I've been there many times over the last 40 years, sadly.

Sometimes the support person knows full well they're going through a script but they have to do so to progress the call (the Dell exploding capacitors was a case in point, I raised a call, the support person apologised 'cause we both knew immediately what the problem was but unless he checked every box on his screen he couldn't arrange the engineer).

The worst was the ERP provider at a previous employer. They had two support people, one who'd been there years and knew everything, the other only had one answer to any non-trivial support question, "You'll have to restore from the backup!" That would be bad enough now when I've got hourly database log backups but back then, on an AS/400, we only had overnight tape backups, the consequences of having to repeat most of a day's work with thousands of transactions* didn't bear thinking about. My refusal to do this usually forced an escalation to the person who knew what they were doing, he'd usually have an answer in a few minutes (generally a manual edit of some data).

*Yes, we always instructed people to make sure they could repeat any work but users are users!

Mr 'One Answer' was earning his keep by diverting many support calls to 'go off and restore your backup'.

This left Mr 'I know what I am doing' to deal with the other calls that either were more difficult or had got past Mr 'One Answer' !!!

Not a nice way to work but not uncommon when there are limited 'real' skills available.

I would be expecting Mr 'One Answer' to come up to speed quite quickly by learning off Mr 'I know what I am doing' and working through old calls that had been solved and 'understanding' the solutions & why they worked.

If there was not, within 2 months, a material improvement in the quality of Mr 'One Answer''s calls I would be looking to replace him/her quickly with someone who wants to learn.

Bad support 'Bugs' me, I have worked on & ultimately run 'support functions' in large companies and it is a skill that is underappreciated.

Good Support people are an asset to the company and actually generate revenue by creating happy customers who buy more & recommend the company and its products to others.

:)

You're absolutely right, in this case Mr 'One Answer' lasted well over a year until I think they realised having no second person was better than a useless one!

These days they'll just replace Mr. 'One Answer' by AI, and get the same effect for less money.

>” and get the same effect for less money.”

I expect callers to disconnect from the premium rate support line much quicker once they realise they are being served by an AI.

I had the other way around, I supported some scientific software from a small company for years. Whenever there was a problem I couldn't solve, I'd phone and the switchboard would put me through to the head developer. I asked the product manger why they had seemed to have no one on support - he answered that if it was a simple problem then I'd have already solved it so they saved everyone's time by putting me though to the big guy. I decided to take that as a compliment.

We had new PCs installed across the company and the provider included support for an ongoing fee. It was a poor initial set up with everyone given 'basic' privileges to such an extent that nothing could be run. I wasn't permitted to even open a file. It became apparent that the supplier was taking glee at causing modest mayhem by installing incremental permissions across the board and treating each one as a potentially billable event.

We approached a local company to investigate/comment/advise. They offered to take over the maintenance/support contract at a fair rate. We made sure we had full access and control of the system:

It saddens me to say it, but I took glee in informing the original supplier that their contract was terminated with immediate effect.

Back in the 1990’s I was working for a globally recognised company. My role wasn’t IT based but it required me to be very familiar with the company’s IT systems. To do my job I needed systems to do their intended jobs and I got to know many of the help desk team. Initially wanting total control themselves, they eventually realised that letting me get involved kept the bosses happy.* One consequence of this was that I became the initial (but very unofficial) first point of call for IT support in the office area I was based - ironically one that housed many of the company’s top engineers.

*In my official role, and that of others in the office, unresolved issues could lead to significant financial hits, and senior management had the refreshing (and, unfortunately, rare) approach of letting their engineers and senior staff get on with their work. It was a rule that decisions were made by individuals, not committees. Meetings were frequent - but to gather information and views so individuals had the best available information to make their decisions. It was a policy that led to the company being very successful, though changes at top in subsequent years (a result of external pressures) tempered that. They’re still in business but in the middle of the peloton, not amongst the leaders.

I'm an engineer not an IT person, but I always seem to acquire a reputation as "someone who's good with IT".

In my previous job the company was split between two buildings and the IT guy was in the other one. The office I was in had some people who were... more advanced in years shall we say, and had frequent "problems" where "The tool bar just disappeared!" (they'd dragged it off the menu) or similar. When they realised I was "Someone who's good with IT" I became their first port of call and saved the IT guy tons of time constantly having to go between buildings for trivial ID10T errors.

