More confessions of a Tech Support rep

The other night I get a phone call from a guy who was telling me he was a Neuro Surgeon and had been in surgery for the last 3 days. He had just gotten home and noticed his DSL was down. "No problem. What lights do you have on the modem?", I politely asked. The light status will usually tell me what is going on with the DSL connection. The doctor then tells me he is in a black out and the only thing on is his generator. He also states that his whole neighborhood is without power. I then asked him, "Do you think perhaps because your neighborhood does not have power, that might be cause of your internet problems?" He agrees with me and tells me he just wants me to notate his account, which I do notate his account. He hangs up with me and I go on to the next call.

I later find out that he has called back two more times to get a ticket put in because he does not have service. A ticket should never be put in if you have an outage area. The ticket would be immediately rejected back. He decides after his 3rd call that I was very rude to him and decides he wants to complain to my team lead that if he does not fire me on the spot, he is going to talk to his attorney. My team lead who is very laid back comes and tells me, "I do not care about this moron. He needs to get a clue." He then proceeds to tell me he is going to document it in my file in case the attorney does call in and tells me he is going to take me off that call group. I am fine with that all because that particular call group is a nightmare to work anyway. He kinda blew off this guy as another caller calling in to whine and complain.

I find out later on that the documentation that he put in made it seemed like I dropped the ball and basically he made me out to be the bad guy. I was in total disbelief. Instead of backing me up, my team lead basically said that I should have put in a ticket and I could have handled the call better. I will agree I probably could have handled the call better and not been so short with this guy. If you are going to call in and the first words out of your mouth is a bunch of complaining, things are going to go downhill real fast. Needless to say, I was still talking calls from the call group a week later.

On Monday night, I rolled in and the first call I got was from that call group. I go to sign in and amazingly enough they had pulled my access to their portal. I was set to take the calls still but had no tool to track the calls. I had to put calls back in the que. When callers have been waiting on hold for more than 10 minutes, they are not very nice about having to go back into the que. Secondly, I would like to know how I am supposed to track these calls now that I do not have a tool to do so. I alerted the Floor Manager who basically told me he did not have "Provisioning" access. What is ironic is, I can take test to take these calls and it will automatically provision those calls to me ; but, they can not take me off that call group. I ended up signing out of my phone, emailing my Team Lead and walking out before my shift was up. The only word I got from the Floor Manager was "I will back you up." What does that mean? If I can not do my job, I am going to bail. It is not like I need this gig. The pay sucks for DSL tech support reps anyway. The only reason I took this job was to make extra money to pay off some debt and to help make some money to install new flooring in my house. They have also been promising to allow us to work from home since January of this year. I have yet to see that happen.

I have decided to start looking for a replacement part time gig that I can work 5 days a week that does not cut into my sleep schedule where I am sleeping in shifts like I do now, where I can make just enough money so I can knock out the floors and other projects that I need to put my house on the market. I have a Masters degree in Computer Science. I am not sure why I am sitting at a tech support job where they hire college kids because its cheaper for them. I have decided I am going to be a part time professor at an Online University. I figure if I can get my foot in the door at University of Phoenix, I can take Doctoral classes as well and get my Ph D.

I work tonight at 11pm. We will see how it goes. If they still have things screwed up. I am walking out again and will not come back unless they fix my provisioning or I might just not come back period.

Rants of a DSL technical support rep.

Confessions of a DSL technical support rep

It has been 3 months since I started this part time tech support job. My team lead finally got me bumped up to Level 1 tech because I had more technical experience than most of the team on the night shift combined, not to mention i have a Masters degree in Computer Science and looking at Ph D. programs. I have yet to see a raise yet because I have to give it about 2 weeks for it all to catch up. I figure I will start blogging about this part time job on a regular basis. This will be my "confessions of a tech support rep" to give folks an inside look at what exactly we have to put up with on a daily basis. I am not going to mention any company names. What I can say is I work for a company that services quite a few DSL service providers who also provided dial up service.

1. First of all, do not tell me you are not very computer literate. I really do not care. My only concern is if you can follow directions or not. If you keep repeating the fact you are not very computer literate to make up for the fact that you can not follow instructions to save your life, only makes the call that much more lengthy.

2. We have call times we have to follow. I do not have all day long to work on your technical issue. I have to have you on and off the phone in less than 12 minutes. The good thing is that one call might roll on for almost an hour but the next call will come in and I am on and off the call in less than 2 minutes. That helps my call average.

3. If I put you on hold to "check on a few things", I am usually going to the bathroom or complaining to my co-worker about how clueless you really are. This place frowns on us using DND (Do Not Distrub). We have to have a DND of less than 10%. DND is used for breaks, lunches and bathroom breaks. In order to get under the 10%, I use the hold button because I am not here long enough in an evening to take a break or a lunch.

4. Please do not call me because your Microsoft Office does not work and you happen to know that I am available. If you whine because the previous tech helped you, I will probably tell you it is out of my scope of support and ask if there is anything else I can help you with.

5. If you still have dial up and are paying for you, you need to look into getting DSL. If you have the lowest DSL package it is like $15 a month. Dial up customers whine and cry because their connection is slow or when their friend send them a large file that they can not download because their connection times out. These folks usually call up and have to have us delete the large file so they can get the rest of their mail.

