While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!
I work in our service department myself (not as support tech though), but obviously, all tickets are supposed to go through 1st level. I don’t wanna be the dick skipping queue, so I did then one time I had an issue.
There’s a unique feeling of satisfaction to submitting a ticket with basically all the 1st level troubleshooting in the notes, allowing the tech to immediately escalate it to a 2nd level team. One quick call, one check I didn’t know about, already prepared the escalation notes while it ran. Never have I heard our support sound so cheerful.
Still riding the high of RMAing my Index. Included all the steps I did and the reply was essentially, “Thanks for troubleshooting, confirm your address and we’ll ship your replacement.”
My favorite little story was while working short-term at a company. Had some issues, did my normal troubleshooting steps and Google searches, identified what I felt the issue was and knew I wouldn’t have enough access to fix it. Reached out and got a response “Blah blah blaaah schedule blah blah Remote-In.”
Later on he sent me a message and remotes into my computer. I take control quick, open up notepad, and type out “Hi!”
To this day I swear that little show earned me more difficult fake phishing attempts. Which I mention because he specifically told me one day he had experience in the information security sector. Lo’ and behold!
The other day I was having a bad day and had a call from an unknown number, so I decided to pick up but let them talk first. They just hang up and have not called again.
I don’t think it was a good idea to pick up in the first place, but it was curious in the end.
Back during the real estate frenzy of the late 2010s I would get calls all the time asking how much I would sell my house for. I’d say “I could probably let it go for 2 million dollars.” (Even at the ridiculous peak, it was never worth more than 750k.) There would be a few seconds of silence on the line while they actually looked up my house. Then they’d say “oh.” And hang up as fast as humanly possible.
I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”
Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”
I find this a fascinating phenomenon. Some of it is ignorance of the technology. Which I get because you can’t expect everyone to be experts (but if you don’t know the difference between a browser and your desktop just fuck off back to the bronze age).
The other is a true lack of empathy in the context of communication. Being able to communicate effectively with an equal onus on both parties to understand and adapt the dialog until the information has effectively been transferred is not hard, really, but some people just don’t care enough about the person on the other end of the line to be bothered.
That is infuriating when you’re trying to be helpful.
As a former IT help desk person, I can confirm that we do in fact love it when people give us good info. People who write screen broke shouldn’t be working with technology more advanced than a shovel
Abundance of PascalCase in ThreadName disturbs me. If you don’t use FormatSymbol as format symbol at least name variables in camelCase. Or snake_case, or at the very least SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE.
I’ve heard stories of webdevs adding technical-looking error popups on their website asking the client to pay. Something like ERROR 402 PAYMENT REQUIRED: Database connection failed due to insufficient funds. Apparently it works pretty well
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