Customer Service

There's a fundamental flaw in the nature of my job. For the most part, things run quite smooth, but there's a certain trigger phrase that basically means my life is about to turn shit for at least a few minutes. That phrase? "I talked to someone before. . ."

See, most of you out there in cyberspace don't see what so bad about that. You may even think "hey, cool, this person has already received some assistance so they won't be completely lost."
Oh, how little you fools know. . .

The very nature of help desk is to come up with answers to questions we can't possible foresee being asked. This means that every question ultimately is a test of an individual's experience and problem-solving skills. By sheer virtue of diverse experience, we all have different methods and ideas. Most people, the clients, don't get that. They assume we all are operating out of the same memorized manual. Admittedly, sometimes we are (resetting passwords is only really done one way) but usually not.

What does this all mean? It means that, unless the worker who helped them is standing right next to me, I have NO idea what has already been tried or the specific details of the question (the hows and whys behind a computer not doing what it's supposed to) and the clients tend toward reluctance when asked to explain their last visit/phone call.

At its worst is when the problem was not solved the first time (usually pertaining to VPN and off-campus networking), which means it's highly likely there's NOTHING I can do that hasn't already been done. Sometimes the VPN sucks. Deal with it. The clients seem to be under the assumption we have all the answers (which is alright, as far as my ego goes) but can't handle when there's something we can't do. They stare at me with contempt and say "and if that doesn't work, THEN what?" Gee, lady, I don't know. Why don't YOU try doing something? How about you read your damn operating manual or, I don't know, LOOK FOR THE ONLINE DOCUMENTATION FOR YOUR DAMN SELF!

*On the subject of mapping network drives: Mapping to H: and W: from off-campus with a Mac fucking blows. Nice job there, Steve.

As bad as the above scenario may be, and truthfully it's not so bad, there's one FAR worse situation: Call Center.

I really can't generalize or attribute this to a common rule. The experience speaks for itself. At 2:00 I replaced the guy in the Call Center. At 2:05, I took a phone call from a woman who had just been advised by the Help Desk (gee, who could that have been?) to click "Yes" to an unsolicited popup from XP Security Center, one of the better-known HOLYFUCKINGSHITDESTROYYOURCOMPUTER Trojans out there. So what did she do? Of course, she installed it. That began the very long process of near-constant fake spyware popup warnings. Naturally, she called back, and essentially gave me a tongue-lashing because some other schmuck is a dumbass. Difficult though it felt, I had no trouble maintaining professionalism and didn't insult or belittle my co-worker for his stupid mistake, but simply tried to help solve the problem.

Granted, the woman was kind of dumb. "I don't usually open attachments in my Junk Mail folder, but this one looked important." . . . . DUH! THAT'S HOW IT WORKS! "But it said Windows XP on it." Again, nice lady. . . THAT'S THE WHOLE FUGGIN POINT! HAVE SOME COMMON SENSE!

It's inescapable. I am always going to have to deal with second-time return callers who expect me to be both aware of and responsible for prior phone conversations. That's nothing I can do anything about. I just wish people, no matter who they work for, weren't so GODDAMN STUPID.

Rant over.
Out.