Late Night Ramblings of a Tech Support Agent on the Edge...

4 days in a row and not a single decent quote of the week to speak of...

Ah well, there's still been good calls though!

Tonight I had a young woman who called in, unable to connect to her internet only to tell me that she had the router and modem plugged in, but there weren't any lights lit on the modem. Well, it's no small wonder that you can't connect to the internet! Without power, there's no internet. So, I ask if it's plugged into an outlet connected to a wall switch. Reasonable question, right? Right. It's not. Okay! Have you tried to plug it into any other outlets to see if it's maybe the outlet? Why should you?? Your router is plugged into the same outlet and it has power. Okay, well.... we'll move on then, because it's apparent that this customer doesn't want to try any other outlets. Got it. Troubleshoot everything else that might be keeping her from having internet... everything checks out. Dispatch a technician! Okay then.... if the tech gets out there and the issue winds up being that outlet that's the problem, it's going to be a charge of X-dollars to send the truck out. What? You want to try another outlet right now while I'm on the phone? Suuuuuure! *mumble grumble under my breath* Not like I didn't ask you if you would do that 10 minutes ago.... Hmmm? You tried another outlet and there's still no power to the modem? Okay, then it looks like the tech will have to swap out the modem for you when he's out there.

It's funny what people will do when faced with the knowledge that if they're wrong you're going to charge them money. Heh.

I did get to talk to a sweet old lady who shared part of her life with me tonight. She'd just gotten home after being away for 2 months which she spent with her son who had lung cancer while he went through chemotherapy. The good news is that they caught it early and it's treatable and he's going to be fine, but she did take a bit of a blow through those months watching her son go through the effects of chemo. Poor lady has had cancer herself too! She'd been a realtor for 27 years as well and we shared the joys and pains of customer service over the years. She'd asked whether I got a lot of people who yelled at me and that's what got us into the conversation. If I'd had time to talk all night, I bet ya she would have. But we had to get her TV fixed. Wound up being the coaxial cable was not only unplugged, but the pin inside it was bent and wouldn't go into the connector on the back of her receiver. So she was going to get one of her kids to go get her a new cable and call back if that didn't work.

Ya take the good with the bad some nights and some nights the good calls outweigh the bad ones and some nights... well... by the time you're done with the night ya just wonder what the hell has happened to the human race that we've become SO dependent on technology.

Oh! The other call I had tonight that had me cracking up laughing was the 50 year old woman who was working on setting up her internet. Now, if you remember, one of my pet-peeves is people who call Tech Support on speakerphone. This woman may be the one and only exception. The phone picks up and I hear the loudest woman known to man, I think. She's got me on speakerphone and is yelling so she can be heard, which she didn't need to do when she was right by the phone, but then she explained that her phone was in the kitchen and her computer, that she was trying to get connected, was clear out in her entryway the next room over. Even clear over at her computer she caused me to turn the volume on my phone down! I think I could have heard this woman from her house to my computer even without the phone! She did most of the talking, too, because she would add noises and whoops and hollars as things happened on her computer screen. She had me laughing! Poor thing, I couldn't even help her get connected because she was running on an ancient computer with Windows 98!! But she said her computer guy had come over and "juiced up" her computer so she could connect! Except that, when we went to set up a connection to the internet.... it wanted to set up a DIAL-UP connection! Ugh... so I tried to get her through to one of our other computer tech support agencies and THEY don't even deal with anything older than Windows 2000! It's crazy! So I let her know that and she wrote it all down so she could see what she could do. She took it all with grace and style, but good GRIEF!! I could barely HEAR once I got off the phone with her!! LOL

Ahhh, well... again, ya take the good with the bad.

Until next time, dear readers!

Lis