The last Helldesk stories. For now.
I got a bloke who "hadn't changed anything", but now his computer
wouldn't connect. It eventually transpired that he'd upgraded from
Win3.1 to Win95, but didn't like it, so downgraded again by opening
the Windows directory and deleting every file he didn't recognise by
name. Apparently he hadn't noticed any problems until he came to dial
up.
Overall it was about one in ten "good" calls, people I could make
really happy; about one in ten "bad" calls, people who were fed up
with the whole business and would give me a hard time over it; and the
rest just grey and neutral, stuff people could have worked out for
themselves if they'd had the few pages of basic training material that
we had.
That was what got to me in the end: as in most jobs that involve brief
interactions with people, every call started at the beginning, and
there was no way for me to teach the voice on the phone anything. I
could say things that would get the immediate problem solved and mean
that that person could recognise it in future and fix it without
needing to call for help, but the next call would be someone else with
what seemed like the exact same problem.
These days what we did would probably be called second- or third-line
support. We weren't on a script, though there were certainly standard
things we'd ask for a given set of symptoms; we were there to try to
solve problems, and the typical user in those days was able to do
basic troubleshooting for himself.
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