Paid to go Insane!

Those of you who haven't been reading Tthe Sledgehammer probably think I'm crazy for saying such a thing (and anyone who reads on a regular basis knows that I am crazy,) but I have lost my mind and I am actually getting paid to do so. If you are feeling not all there sometime, try finding a career in technical support. It's a rewarding career field, where one has no responsibilities other than to sit around all day listening to people scream at you demanding all of the world's problems are your fault, and even though it's obviously someone else's problem, you are the one who has to fix it. Some of them even want to hurt you personally, which makes the job that much more fun.

The whole job is not all fun and games, however (unless you're working tech support for one of those companies purveying these time-wasters, in which case you probably wish that it wouldn't be.) Occasionally, you must do more than tell a customer to FDISK and reinstall (the actual steps here may vary, according to the overall competence level of said luser and the relative quality of the hosed piece of last-generation junk someone tried to pass off as a computer.) For those of you who know of the non-standard methods of troubleshooting that I advocate, you will, unfortunately, not get much chance to use these methods unless you have decided that flipping burgers sounds like your ideaof a fun time. In addition to this, the intelligence of the average caller tends to rival that of your average piece of granite or basalt, usually making one wish that the rocks would call instead of the lusers (although an exception can be made for those rocks that have become consultants, meaning that you're the one who is doing all the work while they get paid $120 an hour. When you get these, tell 'em to FDISK and reformat their brains, then call back. If you're lucky, they won't call back to get help with this. If they do, just send it to that technician that seems to get all of the easy calls..

Being a tech support rep isn't all just endless abuse and whining, however. There are some perks to the job (if this were not true, we would all be going through computers at about six a year. We would also still be trying to figure out a catchy name for that glowing orange stuff that you get when that blue flash strikes a tree when it rains.) For example, keeping a bunch of what the rest of the world shuns as "toys" at your desk could be justified as "self defense" (who knows when some other disgruntled tech could decide that you look like you need to be be filled with Nerf darts?) At the delightful little operation I work for, you can have a cute little orange sticker reading "Psycho" prominently displayed on your badge and nobody would think that's strange. (If you don't have a cute little orage Psycho sticker, you can pattern one after the one this well-dressed gentleman is wearing.) You also get to whine about how incompetent people are all you want (except for those few unfortunate souls who must brave the wilds of the tech support queue without the benefit of a "mute" button. A moment of silence for our less fortunate bretheren.)

If you do decide that this express lane to the looney bin is for you, there are some things that you should remember as you seek depravity:

• Remember who is in charge here. No matter who pays you, every tech support operation in existence is in actuality run by Mr. Murphy himself. As a case in point, I will cite an example from work. Each technician has a data access machine, and between two technicians, there is one machine that is called a "configurable" officially, but is more often called a "Break-me" machine by the technicians. This was done in an effort to keep us from hosing our data access machines trying to fix customer problems. It happens that recently, these break-mes have figured out their true purpose, and have from that fact derived that they are, by default, supposed to be broken. Since then, these machines have had to be FDISKed and reinstalled on a regular basis. I speak for my whole team when I say that we would like to troubleshoot these things (these are the notorious 386 machines, mind you, and I am sure that even normally very well-adjusted people would take a potshot or two given the opportuity to do so.) One has kickedf the bit bucket already (with a fried CMOS) and the others all all halfway in the grave, with al of us holding shovels at the ready (if only because some of us forced to use the suckers are plotting something thoroughly evil against this ancient curse...)

• If you think you've seen it all, you haven't even come close. This is something that cannot be emphasized enough here. Once youre on the phones, you wil start getting some calls where you begin to wonder how mankind ever managed to get out of the Dark Ages. You may be amazed that otherwise normal human beings become nothing more than a quivering blob of putty when at the computer, unable to type a simple dir command. Others, thinking that they have an iota of clue, will in their efforts to justify that Packard Bell they bought as being a "nice computer", remove every file that they cannot determine the function of, including the c:\windows\system directory--Then they call tech support and blame us. Just remember, no matter how hosed the system may be, never jump to conclusions and assume that one call has reached the peak of luser stupidity. Such a thing is impossible. In fact, the next call will most likely send the clue meter plunging even further into the depths of the negative numbers. For example, my friend at work tells of a call he had once where the user saw that his whole hard disk was not fully partitioned, so he used FDISK to rebuild the partitions, and then called us to try and get his data back once he realized that he wasn't supposed to do that... Then there was another one who, for some reason or another, decided that they needed to reformat their hard disk (which, in some cases, would be an appropriate step in diagnosing the nature of the problem... When everything on the hard disk is gone, say "Well, the hard disk isn't the problem", hang up and hope the guy doesn't call back anytime soon.

• Make sure you have the right tools. You may have a few ideas on what is needed for such a job. Throw these concepts out the window. We're going insane, remember? In my job experience with technical support, I have found that the most important tool one can own is a good Nerf weapon. On the phones, you will be dealing with two primary types of customers. There is the clueless luser type, of course. The other type of caller is the sysadmin, and these can be divided into several subgroups. Right away, many of these can right away be downgraded to theclueless luser archetype, and the remaining ones either A) want you to build them a WAN over the phone, or B) are completely stumped, meaning that there isnt a chance in Hades that you will be able to do anything about it and will end up stuck on the call for three hours. Even though you can't shoot them in person, shooting the phone does provide some welcome relief. Many of the clueless luser type people call at the first sign of anything wrong, trying to mask a complete inability to read the manual and figure out what is going wrong with their system (making some people wonder how they ever managed to dial the phone in the first place.) Once they are told the simple, straightforward solution given by the technician to an often imagined fault, they find a way to selectively ignore words, resulting in a thoroughy hosed system, blamed on the technician. If you were working on these systems on-site, all of the necessary troubleshooting could be accomplished with only one tool (and what that one tool is happens to be a matter of personal preference, and a screwdriver doesn't seem to be very high on the list. I wonder why...)

Eventually, however, no matter how well-prepared you are for it, you will lose your mind, reduced to ranting about how stupid computers are. Not long afer beginning, you will start to notice that you are no longer the cheerful, happy guy you once were. It seems like you do nothing all day but sit around and listen to people whine about how stupid their computers are, and how it's your fault personally. Pretty soon, you find yourself aimlessly fumbling for the release button, dunbfounded by this, and less and less often actually hitting it, reverting to unplugging the phone. Even in real life, you end up engaged in conversation with someone that apparently belongs in a cave somewhere trying to figure out what the best way to prepare dirt for food purposes is, and try desperately to find the release button that you are sure is located somewhere on their person. Eventually, this escalates to the point where you believe that all of the world's problems can be solved by a simple FDISK and reinstall. After long, you realize that nobody will do this, so you spend the rest of your life hunched in front of a monitor trying to find out where the FDISK command for the planet is. It is during this futile search that the nice men in white coats come to take you away. Don't even bother resisting them. Believe me, you'll feel much better about yourself after they reformat your brain and reinstall the Reality(tm) Client for Homo Sapiens in your head. This proves that is in fact possible for even tech support people to lead healthy, normal lives... unless they accidentally wipe themselves out with a misplaced delete command once they have hacked into the main control computers for the planet.

Copyright (C) 1997 Brian Lutz. All rights reserved. Got milk?