r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Jacket313 • 20d ago
Short I now understand the real challenges techsupport goes through.
I'm not sure if this post belongs here.. but my image view for a long time of techsupport were tech savvy gentlemen who would keep themselves busy with the most difficult of questions customers could possibility have.
How wrong I was.
My dad isn't very tech savvy and regularly has problems anything related to tech.
I genuinely wonder sometimes if my dad is serious or not me when he has a tech problem. One time his camera wasn't working and he tried all sort of things like shutting off and rebooting his phone, scouring the internet for answers and asking chatGPT why his camera wasn't working,
I came over, took around 10 seconds to asses the situation, and explained how his new phone case with those flap thingies where you put in your credit card and stuff were blocking his camera.
Another time, my dad complained how the ringtone of his phone wasn't loud enough and wanted to call the store, complaining how the new phone they sold him was broken and that he wanted a refund. took me a minute to just open the settings app, raise the volume, and explain to him how to raise the volume of his ringtone.
Yesterday when I was at university, my dad had been struggling with the computer for 2 hours. he explained to me how the computer froze, that he kept moving and tapping the computer trying to make it work, turned it off, and that after he turned it off it wouldn't turn back on, and how he kept calling the store he bought it from that they sold him a broken computer.
Those system updates with the big letters "UPDATING, DO NOT TURN OFF" apparantly didn't matter to my dad. while he was moving and shoving the computer, he somehow magically managed to unplug the power cable. it took me a few seconds to plug the cable back in.. and another 10 minutes trying to convince my dad that, the problem why the computer didn't turn back on was because he unplugged the power cable, and not some corrupted harddrive like chatGPT was telling him.
Looking past support tickets with tech support from companies and how long they are, it made me realize the real type of problems tech support must be facing from clueless customers like this.
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u/Elegant-Winner-6521 20d ago
There are two things* which sink the most of your time in tech support: clueless customers and smallest customers.
Often the two are one. Rest assured, the big clients with the complicated problems tend to resolve themselves. That way, you're stuck dealing with Tina who can't get her emails to work and what she really means (but won't tell you) is that her internet is off.
This is why the tech support person seems to patronise you with the most basic of questions. No matter how many times you tell us that you already tried that or that X is definitely on, we won't believe you.
(*Actually, three things. The other one are tech bro CEOs who waste your time with ambitious project ideas that never materialise or they outsource to another app after scoping the project with you.)
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u/AngryCod The SLA means what I say it means 20d ago
The small customers are always the ones that will argue with you over every little thing. "No, it can't possibly be that." Oh really, Karen? If you're so smart, why did you call us?
The big customers usually have their own onsite staff to handle that kind of petty junk before it gets to external support.
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u/bobowhat What's this round symbol with a line for? 20d ago
It can totally be a coin flip which one actually takes longer.
My previous role where I was T3, I was working with smart people in small public organizations that don't know computers and enterprise customers, usually in the same hour,
The number of times I got a call escalated to me from external IT and even my own T1 team where the issue was a loose cable was too dang many. It got to the point where I started training my T1 team on the wonderful philosophy of KISS.
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u/fresh-dork 20d ago
it's certainly good to train T1 at all. if they din't check basics, it sounds like they're just an answering service
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u/bobowhat What's this round symbol with a line for? 20d ago
A lot of times, they were book smart, could handle common issues, and the like, but didn't have the right foundation. There was also no formal training internally beyond shadowing.
So I designed a formal training.
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u/Hey_Its_A_Mo 20d ago
Don’t forget, “I’m sure it’s something small/easy!”
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u/AngryCod The SLA means what I say it means 20d ago
"As long as you're here..."
They call in one item, but really they've been saving up every piddling little issue for the last month and want you to fix all of it before you leave. You know the initial call was going to be a 10 minute onsite, but you already know you're going to have to schedule four hours for it, which means all your other customers get pushed off.
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u/__wildwing__ 20d ago
“Since you’re onsite…”
Yes, I’m on site. To replace a mouse. I didn’t bring any of the equipment needed to address these other issues. Yes, you’ll have to put a ticket in for us to comeback out. No, the equipment won’t magically materialize just because I’m here. No, “taking a quick look” won’t do anything, because I don’t have the equipment.
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u/AngryCod The SLA means what I say it means 20d ago
"Technician refused to help me..."
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u/KelemvorSparkyfox Bring back Lotus Notes 20d ago
"User refused to log all required information on the initial ticket."
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u/AngryCod The SLA means what I say it means 20d ago
No, see, that's in the review they get to leave. The one that you can't respond to. Because in this dystopian industry, random coworkers get to formally review every interaction you have with them but we're not allowed to review back. And for some reason, no one thinks that's a batshit way to run things.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Joke-97 20d ago
True! Those "While you're here" jobs usually took at least 2X the time to resolve as the original thing I was called out to do.
