Welcome to the self-help portion of the website. Help for me and my fellow technicians, and help for you, the user. We don't specifically try to irritate you. We want you off our phone as quickly as possible, and you want your problem fixed as quickly as possible. Hopefully, this will help everybody get what we want.
| 1. | Be at your computer. I can't stress this enough. If you have a computer problem, we need you to be at your computer. We can't pretend that you're at your computer because there are things we need to know about it as it stands. Having a working phone next to it is also important. Sometimes it's necessary to check a large number of settings, and having to wait a minute between each of them while you run back and forth is a pain. |
| 2. | Have the computer booted up (If the problem is not "my computer won't boot"). We understand that sometimes the system just won't start. That's fine. But if it will, don't make us waste time waiting for the thing to boot up. |
| 3. | Have the error message on the screen, or write it down exactly as it shows on the screen, if for some reason you can't. Telling us it said something about the modem but you don't remember tells us nothing useful. It is best to leave it on the screen so you can read it to us directly. |
| 4. | Tell us what the problem is, specifically. Don't say "A week ago I had a problem but it went away after a while, and my baby was throwing up on the keyboard a couple of days later. I got a new keyboard, though. Do you think [$keyboard_maker] is a good one? I think they charged me too much. But my cousin Bertha said she likes their keyboards because they come in the ky00test translucent orange...[yak yak yak, blah blah blah]", say "When I tried to open a website, I got 'Internet Explorer has performed an illegal operation'". Small talk is fine while waiting for a reboot, or for Scandisk to finish or something. But wait until it's appropriate. Don't try and analyze the problem yourself; you obviously don't know what it is, or you wouldn't have called us. Just give us the facts and let us figure it out. |
| 5. | Don't volunteer information.This is similar to, but not the same as, #4. We will ask you what we need to know. All we need right off is your name, and (depending on how the system works where you're calling) a problem number. Where I work, we have call entry people who take the call and information such as your phone number and name, then route it to the appropriate technicians. Telling us what kind of computer you have, how big a HD, the speed of the CDRom drive, etc, generally doesn't matter to us. If we do need the information, we'll ask you for it. |
| 6. | Don't change any settings. You don't know what they do, and it makes it a huge pain in the neck for us to fix them. If you absolutely must change them, then when you call in when it doesn't work, tell us. This way we don't spend an hour trying to figure out why it's acting oddly, and can just repair the damage you did. |
| 7. | Listen to what you are being told, and do only that. Don't assume you know what we're going to do, you're almost always going to be wrong, and will only cause problems. If we tell you to open the control panel, don't rush into the modems icon, as we might have to check some network settings. If we tell you to 'close all the windows you have open', this does not mean 'shut the computer down'. |
| 8. | When you have followed an instruction, confirm that you have done so. When you're told to click on start, do so, then say 'Ok', or whatever. Don't just sit there. We can't see your screen, and only know what you are telling us. If you haven't told us the start menu is open, we have no way to know. |
| 9. | Don't start a call by demanding to know if a server is down. Most of you wouldn't know a down server if it started humping your leg. Describe your problem [Briefly, as in #4 above] and let us determine what your problem is. If a server is down, we generally know it long before you do, and will tell you at the beginning of the call. |
| 10. | Don't ask for a second opinion. You don't know enough about your system to know if we are incorrect, and having someone who doesn't know anything call into question our professional competence really irritates us. If we are not sure of an answer, we will talk to someone else and there's your second opinion; if we are sure of it, then anyone else will tell you the same thing. |
| 11. | Remember that we are people, too. We are not a really good AI system. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we forget things and have to check something more than once. Sometimes what we need to do to fix a problem can make it worse. Sometimes, no matter what anyone does, you will lose data. We will try and help you as much as we can, but if you insult us or call us liars long enough, eventually something will happen in return. This can range from having you count all the X's in the msdos.sys file {The file must be 1024 characters) to running a thorough scandisk (takes many hours, depending on the size of the HD), to, in extreme cases, destroying files. And you will never know. We want to help you. It's our job. It is not our job to take abuse. We did not make Windows crash and lose the Excel file that you've been working on for the last 10 hours without saving. We understand that you're annoyed. But we did not do it. |