MMMiii!

Two new characters in my daily Tech Support life. And I’m on time this time. I actually almost forgot. This is the problem when you’re on night shift. You leave the house at night and come back the next day. Sometimes you forget what day it is. You practically have to live in someone else’s timezone.

It’s not yet Monday in EST, but it’s Monday in PHT. Sooo… yeh.

________________________________________
Ms Divorcee

Customer calls in. Tells you the story of her life. She has two kids, and she’s getting a divorce next week. She doesn’t want soon-to-be ex-husband to have access to her e-mails, to her internet accounts. She wants to delete the future ex’s email account as well.

And of course, she’s the customer. I can’t refuse her since this is doable from the tech support side.

I had to ask her twice to make sure if she really wanted to delete the future ex’s email account. She said she was sure. The internet is under her name, she’s paying for it, and he won’t have any right to it soon. She also wants to have her name changed. Now, I don’t really care. I mean, it’s not my email, it’s not my husband or ex-husband. However, I did find it a little harsh.

If the future ex actually uses the said email account, it will be a real pain to get it back. He won’t be able to use said email account for 90 days and all his emails are gone by now since I deleted it already. What if there were important things inside there? But of course, Ms Divorcee doesn’t care. Her voice was shaking almost the whole time as well. I’m not sure if it’s because of anger or what.

Ahh… Women are really dangerous when they get angry.

_________________________________________
Mr Opportunity

Customer calls in and tells you right away that he knows his thing, the modem is working but he can’t connect to the internet. I authenticate him and inform him of his username. He missed an underscore. And we were already connected. He inquires if we support FTP, and I said that we do, and then he went on about his last ISP and he was told that they don’t support FTP. Customer has a website that I will not disclose, and he told the tech support of that ISP “How do you think the page got there?”

I wanted to answer “By magic” then before I could do that, he said “These things don’t go online just by magic.”

Too bad for me. Well, apparently, Mr Opportunistic IS somewhat a techie. I checked his crappy website and he does computer installations and repairs, backhoe and landscaping, digital photography, website design (for the life of me, I will NOT have him design my website), video lights and sounds, and security systems like installing motion sensor lights.

Anyway, Mr Opportunistic finds out the cause of a lot of internet problems a couple of years ago. He let me in on a secret. He found out that it’s because the newer version of the installer CD was such an utter failure and that the customers had to use an older version. He said he made about $1000 just fixing other people’s problems because the techs insisted on using the new CD.

My reply to him? “Great! That’s wonderful!”

A call that was supposed to only last not more than 10 minutes became long because Mr Opportunistic kept talking and talking.

________________________________________

Sometimes, I don’t always agree with our processes, but we do have to follow them. Like the new stupid registration. I mean, it’s fine and dandy that the customers can now register their own username and password, but if they’re using Win98 (yes, people still use that) or ME (unfortunately), or a 64-bit version of WinXP or WinVista, they won’t be able to register for a username and password, and hence won’t be able to use the internet. I mean, what kind of BS is that? It’s like you’re denying someone the right to have internet because he’s old.

It really pains me whenever I have to inform a customer “I’m afraid you won’t be able to register for your DSL. Please upgrade to at least Windows 2000 so that you could register.”

I really don’t understand.

And if I were like Mr Opportunistic, I’d have a laptop that I’ll be bringing around and helping customers register for their username and password. That’s all they need anyway to have DSL. Internet will work on Win98. These people in Win98 are usually old people and really only use the internet for emails. I’ll probably earn a lot of money from that.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!