First, plaudits. If you worked the Solaris Gold support line (or indeed the others), I doff my cap to you.

Then the bad, number 1. Trying to fix Mrs Tango’s Acer laptop with the Windows Update From Hell. “You’ll have to reinstall Windows. Look for the license key on the bottom of the laptop.” Hmm. This one came with W8, so no it doesn’t have a printed license key. I’m clearly on my own here.

Number 2, migrating from Tiscali to Talk Talk following the takeover. Tiscali had no download limits. TT tells me I’m now limited to 40 GB a month. I ask how I can monitor that. Turns out I couldn’t. The conversation spanning several sessions finally ends with “ok we’re not even monitoring you. Have you any idea how we can do that??????”

I'm sure many of us have been there in fact. I had one many, many years ago when working at a council as IT support and I encountered a Dell desktop that was showing graphical corruption - including on the BIOS screen. I tried swapping out the RAM, no joy. So, I phoned Dell's support.

The guy was obviously working from a script that included "Re-install the OS" as a troubleshooting step, no amount of trying to point out that the OS has absolutely nothing to do with the BIOS screen would get him to budge. In the end the simplest option was to say "I'll give that a try", hang up, go and fix a few other issues around the place, then phone back an hour later and say "OK, I did that and it didn't work".

Magically, we suddenly got an engineer scheduled to come out and swap the motherboard - which fixed it, fancy that!

This is a classic version of adversarial rubber-duck debugging back in the dial-up age.

These days we all mainly rely on AI rubber duck apps.

..... was the person who answered a support call to be able to understand the terms and language that they were likely to encounter.

I had to put a call into B(loody)T(errible) once when a modem was unable to connect across a leased line. I had hooked up a handset and could clearly hear a one Hertz click on the line.

I would have expected someone on the support desk for leased lines to be able to understand the statement "There is a 1 Hertz click on that line that is stopping the modems from handshaking". But it took nearly 10 minutes of careful explanation before the person on the other end of the line understood what I was trying to explain.

In the late 90's we received the first of two firewalls that were supposed to work in a failover state.

The first that arrived wouldn't power up.

I called the rep we were working with.

His response: "Oh, it's because that is the failover unit".

I knew immediately he was wrong and called his supervisor.

The response there was to immediately have another unit shipped out and

another tech assigned to drop by in person and smooth over the ill will

generated by the first tech.

We never heard from the first tech after that.

"Oh, it's because that is the failover unit."

"Wait, what?"

"Yeah the clue is in the name. When the first one fails, then it's all over."

"?!?!?!"

"Maybe you were after a Backup unit."

"Hmmm... Whats the special naming thing on that one."

"Well, by the time it gets started, your main unit will be back up and running..."

They're called helldesks.

As I often point out to manglement, setting bullshit KPIs like "close X calls per day per agent" "calls closed within x arbitrary time" for outsourced helldesks means they get a helldesk focused on entirely the wrong things and a never ending downward spiral in user satisfaction.

There's often no differentiation between "end user" and techie so those of us who are expert get the same 1st line script which, despite all exhortations, often leads us to "reinstall your operating system" and a closed call.

There are special places in hell for the entire Lenovo helldesk team who would often insist an end user rebuild their own machine with the factory Lenovo image instead of our corporate image before they will even consider progressing an incident. (And that insistence, despite our complaints to the Lenovo account manager, is one of the major reasons why we no longer buy a few thousand Lenovo machines a year.)

"here's often no differentiation between "end user" and techie so those of us who are expert get the same 1st line script"

My normal comment is the knowledge level of a tech support call is a constant.

So $ENDUSER rings in, they get the expert.

We ring in, we get "it's my first day! script reader.

We have an external Service Desk/IT. And my lord is it a sh%tshow. At least on the Hardware side (not helped by the Win 11 transition).

I dont actually put that on the poor schlubs on the Hell Desk, and more on their management. But there are so many disconnects it unbelievable.

For example, All monitors in the firm are equipped solely with DP slots. All of the new Laptops being provided by IT have only HDMI. So you collect your new laptop, but cant connect it to your company issued monitor. Ok, you're probably thinking IT would provide a HDMI to DP Cable, or an Adaptor. Nope, every person has to individually purchase a new cable or adaptor over the purchasing system, (at a ridiculous markup, but thats another rant entirely!). Delivery time at least a week. A few departments attempted to purchase multiple cables in advance, knowing of the upcoming new Laptops and apparently got yelled at for "frivolous" spending.

