2012-366 Day 51 – IT Workers

Spent the majority of today cleaning up the mess that our transcript scanning software left when it decided it just didn’t want to work anymore. Unfortunately, since I’m the only one who knows how the insides (mostly) work (well, often not really work), it requires a lot of my day to troubleshoot. Thankfully I’m one level insulated from their tech support now so I don’t have to directly deal with them, as there is nothing worse than being an IT worker dealing with other companies’ IT workers. The problems:

1) The entry level people have to use the same script regardless of who is calling.

This is a major problem in the large companies with a single point of contact for tech support. You get thrown in the queue and have to wait for the first person to answer the phone, and that person is then required to ask X questions before allowing you to escalate the issue. Sometimes you can attempt to short circuit the frustration by telling them you are experienced and would like to speak to their next level support immediately, but often they won’t do that. When I was point person on Dell contacts when we had a long string of fan failures I managed to get around this by finding their email submission form and creating an paragraph I just copied and pasted for each one that addressed all the questions in the script. Cut my time down from an hour per phone call to two minutes an email.

2) The tech working your problem is newer to the system than you are.

I get this all the time with the transcript software since the company that originally created the software was bought out a little while ago. Now the techs from the new company are trying to get their heads around what is going on with the system, while, if you are lucky, occasionally you can find one of the two techs that stayed on from the old company. It’s always disconcerting when you know more than the tech does about the problem and you called them for help. And sometimes it’s just incompetence, as I have one tech from a company that used to call me whenever he showed up to service the hardware to fix it for him (I stopped that one real quick).

3) Yes, I restarted the system

I realize this solves 95% of normal computer problems, but I am an IT professional: I would not be calling you if this was a normal computer problem.

4) Condescension

Thankfully I haven’t had to deal with this one in recent memory, but if you are an IT worker talking to another IT worker, you better be very sure that you are right before talking down to them. Actually, maybe this is a positive quality, as I’ve rarely had more fun than proving an idiot IT worker wrong on their own product.

So yes, even us IT guys hate most tech support. ::end vent::

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