Anyway, one of the most frequent questions I am asked by customers on the phones at work is how I can manage to survive a job in tech support. Most people at this point also throw in some comment about how their being a job such as mine would result in eventual sanity loss. Mike Todaro, one of my readers, submitted this story to me that comes from his own experiences in tech support, which shows that not everyone out there is cut out for tech support:
A man had brought his laptop in to be worked on after his applications began spitting errors out at him. The tech on duty, thinking that it was Win 95 at work as usual, casually began checking over things, and preparing to write it off as Win 95 errors. He inserted a MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk so he could check out hardware functionality. He booted up, and got serious errors when reading from the HD. He began looking around a bit more intensly, and finally ran SCANDISK to check and see if the HD was going bad. Scandisk returned a message saying 23 Megs of lost chains had been recovered and the space was now free. The disk was riddled with bad sectors. He then ran a Defrag session to clean up the remaining space so the man could get his important data off the drive. He told the man that the HD was ruined and that he needed to buy a replacement. The man became furious with the tech, and told him that he needed to learn how to do his job. Having already had a stressful day and having missed lunch, the tech was not about to take this kind of abuse. He looked at the man and told him to please show him how to do his job. The phone rang, and no one moved for a second. The tech told the user to answer it, which he did. After bumbling around for a few minutes, and obviously being yelled at by the person on the other end, the man hung up, took his laptop, and left without a word. The tech found out later that the man had been in the bathtub working and the laptop had fallen into the water. At last word, the man was going to call the makers of the laptop and demand they replace it because it was not waterproof.
When one realizes what we have to work with in many cases, it's no wonder that most people could never do tech support! For one thing, one needs almost infinite patience when dealing with customers. Of course, nobody has infinite patience, so there's the next best thing: the mute button. This is just one of the many troubleshooting resources available to technicians, when troubleshooting just doesn't cut it. It is entirely possible that the looney bins of the world would be overcrowded with recently postal tech support representatives if it weren't for the inspired soul that developed the mute button. With this boon to tech support, it is only necessary to put light padding on the walls of a large tech support center such as the one that I work in.
Of course, a tech support rep does not live by a mute button alone (If that were true, the cusomers would be listening to dead silence every time they called.) At my place of work, the vast majority of the resources we use most frequently can be accessed by anyone who knows where to look for them. First and foremost of these is the Microsoft KnowledgeBase (always referred to as the KB at work.) Nearly the entire KB that we use at work is available on the Internet and can be easily searched. Just point your browser at http://www.microsoft.com/kb to get to the search page for the KB. The other valuable resource we refer to is the Windows 95 Resource Kit. This may be a bit to technical for some users out there, if you actually understand half of what is written in this column, you probably won't have any problem with the Win95RK. This can be purchased in book form, or is in the admin\reskit directory of the Win95 CD-ROM. The main problem with this is that it tends not to be very accessible if there is smoke pouring from your case (by which time anyone with half a brain has already ascertained that they probably have a hardware problem anyway. And if anyone tries to LART me for this, keep in mind that I tend to be heavily armed.
Which brings me to my next point.... troubleshooting weaponry. Back when I lived in Los Alamos (a city that glows in the dark,) I once toured the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Lab (a really neat place where they took ridiculously powerful supercomputers and intentionally crashed them. Ah, those were the days...) and found that near the CM-5 (which you may or may not recognize as the supercomputer with all of the blinkenlights in the control center in the movie Jurassic Park) there was a toy sword. When I inquired about it, I was told that it belonged to Thinking Machines Corporation. It is because of this that I keep a toy sword at my cubicle to this very day. I've yet to be able to trash any equipment with the thing, but in the right situation, this is not entirely inconceivable... Also just as important is my LART, a Nerf Double Crossbow. This is perhaps one of the best LARTs I have found that managment will not mind having around, even though as I have mentioned before, the preferred LART for my purposes is the namesake of this column. So far, my double corssbow has proved inadquate only once (when one of the other techs came armed with a Ballzooka.) Until we can convince managment that we need ICBM launching systems installed in our phones, we will have to settle for more conventional LARTs.
As you can probably determine, tech support is not for everyone. In fact, if tech support were a job that anyone could handle, it would not even be needed. If you think you can handle technical support, one must have a keen sense of the blatantly obvious (enough for two people, as often the luser's don't,) enough nerf weapons to level some two-bit dictator's country, and the ability to never think you've heard it all.... you never will.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
-Voltaire