tech support?

[Eglin]

from a recent /.
Plus, their phone CSRs have a neverending litany of "We don't have supervisors", "I am the supervisor", or "There is no other tier of technical support available". Great tip to get to someone who knows what their doing in a tech phone tree: Lie just like they do. An (somewhat embelished) example:

CSR: "What version of Windows are you running?"

ME: "Three".

CSR: "Three?"

ME: Yeah, three.

CSR: There's no such thing as Windows 3.

ME: Yeah, there is, I'm looking at it. It's on an old 486 laptop. I've got Trumpet Winsock running and a PPOE client I wrote that used to work fine, but now just lets me connect and ping servers on my local subnet, but every time I start up a web browser I get a password dialogue and no matter what I type it comes back with some Redback Aggregation Router configuration thingee about "Do I want to commit these changes and reset " or something like that.

CSR: Uh, let me put you on hold for a minute.

That's how you find the supervisor...

-dameron

[Memener]

LoL nice

[a_Guest03]

I was the guy on the other end of the phone, Eglin.

Actually, I was the hired help at a place like that - a big farm of early college kids getting paid $9/hr to do 8.5 hours of nonstop jabbering. And nonstop means that: nonstop... every call comes in as the receiver clicks down. From time to time, you'll get an hour of 5 or 6 calls instead of 15, but you usually don't get free time.

My manager wouldn't take calls from me. She just wouldn't. I had one guy argue with me for 8 minutes. My call times were to be below 6:15, so he was messing up my 4:20 average. He just wanted my manager. He'd spent 30 minutes with some other jabbering idiot. He wouldn't even tell me the problem, so my manager wouldn't take him. When he finally gave me the info, I fixed it in 30 seconds...

Managers tell you to do ANYTHING except pass it on to them. They tend to be idiots.