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u/Geminii27 Making your job suck less 19d ago edited 19d ago
"Sure, but I have to fix this problem WITH A TICKET first. While I'm doing that, call this number and they'll have it fixed before I'm done with this other one."
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u/lesethx OMG, Bees! 20d ago
It got bad enough at 1 client that we eventually worked out an email in the days leading up for all the issues I would work on; anything not on there aside from an emergency would not get done. It was also a 1.5 - 2 hour travel time and ended up 7-8 hours each appointment for a few months
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u/Elegant-Winner-6521 20d ago
"Just a quick one"
E.g. "Just a quick one - how would I go about importing the monthly sales figures gross margin report into my accounting software?"
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls 17d ago
"For anyone with a ticket that tells us what 'monthly sales figures gross margin report' and what kinda 'accounting software', we will investigate and try to find the proper method and best guide in how to do just that."
"But for you, I would suggest ctrl-c, ctrl-v."
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u/Elegant-Winner-6521 20d ago
I think there's also something to be said for personal investment, too. The small businesses are run by someone who's looking at this costing them income personally. The big businesses - well you're dealing with someone who's getting paid regardless.
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u/fatmanwithabeard 20d ago
I mean big tech savvy orgs that you've heard of do stupid shit too.
You've over filled your twitchy scratch file system. One of its servers appears to be hung. So you reboot it before calling the vendor support back, despite said support repeatedly telling you to call him (me) before doing anything not in the instructions he sent.
Or the Three Letter Agency that would only share log snippets via fax...and in a 4pt font.
Or the major pharma whose over aggressive network scanner can't be told not to hammer on the file system's ports. (Yes of course the file system's network activity looks like data transfer)
Tech bro executives are the absolute worst. Especially when they come to you for your ultra specialized stuff and then 6 months in act like they're experts in your space.
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u/Hades-Arcadius 20d ago
This....playing the game of 20 questions and hoping that the person doesn't lose their patience as you collect information and attempt to re-state back to them what they're telling you....further refining till you know exactly what's wrong and seemingly why it happens...
My coworkers never ask enough questions...then I get to ask my coworker those questions and they ask the person 🫠
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u/WhenSummerIsGone 16d ago
Tina who can't get her emails to work and what she really means (but won't tell you) is that her internet is off.
I have a Macbook for work (I'm a software engineer). One day I tried to connect to the corporate VPN, but the icon I normally use at the top of the screen (not the Dock, this is part of the desktop itself I think) wasn't there, and there was literally no other way i could find to trigger the connection.
I filed a ticket, and the tech support guy called me, walked through some basic troubleshooting, then did a screenshare and just reinstalled it which exposed a popup that let me connect. He called it a day, and i got my work done.
But the icon still wasn't there so this wasn't a permanent solution. I did some googling, asked chatgpt, poked around in my system, and finally stumbled on a post with the explanation and solution: the icon was "behind" the little cutout part of the screen that Apple, with its famously perfect design team, had decided was a great idea to make the screen a little bigger and nicer.
The solution was to remove an existing icon, and my VPN icon reappeared from behind the web cam. I sent a text to the tech letting him know about this solution and he seemed confused, lol.
I moved all my important icons as far to the right as I could, and now I keep an eye on how many are in that bar, so I don't lose another one.
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u/awetsasquatch 20d ago
Congratulations, you're now qualified to work in Tech Support! One of us! One of us!
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u/dr_stevious 20d ago
On the topics of dads... mine has been using a computer for the last 15 years or so. He visits his hobby websites, buys stuff from Amazon and eBay, the usual stuff. He seems to know how to get around. Or so I thought.
I own a domain name that is a very convenient reference to our family name. I have a funky placeholder website there that I thought he'd like to see. One day, while chatting to him on the phone, I tell him to pop the address into his computer's web browser so he can have a look. After what seemed to take far too long, he says he is looking at a website with some cars on it. Hmmm, that's not right. I confirm with him the address he entered, and it is indeed correct.
After some pondering, I ask him what he typed the address into. Google? Do you mean Google Chrome? Yes? Hmmm, OK. And where in the Chrome window are you typing? What do you mean, what is a window? Are you using Chrome? Use the address bar. What do you mean, what is an address bar?!?!?
This went on and on. After a while, I worked out that he uses the internet by clicking on one of many desktop icons labelled "Google" and just types in the address of what he wants into Google search. Google bots haven't indexed my site, so the search results for my domain query took him somewhere else.
I warned him against using search to enter domain names for websites, as he could end up on fraudulent websites, but he didn't want to hear it as "this is how my computer works".
