The rules for calling Technical Support:

I have worked in tech support for many years now. Here are some basic rules to make things go better.

1. Know your authentication information! – When calling, companies have to find your account, and verify you are authorized to do anything. When you first call we will always have a set of questions we need you to answer to either access your account, verify you, or fulfull our job requirements, please be patient and answer our questions so we can assist you.

2. Play nice. – We know you need help, thats why you called. We are much more willing to go above and beyond for people who are able to be nice, and be patient. Realize that you have spent the last who knows how many hours, or days trying to work out whats causing the issues, we will need more than a minute and half to catch up to the issue, investigate, and look up information in our tools.

3. Follow directions. – You called us because you needed help. We have learned and studied to know the answers you seek. People are smart in the subjects they study. You wouldn’t want me to perform open brain surgery, and I wouldn’t want a surgeon to fix my car. We all consult the experts in the fields we need help with. If we ask you to do something, don’t tell us it won’t work, or that you already tried that. Maybe we have changed things, or reset things and what didn’t work the first time will work now that we have had a chance to work with it. This is aside from the many times people contact support saying this or that does not work, that when we walk them step by step thru what they say they already did, and it works without our changing anything. Human error happens. Relax, it means your human!

4. Know your limits. – If you are calling for support of a complex technical nature, and you have a hard time finding the on/off button, and finding your control panel, have someone to help you. Having someone that understands menus, and functions can be a great help to resolving more complex issues. Ask a friend, kids, or neighbors to be there when you call.

5. Phone etiquette. – Try not to use speaker phone. If you must, please be in a quiet environment. It is hard to help you, and frustrating to us both if we keep repeating ourselves because the other person cant hear. When I can hear the music, tv, other people in the room better than you, we will have a hard time understanding each other. If you use a voice over IP service such as Vonage, Cable Phone, etc. STOP your downloads. Phone services that use your internet connection will have horrible voice quality if your internet connection is already heavily used.

6. Turn around is fair play. – If you ask us to walk you thru every step of a complicated process, don’t hang up the moment it works. Give us a chance to confirm the issue is resolved, give tips, and say goodbye, and offer any survey, or other requirements we may have for end of calls.

To all the people of the interwebs, I wish to explain keyboard symbols.

! is the exclamation mark. It is NOT bang, your keyboard is not a gun, you can not shoot anyone with it. Likewise it is also not the explanation mark, if you want to explain something use words not a symbol. Its NOT the apostrophe, or any other odd named symbol.

Below is the official names of each symbol on the US keyboard layout. (see this page )

! exclamation mark
@ commercial at symbol NOT ampersand
# number sign (or pound)
$ dollar symbol
% percent symbol
^ Circumflex accent (commonly called up arrow or carrot)
& ampersand symbol
* asterix symbol
( left parenthesis
) right parenthesis
- hyphen or minus sign
_ underscore
{ left curly bracket
} right curly bracket
[ left square bracket
] right square bracket
\ back slash
| vertical line, bar or pipe
: colon
; semi colon
“ quotation mark
‘ parenthesis
? question mark
/ forward slash
. period
< less than symbol
> greater than symbol
, comma
~ tilde
` grave accent

Help for fixing your computer!

The Customer is always right… Only in Customer Service.

Some say the customer is always right
Others say the customer is always right except for when they are wrong.
Others say the customer is always right except for when they are wrong which is 99% of the time.

People in tech support often adopt an entirely differnet outlook.

The customer is always wrong, except when they are right. Why? because if you had done things correctly you wouldn’t need to call tech support.

Tech: Ahhh, yea it looks like you set that up wrong.
Cust: No I didnt. What ever happened to the customer being always right?
Tech: This is Technical Support. You called because it was not working. If you want to be right, I can transfer you to Customer Service.