October 14, 2004
-
grr… Tech Support!
I despise calling these stupid tech support numbers. They are the
epitome of exercises in futility. It is very much clear to me that many
of the people answering the phone don’t have a clue in what they are
doing. That alone wouldn’t be so bad if the tech support guys had
the good graces to recognize when the person they are talking to is as
or more knowledgeble than they are. If the person would just do
that then maybe he can combine his specialized knowledge of the way the
particular system works and greater access to data and information with
the callers own intellectual abilities to come to a real
solution. To make matters worse the tech support guys
almost always seem somewhat bored or in an incredible hurry to settle
the user’s problem with the easiest and quickest (and thus often the
worst) possible solution.A case in point, today I ended up on the phone with a tech support
person about why a particular website was malfunctioning. Why I even
bothered I don’t know. It would have taken me much less time to just
use trial and error. Anyways the person of course stepped me
through a bunch of obviously incorrect things like asking me if I’d
entered the correct data in each and every field. I obviously had
and told him that right away. What’s more I characterized the problem
in such a way that that shouldn’t have even been a consideration, as I
described how the entire page was unresponsive. Finally the tech
support person concluded that he didn’t know what the problem was
unless I wasn’t using “Internet Explorer”. Of course I wasn’t. I
never use internet explorer if I can help it. When I said no, he said
“what are you using netscape?” Netscape! Why would that be the
first thing to come to mind? These days netscape’s market share is less
than Opera and various Mozilla browsers and probably less than
safari/khtml based browsers too. Of course when I said “mozilla
firefox” the person did not give any evidence to knowing what I was
talking about.So in the end I didn’t even try to pursue working with this person
through trying to figure out exactly what security settings in firefox
might be keeping their poorly designed site from working correctly.
Instead I just switched to IE long enough to get it to work so that I
could get off the phone and then continue my own experimentation. To
know surprise to me a little later I had it working in firefox.
Why had I even bothered?Tech support is a worthless idea. They should not hire people who don’t
know much to explain things while presuming that the people they are
explaining it to don’t know anything. We should just get direct access
to the creators of the system. What’s the point of the middle person
anyways? Better yet they should just put all the sourcecode, including
server side code, on a big visible link on the site, and access to an
interactive debugger, so that anyone can just debug it themselves.