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u/ShirleyUGuessed 20d ago
This happens so much. People do that on their computers and phones and sometime searching doesn't get you to the actual web site. That happened with my dad back in the day and it happens with customers every week. Still haven't perfected a way to get them to open the browser and type into the address bar when they don't know any of those words.
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u/fin600 Destroying harddrives for fun and profit 20d ago
When my mother wants me to see something on a website, she texts me a link to a google search, or insists if I search a particular set of words I will see the link as the # result. Just last week I had to demonstrate that, yes, google search is completely personalized per user. She sent me a google search link. I demonstrated this did not change my results to hers. She said she didn't know how to send me the website, despite just sending me the google search out of her address bar... We go through this song and dance every month. She ended up sending me screenshots of the website instead and told me to figure out how to find it myself.
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u/LeomundsTinyButt_ 20d ago
Still beats my ex father-in-law. He "shares" by printing the page, then scanning it into an email. The man has somehow tamed the printer and scanner, but copy+paste is too difficult.
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u/LeomundsTinyButt_ 20d ago
I really wish Google would do the responsible thing and treat any query that looks like a URL like an URL and simply redirect. If it doesn't exist you can show the results page.
But that would mess with ad revenue, and at this point they've dropped even the pretense of "don't be evil".
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u/TinyNiceWolf 20d ago
Try telling them to use the keyboard? Open browser, type Alt+d, type the website. People are sometimes better at finding Alt and d on their keyboards than the correct unlabeled box on the screen.
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u/BlueWater2323 20d ago
Ooh, I wish I had known this for my mom. I ran out of words trying to figure out how to tell her where the address bar was.
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u/DeciduousEmu 20d ago
And depending on the lack of emotional maturity in the parent, they get very angry when they are proven to be wrong.
"I demand your help but don't you dare make me feel stupid by showing it's my fault."
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u/jasondbk 20d ago
I had a customer years ago with a real nasty problem. I couldn’t even dial in to his system. After 10 minutes to diagnose and much longer to fix he stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Did I do this?”
I thought for a few minutes before replying. He was a good customer and we had a good rapport.
“You’re not smart enough to cause this kind of damage and it’s not something that could happen accidentally. It was the Canadian company who supports (name of customer app) that just finished an update.”
Apparently the Canadian support company had just finished and told my client that he had caused the problem.
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u/MrMyx 20d ago
I was walking past someone at work and she waved me over. She said I was techy so maybe I could help. She had her mouse stretched all the way to the edge of her desk and couldn't figure how to get it back next to the keyboard. When she'd drag the mouse it'd reach the end of the screen and she didn't know how to get around that. I picked up the mouse and set it down next to the keyboard.
We did have a good laugh about that.
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u/WhenSummerIsGone 16d ago
People get stuck in their mental models about all sorts of things, not just tech stuff. She's doing great to recognize there was a problem and not do random things to compound the problem!
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u/fshannon3 20d ago
Just had a user submit a ticket saying that they couldn't log in to the application; they kept getting "Username or password is incorrect" whenever they'd enter their password.
The username showing in the screenshot they provided was not their username; it was that of the person who used the application before them. This user did not bother to look and see if the username was correct.
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u/KelemvorSparkyfox Bring back Lotus Notes 20d ago
SSO is a Lee-send for cutting down on that kind of error. In my current job, the only time I need to type a password is when I change my password.
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u/fshannon3 20d ago
In the case above, this was an "external client" logging in to our application.
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u/Particular_Archer499 20d ago
I once drove 20 minutes to my grandparents house because my grandmother had accidentally clicked the windowed button on her IE which put it on half the screen.
Shit happens.
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u/AlmostChristmasNow 20d ago
Grandparents are adorable. I was about to drive over to my grandma because her phone “wasn’t charging”. Luckily I first asked her which charging cord she was using. She was trying to put a Lightning charger in a USB-C port.
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u/Rathmun 20d ago
My grandmother never got around to learning "all this technology stuff". She worked a skilled manual labor job before she retired, and never needed to work tech more complicated than a microwave with two knobs (power and time, the latter worked like an egg timer).
Then one of my cousins had a kid (grandma's great grandchild), and wanted to facetime grandma from the other side of the country. Suddenly she had MOTIVATION!!! to learn. It took her two hours to learn how to reliably get on facetime, and then she managed to do it on her own every day from then on until she was no longer physically capable. Even when Apple changed things that didn't need changing, she still managed.
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u/Ich_mag_Kartoffeln 20d ago
For my grandfather it was finding out that EVERYTHING to do with his beloved horse racing is available via an app on his iPad. Still places his bets by phone, though.
Grandma is technologically illiterate. She can talk on a video call, but can't initiate one. Or even answer a call.
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u/JimMarch 19d ago
Your dad is what we call a "frequent flyer".
His logic circuit is fried when it comes to anything like troubleshooting anything. He's likely to have the same problem with any piece of tech. Most of these types are completely clueless with wrenches on a bicycle let alone anything complicated.
