Thank You For Calling Tech Support, Now Please Die

Stories like this are the reason why I start every conversation with tech support by apologizing to the person that has to take my call. I know the problem I am having today is not their fault and no one ever calls them unless something is wrong....and then I proceed to yell at them about my problem.

"Sir," you’d hear them start. "Sir. Sir. Sir. Sir, I need you to calm down. Sir, if you continue speaking to me in that way I’m going to end this call. Sir, I am hanging up now." Usually after that happened, anyone nearby who wasn’t currently on a call would rush to the supervisor cube at the end of the row to listen to the recording.

Dude was lucky. It's worse, working in sales:

"Unlike a lot of other call centers, we weren’t graded purely on call completion time. That's fortunate, because basing an employee’s performance evaluation on how quickly they get people off the phone is a toxic way to measure work, both for the employee and the customer."

Average call handling time... sales quotes per day... basically it looked like the article that he wrote + Glengarry Glenross:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO_t7GtXO6w

And the software at Rogers telecommunications was a bag of shite - that place was held together by duct tape. I heard that the turnover rate was 90% or 95%. The attrition so high that the agency recruiter who recruited me, lost his job, his mom came down with cancer too. He was a super nice guy who was an artist.

I quit after being forced to work 10 days straight, with no days off in between, around Christmas time... Dec 10th.

So true:

"Truthfully, I’d take a minimum wage job doing manual labor over slapping that headset down over my head again."

That's how I ended up working in a bakery and the pay was higher too ( unionized environment ).

* sales quotas

I did overnight help desk for an investment firm in the late 90's and it had it's ups and downs. We had a couple of notorious users, stressed out investment bankers, who would call the desk and just berate us for every little thing. *I* crashed their Word, *I* blue screened their computer. We had recorded calls of threats against us and one night someone in my building actually DID attack me, physically.

Odd thing is the abusers were still there, unaffected, after most of us were laid off.

Fairly accuratie if overly bubbly and nice view of a call center.

One thing was nice back in the 90s was tech support was more knowledgeable least for ISPs.
But tech support sucks. An ISP I worked for in Woburn mass around 1995. Each call had to be 10min or less. We had one guy that was our windows NT expert. Any NT calls went to him. I failed to keep calls less than 10min got let go after a few months.

if you dealt with someone abusive, and they were screaming at you, and you said-
"hey, I'm just a lowly tech support guy. You can yell at me all you want, but that's not going to change anything except you might feel a little better for getting that off your chest..."

Would you get fired?

I worked at Convergys around the same time as the person in the article.

Back then, Convergys predominantly used Lucent for their phone system. During my more rebellious (and unprofessional) days, I figured out a way to soft lock the phone while messing around one night. The trick had you repeatedly hit the release button, immediately after a call. The phone would become unresponsive, until you physically reset it.

You would show up in the IVR as perpetually "available", never taking calls.

I did some time at Convergys supporting Win 98 and XP. The author worked there during the halcyon days. The most fun I had was training "Brandon, Buffy and, Bill" in India to take my job.

SuperSubZero said:

I did overnight help desk for an investment firm in the late 90's and it had it's ups and downs. We had a couple of notorious users, stressed out investment bankers, who would call the desk and just berate us for every little thing. *I* crashed their Word, *I* blue screened their computer. We had recorded calls of threats against us and one night someone in my building actually DID attack me, physically.

Odd thing is the abusers were still there, unaffected, after most of us were laid off.

Click to expand...

Sounds like you guys were there mostly as punching bags.

Some of the lower tier support people really are super heros for the job they do. The shit they put up with.