MMMiii!

No offense to Indians or people from India, but I’m kind of glad that my account is going to shut down their site in India. I do get a lot of calls wherein the customer couldn’t thank me enough for not being Indian. I also dislike transferring or calling up other departments in India. They just have this… I don’t know… they have a different attitude that I just can’t live with.

Anyway, I had this customer and we were trying to make his old LinkSys router work. Now, I always tell my customers that I’ll be glad to help them with the basic configuration of their LinkSys router to work with our modem, but in the event that it requires advanced configuration and/or troubleshooting, I will have to refer them out. And they agree.

And so I was having trouble making the router work. The modem was working fine, customer can connect to the internet without the router, but when the router was connected, it wouldn’t work. It’s not a big deal bridging and unbridging the modem to make it work properly with the router, but well… the issue was the customer was typoing (over and over again) … (I shouldn’t really assume, but that’s actually what happened) at one point, and his router had a password that was different from the default.

As much as I would love for the customer to just press the darned reset button at the back of the router, we’re not really allowed to do that. LinkSys routers aren’t our products and we’re supposed to play dumb about it. Not that we know everything about it, but we’re not really trained for it. But the reset button is almost the same in equipment like these… so… anyway.

In the middle of our troubleshooting, trying to figure out the password for his router, he had his wife call LinkSys. Apparently, the agent was from India. The customer kept screaming that he has a nice lady from the Philippines helping him with his internet and he needs to know the password for his router. From the sound of it, his router wasn’t under warranty anymore and he was told that he was going to be charged.

The customer went back to me and he told me that this stupid person from India wanted to charge him for just to be told to press the reset button so he’ll just do it anyway. Well, he did it, and it didn’t work. While doing this, he kept going on and on about how he didn’t like Indians and that he could get a heart attack just talking with them.

I ended up selling him a modem-router (gateway).

I’m not saying that Filipinos are better technical support or even customer support people. Indians actually do better in the metrics side, I believe. But due to the nature of Filipinos, we’re more amiable and tend to want to please. The Filipino hospitality or something. There are still some Americans who don’t like people from other countries answering their calls though.

“Oh Well.”

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One of my calls today was really depressing. The customer wasn’t so old. She’s only 52 and she keeps calling herself old. I keep on telling her that she’s not (since I get calls from older people like Mr. FastAction). Well… her issue was she was having troubles setting up her internet.

The details: She had an old 5 or 6 year old computer running Windows 2000 that she just got from a friend. Her modem is an old Netopia 2241 that she also got from a friend. Her computer doesn’t have an ethernet port.

Now, with her ISP, the installation works best with at least Windows XP (even if Mac and Win2k is supported). It almost never fails. With USB connections, she has to go through the hard pain-staking process of installing the driver for the modem. And her computer is slow. Have I mentioned that the computer was slow? The computer is SLOW.

The process is actually really simple. Just run the CD and then just follow the instructions. But for someone who is too clicker-happy, yet does not and could not distinguish left click from right click, it becomes hard. Really hard.

It came to the point where she was telling me why she got internet (and she got the fastest one, mind you) while we were rebooting the computer. She said she just wanted to look at recipes. And then her voice started to shake and then when the computer was back up, and we were going to proceed, she said, “I’m sorry Angel. I’m tired already. I thought this was going to be easy but it’s becoming a job to me already.” (It was almost 10pm already).

My heart went out to her. I wanted to go there and set up her internet for her. She did mention earlier that she was just some lonely old woman, divorced, living alone, her kids have left her as well. And she really did sound lonely. She was saying goodbye and I couldn’t say goodbye to her. I’ll probably be marked down if ever that call was monitored. But since that call was over an hour, probably not.

This is one of different kinds of calls that I get that I really hate. Getting emotional on a call. *sigh*

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A Dissat or a DSat is short for Dissatisfaction — A dissatisfied customer, in other words.

My job involves a monthly scorecard. And if I pass my scorecard for the month, there’s an entailing bonus for every quarter.

The scorecard (at this time) includes customer satisfaction surveys. Some customers receive a survey and they are asked to rate the agent and the service they received from their call. If you got a sat, you pass. A dissat? an instant fail.

From December to May, I’ve never got a dissat. Until June. All my surveys were Sats (Satisfied customer). Until June.

The reason I got a dissat? Because I assumed that Thunderstorms = Rain included. According to the customer’s comment, “I told the agent that whenever it storms, I lose my internet connection. Even when it rains.”

*sigh*

It’s depressing. Because I know I told her clearly that it MAY be because of the rain and water seepage in the NID that’s causing this. I said it MAY be that’s why I sent a technician to fix the goddamn thing. Why the ef should she give me a dissat -_-;;

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I had a call the other day. The woman said something like the lightning hit the transformer outside and knocked out their power, so the transformer had to be replaced. She said there’s nothing wrong with her computer but her internet went out. The internet light is red on the modem and the modem is broken. She said.

Usually, on DSL modems, the DSL light has to be a solid green. That means there is a connection to the network. Then in some, there is an Internet light. That’s the PPPoE or the Authentication. Green would usually mean the modem is authenticated to the network. A red light would usually mean an incorrect username and/or password is in the modem. For some, it means that there is no username and password in it. And still, in some, it means that it is bridged.

Taking these things in account, of course I asked the status of the other lights. They’re all green. But we couldn’t access the modem. Tried troubleshooting the NIC–it seems to have been busted.

I tried explaining to the customer that it’s a possibility that the modem and/or the NIC has been affected by the surge.

They said they get a lot of power surges in the area so they have a surge protector. It’s not possible that something in the computer could have got broken. And it’s just the modem that is broken, not the network card.