Similar thing that the new graphics cards for engineering desktops which use Mini DP outlets, but IT wont supply Mini-DP to DP Adaptors.

I could also go on about the software on the new hardware - bring back the old machine with a dozen IT approved and purchased pieces of software on it. Collect the new machine, which is effectively empty. Then stand around with the Hell Desk person for 30-45 mins, whilst they manually install Teams, Outlook, and a few other standard programs and adjust a few settings. But not the full list of your old software, which you need to repurchase (process takes at least 2 days) and install on your own time. As for the standard stuff, and the settings. No they are apparently not allowed to do that in advance of pick up (you get given a specific appointment to come and pick up your hardware, so it's not like someone drops in unannounced to collect new hardware!). So really an excellent use of company time.

But thats enough rant for now... But like you said, you get the KPIs you pay for, everything else is unimportant...

As someone who spent most of their paid career in QA (not IT, I should add, but in more tangible engineering areas). One of my objectives, when advising organisations, was to get senior management to recognise that getting things right before customers get their hands on their products (or receive their services) was the most cost effective approach. That didn’t mean there was no requirement for after-sales support, but every unscheduled service call should be seen as a failure that needed investigation and, in most cases, corrective actions to ensure it was a one-off.

Any company that boasted of large after-sales support teams and call-centres was a red flag to me when assessing potential suppliers. Increasing help-desk resources was (is) a sign of failure to manage. It’s become acceptable in software that there will always be bugs. I’m not saying it’s feasible to supply totally bug-free software as there are far too many variables to control (other than bespoke systems that are under single source control) but the rush to add features is leading to an ever increasing risk of user problems. One reason Apple have been successful is that the hardware and OS are under their control - not perfect, but their systems need significantly less user support (though anti-monopoly regulation, especially in the EU, is going to level up the field). Apple systems aren’t for everyone but their walled garden approach is an option (for now)for those that want it.

Our SIMS support company are usually great, and are able to fix most issues with a single call.

Not so a few years back, when I noticed we had no timetable after Christmas.

Calls and emails batted back and forth for a few days with no solution in sight.

Until one day, whilst I was on hold, I decided to look at the Academic Year setup and noticed the Spring term was set to start on a Sunday, not Monday.

I changed the date and as if by magic, our timetable reappeared just as the help desk operative came back on the line.

I explained what I'd done and the operative let out an audible sigh and told me they could now clear the problem for a couple of dozen other schools.

It seems that adding an extra bank holiday for HM Queen's funeral had shifted the timetable, because we'd done it the wrong way. We did it the correct way for King Charles' coronation the next year...

Dogbert does tech support best:

“Hello, I …”

“Shut up and reboot”

“Hey, it work …”

“Shut up and hang up”

Dogbert checks watch, “My average call time is improving”

Seems a bit suspect as the routers would use UTC I would have thought.

Possibly someone had fiddled with the system (UTC) clock to get the "right" local time rather than set the correct time zone. I have seen this and it is bloody irritating once you tumble to it.

Years ago, our university wanted to standardize IT support, so the computer science department I work in had to transfer our (very capable) sysadmins to the centralized IT department. We did insist that we keep working under Linux, and a university-standard Linux distribution was put in place, next to the standard Windows set-up used by the vast majority of the university. So far, so good.

However, the help desk was centralized as well, and where in the past I would simply call our sysadmins (or drop by their office) if there was a problem, and got it sorted without hassle, I now had to phone a help desk, where they first went through a script aimed at the standard Windows install. The first time this happened, I told the person on the other end that my machine was a Linux box, and he answered that they didn't support Linux, only Windows. I told him he was wrong, and I was running the university-standard Linux install, but he remained adamant there was no such thing. After a fairly pointless "Yes it is! - No it isn't" loop worthy of Monty Python, I threatened to file a complaint if he did not put me through to the sysadmin who installed the Linux system he said didn't exist. As I mentioned the name of said sysadmin he could hardly suggest that that person didn't exist, and the problem was quickly sorted.

All is well that ends well, I should add, as we now have a very capable sysadmin delegated from the IT department to our institute, so I do not have to answer any stupid script questions about Windows settings my machine does not have.