Finally, after two days of hassles, that luckily weren’t mine, I got to do telephone support at work. This basically entails clients phoning in with problems, and you trying to solve it over the airwaves or reassure them when they start planning a bloody koo of your company.
Now I will admit that while it was something new to try and did perk my pointy ears up in interest, I must say I wasn’t really looking forward to it in the same way you do something fun like a visit to the candy store or intrusive dentistry work.
It wasn’t the idea of ‘JO vs. THE ANGRY CLIENT’ that got me bothered like many people thought. I can deal with angry people, I was married to one, I know they’re just upset and angry and not to take their ragings to heart. (Well if one did ever whisper, “I know who you are Jo, I’ll get your little hamster yet…” that miiiiiiiiiiight put a bit of Eeeek into my day…)
For me the worst part of Thursday was the fact that I simply could not help 9/10 of the people who called! You get whirly-gig frustrated when you have to ask for their details and say, “I’ll get one of our technical guys on it” when you know all they’d like is a simple solution that you blooming cant give them! I feel like a bouncer at a Barney festival turning away little kids with polio.
Plus I’ve never been very good at giving instructions. People’d ask me where the shops are and I just sort of point in a vague direction and say, “Go thatta way!” I’m terribly honest as well and tend to admit I haven’t the foggiest as well and this makes people wonder what you’re doing on support and then you have to explain you’re just there to ensure that their calls aren’t dropped and they end up with a tone in their voice similar to someone who phoned NASA and was patched through to Coco the deviant test flight chimp.
Besides all this was the alarming way the calls came in so fast! The second one customer hangs up the phone rings again. That isn’t even exaggeration, don’t I wish it was! It is very disconcerting and makes you start to hope the customer would hang on a bit longer to give you a breather and maybe swopping raisin bun recipes.
And there were problems logging me out of the system which can be a bother when you need the loo and none of your co-workers are keen on you peeing up against the sideboards. Once in the system, there was no escape! The phone just rang and rang, I felt like I was stuck in a glitch in the Matrix!
And then, because life loves stuff like this, when I managed to log out and catch up on sending the helpdesk 100 000 000 messages, I found I couldn’t log in again though I followed the head bloke’s instructions to the typed letter. Eventually he had to come and help me and I started to feel a right tosser only to see him do some occult thing on the keypad that I sure as heck hadn’t been told about! Then POOF-O! I was back, connected to my mostly miserable people, yay.
But we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And while my techno knowledge is somewhat lacking, like herds of naked mole rats are at the south pole, I did spend a goodly while getting people to not panic and even getting a laugh or two out of them. That added a bit of sunshine to it.
I need to increase my knowledge in general so that next time I don’t feel quite like a presumptuous plank of wood! Mind between you and me and anyone else reading this, I am sort of hoping they decide that my skills could be better used at the office, you know cleaning toilets with a bobby pin or something. Aren’t I terrible? Well if I am you can call and complain about it on 011 529….