——-Start of Irateness of customer——-

well… they seem to think that Surge Protector == will protect all devices forever. and as if their devices are invincible as long as their on surge protectors.

Well… depending on the surge protector, either devices won’t be protected as much, or will be, but only for a certain period of time.

I don’t know … *sigh* If the transformer blew up, I would think it would have taken a lot of … i don’t know… electric current? to make it explode. oh well. I’m constantly on a battle with surge protectors.

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The customer just got a tech come over his place and set up his DSL, but the tech did not teach the customer how to go on the internet. The customer is complaining that the tech didn’t teach him how. I asked him to double click on the Internet Explorer icon and then he should be online now (Some customers think that going online means opening Internet Explorer and going offline means closing it or exiting the program).

His page opened to the ISP’s homepage and he said “I don’t need all these advertising bullshit. I see Today’s guide and all these advertisements… I’m paying for FAST ACTION! Not f*ing advertisements!” (The homepage actually has just one ad block)

I explained to the customer that he’s already on the Internet just by opening internet explorer. He said “I WANT TO GO ON THE INTERNET.” I asked him what exactly did he want, then he said he wanted to see Fast Action. That’s what’s he’s paying for. Fast Action.

I guided him to the search bar and asked him to type in there what he wanted … but he said he didn’t want all those advertising b.s. (the text). He said the tech that came over earlier showed him moving pictures. Exasperated, I asked him if it was like movies or videos.

His answer?

“You don’t know anything. Get me your supervisor.”

And of course, I couldn’t deny him that.

I had to put him on hold for about 9 minutes because I couldn’t get an available level 2 tech or supervisor or even a team leader. I kept asking the guy to bear with me and he said he wouldn’t be going anywhere because he was an “80-year-old man stuck in a wheelchair.”

I got desperate and asked if the level 2 tech’s team leader could take my escalation. He pulled out one of his agents who was on lunch and asked me to explain the issue and take the call. I explained… and this nice guy on lunch took my escalation on my station.

It turns out, this “80-year-old man stuck in a wheelchair” wanted pr0n sites and he wanted to go to them now because the children are asleep. He must have been thinking he was finally free and that he was in one of the many fancy las vegas hotels and he could gamble, or get women, or something. I don’t know. The call lasted about an hour and a half because the “80-year-old man stuck in a wheelchair” was also hard of understanding and following instructions. Even the level 2 tech was getting exasperated. (My poor bone wrist rest became a stress bone).

At first he was just guiding the customer to type what he wants in a search engine… in the end, he gave him (spelled out) a specific porn site.

I didn’t know if I would laugh because of the situation, or cry because my Average Handle Time was shot.

*Sigh*

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Sometimes, when customers get disconnected, the solution would just be to powercycle the modem and/or the router. I’m not saying that this is always the case. Like I said already, it’s sometimes. And that’s the first step in trying to re-establish the Internet connection for a network with a router.

I had a customer unplug the power cable of her router once, and it was just so amazing. She lost the cable. She said there were a lot of cables there and she just couldn’t find it. I was utterly amazed that I couldn’t speak for about 10 seconds. I mean, if you’re able to unplug it, you should at least have looked at it, right? I would understand if she unplugged it blindly, but she verified before she unplugged it that it was a thinnish black wire.

I described to her again and again how it looks like. We even tried tracing the cable from the power outlets and power strips. Yes, we tried more than one.

For about 35 minutes, she was trying to look for it. My call lasted 40 minutes. Because within 5 minutes, I had determined that we need to powercycle. Ughh… a pain for my stats.

Some people really do the most unimaginable things.

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I haven’t written lately about my adventures in Technical Support Land. I know. My apologies. I just keep getting pre-occupied with something else. My stories for this post will be somewhat old. I mean, I had these calls more than a month ago, but I just keep forgetting to write about them. But I know that I really wanted to write about them. I even wrote the gist of it on my notebook.

Anyways, I decided that I’ll just have one post for each story so that it won’t be too much of a strain on the eyes. I myself lose interest when seeing a long wordy blog post.

The Military Alphabet

In tech support, most of the time, we have to spell out everything. Down to the dot N for November, E for Echo and T for Tango. One of my customers apparently was a little hard of hearing and spelling and I had to spell everything. When I first spelled out something, he said, “Wow! You know the military alphabet!”

I said, “I’m not quite sure about that. I don’t really know it.”

“But you do!” he said again… I just ignored that last one and continued to spell out stuff for him. And then it came to a point that I said S for Sandy and H for Harry. He kind of angrily interrupted and said it was S for Sierra and H for Hotel.

“I thought you know the military alphabet!”

“I didn’t say I did, Mr Customer. I do apologize. But really, I just use what I can think of.”

=_= Some customers just assume. They make an ASS out of U and ME.

________________________________

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I realized how lame my previous post was. I was desperately trying to type it with my eyes trying to close and I was fighting against it, keeping it open, alternating each eye so one could rest.

And then when I woke up, I was practically chatting with Yu the whole time until I fell asleep again, so I wasn’t able to write.

I was going to write about that one funny call. The customer was really nice and he was setting up a business about signs–fully customized signs. Signs for what, you say? I didn’t really quite understand. It must be an American thing. I just smiled, nodded, agreed and laughed with the customer. He said you could have it set on your birthstone, it glows in the dark and if ever you have one, you’ll probably be the only one in your whole block to have one.

Read more »

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I would normally say this would be for no real reason, but there is, actually. I keep forgetting when is Monday. I’m sometimes on Eastern and sometimes on Philippine. So… I’ll just name it Tech Support Stories and write whenever I feel like it, and that would be during my days off. My schedule changes monthly, so… yeh.

I’m really too sleepy at the moment, but just to remind myself, I’m going to write a person and his signs. Okay? Okay.

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