
Thank you for calling tech support, now please die (2015) - nwrk
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/thank-you-for-calling-tech-support-now-please-die/
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slfnflctd
> we weren’t graded purely on call completion time... basing an employee’s
> performance evaluation on how quickly they get people off the phone is a
> toxic way to measure work

And yet, it's unfortunately how all too many of these outfits have continued
to run their businesses. Being spared this particular indignity was a major
privilege.

> phone monkeys such as myself reached a state of "burnout" in no more than
> eighteen months... I hated the job and needed to quit before I hurt myself

Sadly, a great many of us essentially felt trapped in our positions for quite
a bit longer. Never enough available time/energy to pursue greater things when
we had bills to pay, and always insufficient meaningful experience to parlay
into anything better.

> I’d take a minimum wage job doing manual labor over slapping that headset
> down over my head again

After way too many years, I finally crossed this bridge. I would prefer
janitorial work or being a rideshare driver, and have (gladly) done both since
leaving tech support.

> support, I’d rapidly found out, isn’t fulfilling or exciting—it’s a never-
> ending grind that wears down even the most optimistic and helpful souls... a
> Sisyphean torment.

This sums it all up in a nutshell. It would be nice to see the whole thing
reformed into a ramp for more rewarding work of different kinds, but in our
current 'disposable employee' culture, I don't see it happening any time soon.
In the mean time, lives are being destroyed and tremendous amounts of
potential are being squandered. I can only hope a few people in charge of such
operations might read this and think about ways things can be improved.

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DavidWoof
As a customer, the late 90s were the absolutely most frustrating time to deal
with computer customer support. In virtually every case, it was obvious that
the customer support person was simply reading from a support database that
the company hadn't bothered to put on the web yet, and yet to get these
answers it was necessary to let the operator, who generally had no tech
knowlege, walk you through a long script of repeating obvious steps until
finally you would get to step 50 in their script that said "if you get error
87AB with an nvidia graphics driver, you must frazz the foo in the bios
settings", which is all I wanted in the first place.

Gateway was one of the worst, since they generally had OEM versions of
hardware that required special driver settings that were completely
undocumented. Since this type of thing is generally online now, I honestly
don't think I've called customer support for any personal product in over 15
years.

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foreigner
I think I'm the only person in the planet that enjoys doing tech support. I
just _love_ it. You get to talk to real customers and fix real problems. Most
of the time the fixes are easy so you get quick wins. Callers are be delighted
to speak with someone technically competent who doesn't put them on hold
forever and all the other crap you usually expect from tech support.

If only I could make a decent living doing tech support I would totally make
that my career.

~~~
perl4ever
My first job was doing tech support for an early dial up ISP, and it was not
for me. On the other hand, in an environment with a corporate desk job where
co-workers would come by and ask me questions, it was basically as you say,
enjoyable to solve real problems, as opposed to my main job of working on
things for clients that you could never interface with directly.

Whether helping people is fun depends a lot on how civilized they are.

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whatupmd
_" Yep," he’d say on mute, with a customer’s sad voice droning on in both our
ears. "Once you get the new ticket open, it’s tab three times to get to the
description field, and if you need to get into Internet Explorer it’s control-
escape, I, enter, then alt-tab back. I’m the fastest tech on the floor here
because I never take my hands off the keyboard. If you’re smart, you’ll be
like me."_

Sounds like my kinda guy!

~~~
rzzzt
Control-escape is equivalent to the Windows key; alt-escape is the shortcut
that cycles quickly between recently used applications without showing the
small bar in the middle, like alt-tab does.

The mega combo is ctrl-alt-tab (or altgr-tab for the international keyboard
aficionados) which gives you the application switcher bar, and lets you
navigate with the arrow keys without holding down any other keys.

~~~
edoceo
Windows key + tab too

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ahje
I spent some years at Convergys. And definitely recognize many of the
procedures and idiocies described in that article, even though it was in a
different country. It's easy to forget how large the call centre business
really is.

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themoat
It's a really entertaining read for me, but I can't place my finger on why
exactly. I think crappy jobs are a great plot device in any story though since
so many people have that shared experience. The ending is so satisfying to me.

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asaph
You enjoyed it because the author is a great writer. I felt the same way you
did. It's impressive how the story telling was so engaging while the topic is
so mundane. I could see this being made into a cult-classic movie a la Office
Space.

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lee_ars
Article author here, though I'm a few days late to the party. Thank you for
the kind words :)

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asaph
I kept waiting for the tech support call where someone said "Thank you for
calling tech support, now please die" but it never happened. Even so, this was
a really enjoyable read.

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Waterluvian
I thought safe mode on windows 98 was also F8. I thought F8 has been the go-to
key to get a list of boot options after POST.

~~~
300bps
Both F8 and CTRL work for Windows 98.

But it probably didn’t matter what he answered in their two-question
interview.

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walterbell
Are there call centers for iPhone tech support or only F2F at Apple Stores?
How have the problems changed compared to PCs?

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alliecat
Apple don't maintain contact centres per se; instead, in the US have a fleet
of teleworking contact employees who handle calls, online chats, etc.

From what I hear it's a pretty good gig, minus dealing with the public.

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mcguire
" _From what I hear it 's a pretty good gig, minus dealing with the public._"

It's a pretty good gig, if you don't count the actual gig?

My experience with tech support doesn't involve phones, fortunately. I got
some exercise crawling around under people's desks.

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stephengillie
Replace Houston with Redmond and this is almost exactly the story of my 2nd IT
job - as a BPOS tech in the late 2000s. BPOS was basically Microsoft Online
beta.

They had a group of 8 of us shadowing people on both sides of the aisle. It
was like a shadow village - hidden village of the phone.

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rdiddly
Today I learned about the Houston tunnel system.

