Some more things that happened while I was on the Helldesk. (Of course
that's what we called it. Sometimes we challenged each other to answer
the phone that way)
One fellow described his problem, and then explained that this
might be a bit difficult because he couldn't read. It seemed to be
true: he could recognise some icons, and individual letters, but
getting a full word appeared to be beyond him. Given how text-based
the Net was in those days, I wonder slightly what he was getting out
of the experience. We got things working, anyway.
All calls had to be logged in a horrible slow front-end to horrible
Remedy. But Remedy is always horrible, so you don't need me to tell
you about that. The other software we had was pretty good; pick up a
phone, click a button, and you'd have the CLID checked against the
customer database so that you could see account details; you would
have got any previous call history too, but Remedy, so it never
worked.
One of the odder classes of call we got were from AOL non-users. If
you were around in the UK at the time you'll remember the AOL floppy
discs, and later AOL CDs, that seemed to come through every letter-box
in the country.
Seems some of our customers tried them (presumably on days when we were
being less than perfect). Some of our customers who tried them got to
the end of the trial, decided they didn't really like AOL when they
could have the actual Internet, and uninstalled the software, then
tried to connect to their old ISP.
It didn't work.
The modem would dial and connect, but they wouldn't get any data.
They'd call AOL tech support, who would say "ah, Sir is not a customer
of ours, we cannot help Sir; unless Sir would care to sign up for an
AOL account…" So then they would call us.
And we would fix it. It turned out that AOL had its own special
networking stack, which was almost but not quite TCP/IP. It overwrote
the Windows TCP/IP DLL in order to make sure that its stack was the
one being called by other programs. It did, at least, make a backup of
the original DLL, and copying this back into place was an easy thing
to talk a customer through. I'd like to thank AOL for giving us such
an easy way to make a customer happy (and likely never to consider AOL
again).
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