell him I’m going to go speak to my manager. I went up to my manager, explain what’s happening, and he says the customer’s being ridiculous.
I said, “Listen I have this idea for him, are you okay with this”? then explain my idea.
“Are you kidding? Let me get on call listening before you go back, I wanna hear this”.
I go back to the phone, he gave me the thumbs up that he was ready to listen, and I proceed.
“Right sir, I just had a word with my manager and I’ve managed to swing something for you, so let’s break this down. You pay us 39.99 a month for three services, calls, texts, and data, so let’s divide your bill by three. That gives us 13.
33, so let’s divide further by 30 days, which gives 44 cents for your daily data. Now you had your data turned off for 20 minutes but for the purpose of this I’ll round it up to an hour, so we just need to divide that 44 cents by 24 hours. So that means you’re looking at compensation of 1.
8 cents so let’s just say 2”.
I looked over at my manager during this and he was covering his mouth laughing. Customer goes; “Are you having a laugh”? “No sir, the math is there”. “…Go on then, I’ll take it”.
I Was Left No Other Choice
My story starts on what was a normal day taking calls on the front line for a large cable company. The job pays well and for the most part the people I deal with are fairly nice to talk to.
Quite often we’ll get calls from seniors (especially in the morning) who have equipment issues such as “snow on screen” or “no signal” on their TV sets connected to our digital equipment.
Now my heart does go out to some of these folks because up until recently (past few years) we would supply straight analog cable to many homes.
However, most cities we service nowadays require our digital equipment to receive channels, and this has caused a lot of frustration with older people who don’t know how to operate said equipment.
So often times we get customers who are repeat offenders with long ticket histories of these types of issues.
I get a call from an older gentleman who’s quite bitter and mean right off the bat. He doesn’t like that I asked for his address and telephone number to verify the account, hates that he has to speak with a machine before reaching an agent, etc. I have some experience handling these types of customers.
But this call was going to be very different.
I spent over 45 minutes with this guy (we’ll call him Mr Smith) trying to get his TV set connected to the digital box properly so he could receive a picture. No luck.
He was getting clearly frustrated by the whole ordeal and started blaming me for not being able to do my job properly, how I was useless, etc.
Whatever. Like I said, I’ve dealt with this before so I tried my best not to take it personally, but eventually I had to ask him if we could book a service tech to the home (a courtesy call) to get his TV working correctly.
Unfortunately, our booking calendar was showing an appointment three days out. That’s when he dropped this on me:
“Don’t bother sending a technician, because I’ll be dead by then. I’m 94 and TV is the only thing I have left, are you really going to make me wait for a tech”? I instantly felt bad.
I mean, I’ve heard every complaint in the book as to why people don’t want to wait for a tech but this one kind of got to me. I’m in my mid-20s so honestly I can’t even imagine how it must feel to utter those words.
I spoke with my supervisor, who said they’d see if we could get someone out earlier…but we couldn’t promise anything. So I let Mr Smith know and he was predictably not very happy with my answer.
At that point it almost sounded like he started to cry and went into how he has no family left, and no friends that come visit—this was after I asked if there was anyone in his building that might be able to help.
Man. I felt terrible. I knew what I had to do.
I took it upon myself to ask Mr Smith if I could pay a visit. He lived in a small city over from where I was, not very far to drive. He was a little shocked I was willing to do this, but sounded thankful I was willing to come out and help him personally.
I head over, get to the residence and meet him. Within 30 seconds I had the cable running again (simple input change) and even brought him a simplified remote for his set top box to avoid this problem in the future. That’s when he started crying.
He goes into how he hasn’t actually spoken or really interacted with anyone for years.
He gave me a hug and told me how thankful he was that I came out and helped him, and told me how sorry he was for being so mean earlier on. I said it was no problem and I was happy to help, and that was it, I left.
Three weeks later, my supervisor comes to my desk and asks me if I could come speak with her for a bit about an account for “Mr Smith”.
Turns out, he sent the cable company a letter outlining how thankful he was for helping him with his issue and how it really “made an old man happy again for once in a very long time”. The letter was framed and put on our front entrance to retail.
I guess the moral of this story is no matter how nasty someone is to you over the phone, sometimes they’re not always a terrible person and just going through a lot.
I still think about Mr Smith occasionally when I get those nasty customers and it makes me feel a little better.