Answering the Calls of the Wired
Did you hear the one about the stressed-out fellow who rang tech support looking for the “any” key because his computer ordered him to “hit any key”?
How about the seamstress who set up her new PC with the mouse under the desk because she thought it was a foot pedal?
Or the caffeine addict who called to complain that his cup-holder was broken. You know, the one that slides out of your computer. . . .
If these sound like urban legends of the Digital Age, spend an evening with James Copeland, an 18-year-old tech support staffer at Absolute Quality Inc. in Hunt Valley, Md.
Copeland and his colleagues handle distress calls for customers of popular software publishers such as Hasbro Interactive, Lego and Scholastic. They’ve heard it all: parents swearing a blue streak, panting phone sex operators, blubbering babies and blubbering adults.
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In the world of high technology, where software wizards and engineers grab the glory, tech support staffers take the blame for the software bugs and design goofs that drive users crazy. At no time is this more apparent than now, in the month after Christmas, when company tech-support operations--and customer frustration--are at their peak.
“Tech support is not for everyone,” says Steve Martin, co-founder of Absolute Quality, whose 148 employees spend half their time testing games and the other half living with the results.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, boy, I get to talk to a crazed lunatic about how some game stinks--and then they’re going to yell at me as if I developed it.’ ”
It’s no surprise that tech support staffers are perpetually in short supply. “Burnout tends to be a problem,” says analyst Eric Rocco of Dataquest.
On a typical day, Copeland and his colleagues field up to 500 calls from a warren of cubicles papered with posters of pro wrestlers and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, as well as thank-you notes from grateful callers they’ve rescued from the brink of disaster.
Around Christmas, call volume shoots up to 5,000 a day, a sizable number but still a drop in the bucket compared with Microsoft, which draws 29,000 calls on an average day.
Kimberly, calling Absolute Quality for the third or fourth time for help with a game she bought her kids for Christmas, certainly needs soothing.
Slouching over his keyboard, Copeland rifles through an online database of common problems for each of the 225 titles the company supports, including popular games such as Scrabble, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Frogger. But after 32 minutes helping Kimberly update her sound and video drivers without success, he’s stumped.
“If you can’t pinpoint a problem, it’s frustrating,” he says.
In tough cases like these, Absolute Quality trouble-shooters sometimes build a computer to match the one a caller has--a silicon petri dish to experiment with possible fixes. To that end, they maintain an inventory of computers that ranges from the latest Apple G4 to decades-old museum pieces, as well as a storeroom stocked with most of the audio and video circuit boards on the market today.
Occasionally, trouble-shooters encounter problems they can’t solve. That’s when they call Joe Aliberti, a 20-year-old wizard with a shaggy beard and ponytail. He is so good he gets his own office.
“He’s our last line of defense,” says tech support manager Randy Denmyer.
Aliberti specializes in “rebuilds.” That’s shorthand for what happens when a program trashes critical system files and the computer expires. Aliberti calmly leads the victims on a journey deep into the recesses of their machines, into the world of BIOS and Windows Registry, where even many programmers fear to tread.
One rebuild took more than nine hours over three days. And most of the people he deals with, Aliberti says, barely “know their left click from their right.”
“I tell them, ‘This is brain surgery. If you mess up, your computer’s not going to be able to see or talk. So do as I say.’ ”
Then there are the lame and the brainless.
Staffers recall the woman who slid a new CD-ROM into her VCR and wondered why it didn’t work. And they have tales of callers who complain of “broken” monitors that aren’t turned on.
Ibi Hanif, who runs a tech support service in London, spent hours with a woman who complained that her e-mail was bouncing back undelivered. Hanif finally asked her to show him the messages. Her addresses included the “street name, town, county and full postal code.”
“You try to be as diplomatic as possible, but afterward you have a good giggle,” Hanif says.
No matter how diplomatic tech support staffers may sound on the phone, they’re often swearing at their callers inside.
Fred Fishkin, a reporter for WCBS-AM in New York who collects help-desk howlers on his Tech Tales Web site (https://www.techtales.com), says support staffers have their own code for nincompoops with requests such as, “How do I turn off my computer?”
“They say it’s an ID-10-T error,” Fishkin notes.
Or: ID10T
Not all ID10T calls are the result of human error. Fishkin’s favorite: the IBM rep who took a frantic call from a PC owner whose pooch got his tongue snagged in the computer’s sliding CD-ROM tray. “The dog probably thought the shiny disk in the drive was water and started licking. Then the door closed,” Fishkin says.
But Fishkin argues that most people are not to blame for their high-tech woes. “Let’s face it,” he says, “this technology stuff is far from perfect, and it doesn’t work the way it should.”
There’s also an element of slapstick. Rick Ramsey on Symantec’s technical support staff recalls helping a man whose computer had an older floppy disk drive with a door-like latch over the slot. Ramsey asked the man to insert the floppy into the drive and close the door. A moment later he heard a loud “blam!”
Ramsey asked about the noise. “I closed the door,” the man said.
Ramsey’s solution: “There are times when it’s best to put your headset on the table very quietly and run outside and scream.”
