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!

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!

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'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.

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.

Visit here. Plenty of funny tech support stories.

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.

don't forget about the ID 10 t errors.

 

ID10t

but my mother used to ring me from interstate and expect me to resolve her PC issues over the phone.

That is when GoToMyPC is worth the $20/month!  Not my mom (after spending a career working on big iron, she refuses to own one), but my Aunt Who lives 1000 miles from me.

I have met some Techs that are worth more than gold. But most are clueless.  I called Verizon to get the user's password (he was there with me) to set up their wireless, and got 2 hours of anything BUT!  Finally got the password when he decided that the problem was the linksys (duh!), but it cost an hour and 55 minutes of "MR. Mighty PC Tech" knowing less than me, and being condescending about it.

I usually do most of my own stuff, but I had an IT guy that I went to when I couldn't fix it myself. He owned his own computer company and sold/built all of our computers at our office (I've been there for 15+ years) and we've been using him since before I started working there. Sadly, he passed away from a heart attack about 3 months ago and we've not found anyone to replace him. If it was something that the office manager or I couldn't handle (and she has a degree in computers ~ and I designed and programmed the databases we use at our company, even though I don't have a "formal" degree yet! I'm working on it eventually when you get 70+ hours a week, kinda hard to fit college in!) we just had to call Dave and he could usually either tell us over the phone or we would drop the computers off at his shop and get them back the next day, unless he had to order a part. I really miss him , you don't find many people like that!

Not an IT guy but I can piss and moan with the best of em.....

Working in construction , I have had similiar experiences with ALL OF YOU. Get off your high horse and realize that your not smarter than everyone else. Your just better at what you do than others. For crying out loud you work in SUPPORT. So SUPPORT!

I have had to replace a frikkin lightbulb for a guy that supossedly invented a part in all fax machines. He earns $ 300,000.00 a month in royalties for the rest of his life but can't change a lightbulb.

I'll bet most of you that if your car suddenly stopped working, the first thing you would do is call a tow truck. You would probably tell the driver you thought it was the battery when you probably ran out of gas.

Your dealing with just PC related issues. You call for support when your heating system goes down. I don't think your an idiot for calling. Your an idiot for trying to fix it yourself and it costs you more money.

My point is we are all stupid in some regards. For some reason IT guys feel like they earned the right to be rude on top of stupid.

oh and good luck any of you when it comes to pleasing a woman.   

Night Train,

I support INTERNET CONNECTIVITY! I do NOT perform PC Repair over the phone! Maybe you should stop DEMANDING CAVIAR when you're paying for frankfurters!

You, and people like you, are the biggest part of the problem. If we don't do the impossible (yes, I HAVE been asked to reformat a hard drive and reinstall Windows XP OVER THE PHONE...FOR NOTHING...remember, folks, the tech support is for INTERNET CONNECTION!), you jump and holler that we're not doing our jobs.

You work in construction. If someone pays you to build a 250 square foot add on, do you feel it's reasonable to ask you to build a 3000 square foot house for the same price you quoted for the add on? Because that is EXACTLY what you are demanding of us!