BlogWood: MT Archives

Tales from The Depot

(ed. note: "The Depot" is a (fictional?) place that is often referred to by Dell computer techs, a group of support folks who seem an awful lot like the guys in the article below. In Dell's world, your computer or your computer part have always "just left the Depot," and will reach you soon!)

As a rule, I don’t link to too much Salon.com stuff. You have to be a member or get a free “day pass” to read their stuff, so it’s a pain, but this article is just so chock full of good little tech support snippets that I couldn’t resist posting it. I’ve been a computer guy for over 10 years now, and, unfortunately, I can confirm the general truth of this tale.

Gratuitous self-serving note: the only way to avoid dealing with support departments like this one is to contract with a local computer company which handles all tech support issues in-house.

We pick up this story of a tech support phone room as the author describes several categories of tech support types:

A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else.

It's not that Loni isn't smart. In fact, he's wickedly so. He can listen to a person having problems with the mouse and spin a plausible story as to why it is really something the person needs to be discussing with the phone company. He can take a call about a modem and convince the customer that she needs to contact her embassy. He doesn't lack intelligence, just tools. Like the rest of us, all Loni was really taught was The Mantra, and since then he's learned to wield it like a samurai with a sword.

He's not alone. Lots of the techs are punters. And many of those who aren't have adopted some other time-saving strategy to help them dispatch their calls within the allotted time. Karen is part of a growing group called givers. Like punters, they don't really solve any problems, but instead of just asking you to call someone else, givers want you to have a parting gift. They'll listen to your problem and then randomly choose a piece of hardware to send you. Of course it won't solve anything, but givers have discovered that people usually calm down and start agreeing as soon as they think you're sending them something to fix the problem. And by the time they get the new part and discover it has no effect, they'll call back and someone else will have to figure out how to deal with them. Givers are really just punters with style, and they find their tactic very satisfying. Karen and her ilk get to spend all day playing Santa.

Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch. While this can be effective for solving all sorts of software troubles, it's like amputating someone's leg to fix an ingrown toenail. The solution is usually worse than the problem. Most times Ted doesn't actually follow through with his plan. The entire strategy is just a bluff. Most people will balk at the proposition of losing everything and decide they can live with whatever problem they've called to complain about. At the very least they'll decide to hang up, back up their data, and call back -- at which point they'll become someone else's problem.

But some formatters are worse than Ted. They'll help customers get started with the process without ever mentioning that all the data will be lost. Then they'll ask the customer to call back when the operating system finishes reinstalling, at which point the customer usually says something to the effect of, "the last guy was helping me reinstall and the computer seems to be running now, but I can't find my letter from my dead grandmother and baby picture of little Johnnie." Punters and givers will waste your time. Formatters can do much worse.