6. If you have email problems and I have to sign into your email, you need to make sure there is not anything in your inbox that you do not want me to read. I will probably laugh at you and blog about it later, especially if you have emails from multiple dating sites.

7. When you call in, please be sure you are ready to answer the questions I ask you. If I ask you for your billing telephone number, please provide it. Do not tell me, "It is DSL.", or start to go off on your issue. If you do this, it only makes the call longer.

8. When I am asking you questions and I realize that you are not sure what to answer, I am usually going to ask you a YES or NO questions. The answer will either be YES or NO. If you sit there and wonder to answer, the call is going to be that much longer and frustrating. Please do not be clueless if you do not know how to answer a YES or NO question. You have a 50% chance of getting it right.

9. Do not call up with a bad attitude. I understand things are frustrating. I understand it does not work. When you call up in a bad mood, the call is going to take that much longer. You need to be happy you are talking to someone from the US and not someone in India if you called Dell tech support.

10. If you are running a Windows machine with Windows 98, you need to realize that Windows 98 is barely supported. Do not get upset if I tell you that you might want to upgrade your system. You are behind in the times. I realize that "if is not broke do not fix it". You would not still be driving a big car from the 70s, especially with gas prices as high as they are.

11. If you call me at night to compare that you DSL is slow at night, you need to GET A LIFE. Turn off the computer and take a walk, read a book, watch a movie. Life does not revolve around your porn addiction or your online poker habit.

12. If your account is suspended, it can take 24 to 48 hours to get your account back active. At night, we are technical support. Do not call up crying that your phone works but your DSL does not because you are too lazy to pay your bill.

13. We are contractors of this DSL provider. In fact, the company I work for has multiple DSL providers they do support for. The main company whose building we are housed in has their reps monitor our calls. I swear they monitor our calls at least every 2 days. The 3 people that do the monitoring are just as clueless as our DSL customer. I will get perfect calls on like 5 calls in a row from one person monitoring and they will give me a "needs improvement" because of something silly like I did not use the customer's name or offer the phone number of a manufacturer that I refer a customer to. These folks should be happy we take calls from their customers. Some of these folks should not own computers. It takes every ounce of patience for me not to reach through the phone and choke these customers. When I worked tech support before, we maybe got monitored once a month at the most. I am seriously tempted to come up to this office and have a few choice words with these folks that monitor. My team lead goes back and re-monitors some of the calls they give "needs improvement". He always finds that the calls were incorrectly monitored.

14. The average age of the folks working here is about 20. They hire college students primarily. My team lead is only 28. It is amazing at all the drama that goes on at this place. One of the Level 2 techs that I made friends with bragged to me that he went up to the 3rd floor women's bathroom and had sex with her while he was on lunch. I am amazed because there are cameras all over this place. The 2nd and 3rd floors are the offices by the DSL service provided we are contractors of. This place is one big soap opera. The Level 2 that I made friends with starts pointing out all the women he has had sex with. The girl he had sex with on the 3rd floor apparently gave him oral sex in the parking lot when the parking lot lights were out. I can only laugh at the drama that goes on around here, especially since the Level 2 tech that was bragging has a kid and lived with the family of his baby's mother and got kicked out of his house.

15. I am amazed at what they start folks out here. It is a wonder that they keep anyone for a extended period of time. I only agreed to it because they told me I could work from home once they got their new phone systems and they were flexible with my hours. The starting pay here is $8 and hour. If you work nights, you get a $1 shift diff. I have never made $9 an hour since the early 90s. The starting pay for tech support reps in Austin is anywhere from $12 to $15 an hour. They can get away with paying so low here because they hire college kids to work here. I could make more money else where, but where else can I get paid to sit on my butt?

16. The turn over rate is way high here. I was told by the team lead that one month they hired 150 people and fired 150 people. I think the big thing is the "point" system. People tend to get fired for having too many points.

17. "Points" are really stupid at this place. If you come into work late, you get points. If you are a no call no show, you get points. You can work off your points by working at least 20 hours on weekends. The points need to be done away with. I think Team Leads should be given the power to put people on probation for being late and calling in. If you call in sick, you have to roll in with a doctor's note. The college kids that work here many times do not even have medical insurance. What makes you think they are going be able to roll into the doctor and get a note?

18. The Network Admin that works here has the web filter set too high. You can use "quota" time to browse on your own time. I realize there are certain sites they do not want you to be browsing while at work. They block message boards, Food, certain tech websites, Entertainment, etc. I can understand they are worried about bandwidth but this guy does not have to be so anal about the Web Filter. He has a network sniffer on at all times. He can see what people are doing. I did find two ways around his Web Filter. He did get smart and block the one way. I have not tried the second after he sent a nastygram to my boss about my web usage. If my boss gets another email from him, I might have to pay him a visit to find out what his problem is.

This place is just a job and is not my real job. I can kick back and not take it too seriously because if I ever get too upset, I know I can walk out here without looking back knowing that I do not really need this job. It is a nice thing to have, especially since I have to put my oldest son in summer camp. (Plus that new Fender Lonestar guitar that I want with a Line 6 Pod XT.) We see how long I last at this place.