Amen Brother! I have had a little PC Repair training, did not go for the A+ exam. But my friends and family don't realize that I can't always fix their PCs over the phone. It is very frustrating because they think I just don't want to help them. The don't understand.

you mean you can't see what's on their screen like my family members and custopmers expect me to, either? it amazes me how people can expect a person to know exactly what is wrong when you can't actually see their system. as an example, a friend called wednesday wanting me to fix her machine which wouldn't boot. i live two hours away and she wanted me to fix it over the phone. i told her a few things to check but if none of them worked, to take her rig to a local repair shop. i wasn't going to drive that far. sorry!

Bah, the heck with tech support. I not only can and do all of my automotive srvice repair, I also fix all of my PC problems with out the aid of tech support. I find that most tech support personnel know so little that they are useless until you get second or third level support on the phone.(I guess it helps that I am a Master Auto Tech and I have been a computer geek since 79)

True. I, however, am pretty good. But I can't install a modem over the phone, I can't restore a hard drive over the phone...I mean, c'mon...defaulting and rebuilding a router over the phone is bad enough!

Good article, Gideon ... and so very true.


What's the all time top answer when Joe PC user is asked what error msg keeps showing up?

Joe PC User: I don't know ... I just click ok till it goes away.

PC tech: Oh ... well that's all the info I need!

  

The two biggest problems we encounter when dealing with customers complaining of internet problems:

1) Customer routers- they buy a router (wireless or otherwise) and hook it up to the modem which we provide. They seem be unable to grasp the concept that we are providing a connection that comes through that modem, but what they do after that is entirely their own responsibility. Although it is against official policy, quite often the tech support guys will struggle through trying to help the customer get their router configured properly, but the customer seems to think it is our responsibility to do so (WRONG!!) Quite often they will enable weird/unnecessary routing protocols and I have even run into one case in which a customer had taken his modem and connected it to a network that involved two routers and two hubs. This network was for two PC's in his home. Also quite often the customer will buy their own firewall and manually block the wrong ports. Not our responsibility but they blame us for this as well.

2) Slow Speeds- There are two major misunderstandings about internet speeds for which ISP's are often wrongly blamed. Quite often the customer believes that if they are buying a "guaranteed connection speed" of say 10 mbps that that will mean that all of their data will be downloaded at 10 mbps, regardless of where they are trying to download from. What this means is that you are guaranteed that speed on your ISP's network. Once you leave that network though, it's anybodies game. Say you are trying to download a file from a server in Russia and it is coming in very slowly. This is typically not the ISP's fault and could be due to any number of reasons completely out of their control. The other big complaint about slow speeds is often the customers fault as well. "My connection is slow as molasses, goldarnit!"- quite often people's PC's get infested with malware which opens connections across the internet. Get enough of these programs on your machine and it will not only slow down your internet to a crawl but can also crash your computer. Once again, NOT the ISP's responsibility!

I was an Admin Manager at Corporate Kindercare; so I observed new levels of the common sense stretch each day.
We had a term for the average user known as PEBKAP syndrome.

One of my IT support guys had a cartoon about PEBKAP. Doonesbury, I think.

Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Person
But to be arrogant is to err.

But I must say; I recently upgraded to Windows Ultimate using the Windows Anytime Upgrade disk.
Now excuse me, but that is the dumbest da** thing I have ever encountered.

Not only did the Vendor (where I purchased said Upgrade) send me Microsoft Accounting 2007to install- They in turn couldn't for the life of themselves know why I was having a problem installing the upgrade. (hello) I repeatedly informed them they sent me the worng file, and it took days and one of their local staff managers to call them to get the right file. That took 2 days.

When I finally had the correct file, I figured out on my own that 3 features needed to be disabled- (Neither the vendor OR MSN seemed to think of that)and I further discovered
that my factory installed sound drivers were not compatible.

I think the tiny little icon next to my name speaks for itself.

BTW: I am using Linux (preference = Kubuntu) as we speak, it is so easy to install and was up and running in to time.

Go figure.

