p.s. If any of this were simple, tech support jobs would dry up and be a thing of the past. :-)
I literally had a lady on the phone tonight who couldn't figure out that when she clicked on twenty different things at a time, her PC got so busy it caused the operating system to start throwing errors. (Actually she DID know this, but wanted to pretend she didn't.) She also didn't realize that this made it impossible to troubleshoot her actual PROBLEM she called about, and that saying you're "computer illiterate" when you're the person in charge of a large company's digital video systems and you're on the phone with the vendors tech support, isn't really all that funny or cute... but she thought it was. Not saying I wasn't glad she called. Hell, they pay me for this? All I have to do is be patient enough to outlast her clicking festival, ask her to close twenty windows and follow instructions, and then send me the log files so I can read exactly what the computer did wrong -- while her opinion was that "the computer must just be as tired and cranky as I am"? Talk about easy money... I'll take that phone call any day of the week. Especially since they pay me overtime. It did, however, cut into a class I was supposed to attend tonight for an outside-of-work extracurricular activity, so I was miffed... but I'll get over it when the paycheck arrives. How many people on this list have had to help HAMS (you know, the "technical elite of the country's radio technicians and an asset to the country"... bwahaha...) program a CTCSS tone into a radio so they could access a repeater. Be honest. You can learn how stuff works, or you can call Customer Service. :-) And I swear, sometimes people don't call with the goal of actually fixing said problem in mind, but thirty other things, and they're trying to do them all at once. This, of course, never works out well for them... but you just patiently wait until they figure this out, and then start over... Of course, we all have our specialties. I hate plumbing with a passion, and it hates me. My plumber makes as good a living as I do. Must be a lot of folks out there like me who handed a couple of simple pipe connectors and pipes, will screw it up EVERY time. I at least know better than to make jokes about how bad I am at plumbing, and how "plumbing illiterate" I am -- like it's funny or cute. I just tell him what I need done, ask for an estimate, and pay the man. Nate WY0X