The other thing they can't do is generalize.
To them, operating pull down menus in one application is a completely different process than doing so in another application. You can teach them how to save their word processing files, and then teach them all over again how to save a spreadsheet.
It's the same goddamn process TO US. We have a mental toolbox of how to deal with certain issues. They don't. They can't generalize.
In my experience, doctors and lawyers were among the worst of the worst, at least 20+ years ago when I was in the game.
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u/Rathmun 20d ago
"BuT tHe CuStOmEr Is AlWaYs RiGhT!!!!!"
"A, you forgot the rest of the quote. And B, If the customer were always right, they wouldn't need us. The fact that you're talking to me proves that you are wrong about something."
"BuT tHe CuStOmEr Is AlWaYs RiGhT!!!!!"
So so much of this industry boils down to that exchange.
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u/Idenwen 20d ago
User: I tried it for the last 4 hours, nothing works can you help me with X?
Supp: Let's see what the problem is. Ah ok. Look its done that way. <Done in 30 seconds>
User: You are responsible for me being that slow and no one could ever thought it would be done this way and no one would ever do it this way. Normal people aren't doing it this way. You should do it for me all the time since you are faster at doing it and I can't do that anyway in that time. You are the reason I waste my time and can't do other things.
Supp: ...*...
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u/jeffrey_f 20d ago
Been doing this for 40+ years. At some point you just need to laugh, but only as you walk away.
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u/handlebartender 20d ago
User: "The computer is frozen, I've tried everything"
ChatGPT: "It's cancer"
Basically completely whiffing past Occam's razor.
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u/lesethx OMG, Bees! 20d ago
About a decade ago we had a new client that needed help getting their conferences setup properly. I don't think they had IT before, but since they had a lot of programmers, they always had someone to do things when needed, tho that often fell on the receptionist. A big part of it was standardizing conference equipment and setup and making sure everything was plugged in. We vastly underestimated just how much trouble it was to keep equipment plugged in, especially the iPads, because people would unplug them to charge their phones and then leave it unplugged when done, even with phone chargers readily available. This took months (tho working there 2 days a week) of increasingly zip-tying and locking down equipment before we got something halfway descent.
And they were still one of my favorite clients. (Free lunches helped)
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u/goakiller900 19d ago
Welcome to tech support, where half the job is fixing problems and the other half is trying not to raise your blood pressure when the cable was unplugged the whole time.
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u/Generico300 18d ago
Looking past support tickets with tech support from companies and how long they are, it made me realize the real type of problems tech support must be facing from clueless customers like this.
Yes. This is why when tech support asks you to do seemingly stupid things that any idiot would have already tried, it's not an insult. They just don't know you and they've had so much experience with completely clueless people that they have to assume you're another one.
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u/rhunter1980 19d ago
90%of pc problems are PICNIC (Problem In Chair Not In Computer) the rest are usually not too bad. USUALLY.....
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u/Disneylover2718 20d ago
I do a lot of login help, and I feel like a large portion is me explaining to someone how to open their email to find the username that I just sent them.
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u/AnyRandomDude789 19d ago
When I was in tech support at a secondary school 99% of the issues were something being unplugged. The worst thing was half the time when you got called to one of those was a kid would come out the classroom and say we've fixed it, meanwhile your cornflakes are getting soggy
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u/Black_Handkerchief Mouse Ate My Cables 19d ago
but my image view for a long time of techsupport were tech savvy gentlemen who would keep themselves busy with the most difficult of questions customers could possibility have.
There are those parts of the job that tech support lives with, and the tech support problems that we live for. As long as crazy bosses, troubled customers, nasty deadlines or difficult vendors aren't souring up the work environment, figuring out the nature of an issue and the best way to solve it is actually part of the jobs appeal.
(And if the employee(s) being helped knows how to grease the social wheels, it makes the job even better. The buck of blame often lands with tech support just because something like an airconditioner involves electricity, and in quite a few businesses, those being supported rarely have any services or responsibility towards tech support, which can lead a negative culture where IT gets a bad rap for being held to unrealistic expectations and closing tickets that are out of their purview.)
Of course, it differs wildly what the tech support experience is like between people who are just level 1 tech support, and those esteemed figures who climbed out of those coffee-flavored swimming pool keyboard and shorted out USB ports.
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u/Few-Explanation-4699 15d ago
Welcome to our life......
I spent 12 years on tech support for a company that made a specialist hardware product with its own software. Heard it all from intermitant power (the unit was in a sub station and the power was going on and off), bomb squad being called, units smoking happened a few times to the "why did you do that?"
It takes a realy good sense of humour and a lot of zen
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u/ManosVanBoom 20d ago
The struggle is real. Thanks for your support.