~kmw aka k8

I'm not tech support...not even a techie by any stretch of the imagination, but my mother used to ring me from interstate and expect me to resolve her PC issues over the phone. Oh, and not only could I NOT see what she was talking about, I was still none the wiser even when she told me what it (supposedly) was....as she never names anything correctly.

Ma: "My Yahoo isn't working properly!"....and the next 20 minutes or so are wasted trying to establish why she can't sign in...you know, checking the usual suspects, login name and password, etc. Worse still, it never occurs to her to correct things when it's obvious we are on completely different wavelengths due to her naming error.

You see, her FF home-page is Yahoo,and it's actually FF that won't open...and there I was trying to get her signed into her My Yahoo page on IE for half an hour. GRRRRR!!!!

Don't ask how it went trying to get FF fixed...it'd take an eternity and a day to type - considering it took 3+ hours, and I get confused if I type using more than one finger.

Another time: "I can't get my Mozilla to work!"....and it's an almighty long process of elimination to discover whether or not it's FF or Thunderbird, being she uses the most confusing terminology that'd test even the patience of God. At first I was given to believe it was FF, being that she "couldn't open a page"...but it actually turned out 15 minutes later to be T-bird....and the un-openable page turned out to be her ISP service to d/l her emails.

Seems that when my niece installed T/bird, she forgot/neglected to configure it to accept/send emails....and after nearly an hour of trying in vain to explain the simple procedure to get it done, my already strained patience was totally exasperated and I found an excuse to hang up....so I could call my sister. It seemed much quicker for to call her so she could drive an hour to fix it for ma, rather than another futile phone attempt.

Is it any easier now we are under the same roof? Nope! I still have issues with incorrect terminology; selective hearing...in that she only records every third word and cannot duplicate instructions, and then there's her reproduction mode where she somehow undoes what I've done to resolve the issue, apparently in an attempt to recreate it so she doesn't have to bother me with is next time...yes, you guessed it, that WAS the the first 'next' time.

Somehow wondering if she'd be better off with a knitting machine....then again, she's just as likely to come to me with something about not being able to get channel 10 news on it.

Haha. I got a guy to do that for me over the phone (give me hints on what to do if it was the PC that was the problem).

It was MEEEEE! I tied up the phone line!

Worked for AOL and Rogers ( Canadian cable ISP ) and here are some of the things I've had to put up with

1. Clients asking for exorbant amounts of credit for things like outages and such. No I will not credit you back $10k for your missed real-time stock transaction because of a dropped dialup connection because you're too moronic to realize that you are paying $24 for unlimited dialup access and are too cheap for a guaranteed up-time connection. The most I'll give you is 1/30 of that for a dropped line ( if that )

2. PC performance/connection issues. No, I will not accept responsibility if you install some piece of shit spyware app and it breaks your Windows socket connection , delivers you popups, and slows your P4 screamer down to 486 speeds. I'll help you, but it's your damn fault. Same goes with virii. I don't give a shit what AV app you got. When I search your task manager and find a virus and tell you, YOU HAVE A VIRUS, don't tell me otherwise.

3. The afore mentioned routers or gateway. OK , you're a geek and shit, you got your fly linux gateway , but I will NOT TAKE THE BLAME WHEN IT f**ks up, Kapish?, Comprende?

P.S oh, and calling me names resets my care factor for you to a big fat zero. You're damned lucky I don't have you delpart your piece of shit machine.

God I am so glad I work internal helpdesk support now. My clients signed the same employment agreement I did.

Haha. I don't call names.

Being really nice and girly gets you places!

Visit here. Plenty of funny tech support stories.

Jafo looks after his own machines....but has a tamed slave called Yrag on call if and when things get dirty ....

In return he insults me in new and interesting ways each time....

It's a mutual benefit society ....

The biggest problem I have run into is, u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d-i-n-g what the person on the other end of the line is saying. I have a Dell Dimension 4600(and proud of it), but when there is a problem with it I can't solve the only thing left to do is call tech support. That can turn into a 3 hour affair by it self. Somehow I get connected to someone across the ocean from me that talks like they took a crash course in the English language a couple days before. If a company wants me to recommend them to someone else, it would be nice to be able to understand them.

Except at the mechanics....there it just gets you charged more.