Elf Sternberg

Actually, it does count. But when you say it to someone in a support call, it's not in the "PLUS" column.

My usual thought from anyone that makes it a point to tell me "Oh, I'm certified in X/Y/Z" or whatever is "Dear god, why me?"

Describing the issue in detail including the last time it worked correctly and all noticed symptoms is great.

Listing the steps you've gone through when you tried to fix it yourself is great.

Trying to impress on the tech that you've an MCSE or worked on the project that created %TECHNOLOGY% will guarantee that we think you don't know what you're doing. It implies you think you're better at this then the person that's dealing with %TECHNOLOGY% problems 99 times every single day. The thought that's going through MY head when people try that is "Then why are you calling me?"

Sorry, but overselling isn't the right word.

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lucky-otter.livejournal.com

Saying "I have thus-and-such qualification, therefore I'm right" is classic argument from authority.

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solarbird

...interesting.

Is this still true when you hear it from women? Because I have often found - not occasionally, often found - that I have to play cards like that to be taken seriously at all, instead of being blown off as nice lady who has no idea what she's talking about and clearly if she'd just follow the completely irrelevant directions that are entirely orthogonal to the actual problem everything would work fine, even though it didn't the three other times.

I'm totally serious. About half the time, it takes playing that kind of card to get them to listen to what I'm actually saying instead of making guesses.

(This most recently happened last Monday.)

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No difference really. Tell me what you did because it's what I care about.. Don't tell me your history.

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solarbird

Good; I rather imagine that you wouldn't pull the shit I'm talking about, either. But I have had to do that to get people - IT people, support people - to stop mansplaining things - incorrectly! - to me. And I know I'm not alone in that. So, I guess my point is, sometimes you might get that from people who are used to having to throw down that shit just in order to be actually heard and/or taken seriously.

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Funny, I don't see it a problem at all to hack customer service when I know they're operating from a decision tree computer screen instead of their own knowledge bases.

AND I've been outright lied to by CS and their manager. An angry tweet got it fixed.

Too many bad CS out there. Especially the ones that say to reinstall the program. When is that ever the right decision?

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If certain brands of anti-virus crapware were installed on the system, instructing the customer to disable anti-virus and reinstall the program is the right decision. Then the customer is instructed to uninstall the application... but that was a piece of crapware offered free with servers (But the call to get it removed usually ran $200).

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That's far different from the typical answer from IBM help to reinstall when a brand new imaged office computer is unable to hook up to the local database. That caused no end of future connection problems because he didn't have our department's image to install from and only had the company wide one.

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Hrm, the internal support number, or the external one?

For the internal one... if they were actually any good (Competent with DB2 and competent in letting management know), they'd immediately be placed on an external contract with IGS, or else shoved to a programming job for a high margin bit of enterprise software that uses DB2.

For the external one... if they were actually any good, they'd be looking up salaries at the green dollar customers and looking at how to schmooze their way into working for one of those.

Granted, if your department runs a different image than the rest of the corporation and it's harder for members of that department to reinstall with the department image than the corporate image... You have far bigger problems than crap answers from DB2 support.

P.S.
In the past external support had L1 essentially fielded by a different company and the compensation for that company amounted to it was in their best interests to cause as many new problems as possible.

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Internal IBM HELP number. It was outsourced. They were following a computer decision tree. We never got bumped to someone higher. We started asking where they were located to gain evidence for management that we needed a different "source".

The problem which got the most "reinstall" answers was for Lotus Notes. *I* was a developer for DB2 and doubled as L3. ;) As far as I understood, my site had its own image separate from the global installer, but we had nothing to reinstall that specific image from without re-imaging the whole disk.

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Not that it matters, but outsourced, or offshored?
Offshoring did enough damage... and it was embarrassing that when folks actually became competent in an offshored location like Sao Paolo, Brazil, they could make more money working in Academia than at IBM.

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Offshored. Sorry. Mistyped earlier.

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Getting off the decision tree is a crapshoot. I've told tech support "It's component XXX -- I've run diags that tell me so." And I've been suprised that rebooting four times in a row forced a low level reset of something I didn't know about...

A reinstall of a program will (often) overwrite broken personal settings or shared library files that were overritten by you freeware game that you weren't supposed to load on your office computer.

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I seem to get the majority of them then. I admit, I've gotten bumped to level 2 twice in my entire calling of support, but only *after* I jumped through the level1 reboot hoops again.

Another bad support experience of mine: they told me to hard reset my router when it wasn't working.. knowing I had a static IP (and not that this would wipe that out nor that they were the only ones that could reprogram it).

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Call centers are all a crap-shoot.

"If Only..." (http://xkcd.com/806/)

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