Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Technical Support

I try not to be a technical support ass. Since my job is to do and work with tech support, for me to be one of those customers who are rude or really stupid would be counter productive.

Normally I am able to work my way through problems. I only call upon technical support when I've hit a wall that is beyond my expertise. So I called my ISP because form what I can tell, I could not see DNS. The voodoo ritual of modem and router restarting didn't work, so I gave up and called. I liked my ISP's automated service. It picked up that it could see my modem which was kewl. Only when I told it that had not solved my problem did I get to talk to a human. She had me bypass the router and confirm that I could see the Internet. (I felt dumb for not having thought of that. Its filed away as something to do.) Annette even gave me a number to talk to Linksys. I figured out where she was going and was able to ask her what was the goal and give her the information she needed.

Linksys could use better phone lines and automated support. While on hold, I looked on their site and found there was a firmware update. I even found the readme (that this update fixes some DNS issues) and instructions on installing it. So I got a woman from southern Asia (India?) whom I had trouble understanding mostly from the poor phone connection quality and a little because of trying to get through the accent. Struggling through her directions and lack of explaining, I deduced she was going to have me install the firmware update but could not get out of her that is what she wanted me to do. Eventually I subconsciously hung up the call. No, really… I meant to see if I could get better phone quality off speaker and on the handset (maybe I should get a headset?). So I followed the directions I already had on installing the firmware update. In the process I even ended up resetting the router.

So between the reset and the firmware update, my router is working.

In general, I think its a great thing companies have moved tech support jobs to India, China, or Eastern Europe. In the past I have not had trouble understanding the person on the other end of the line. Calling Linksys was my first experience talking to someone who I had trouble understanding. It was also my first experience with the person to whom I was working me as a n00b. Also, it was contrasted with an American sounding person who just treated me well.

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