A bit of fun from Dilbert. I have had the exact experience Dilbert does of tech support refusing to think about the actual symptoms of the problem and insisting on following some script and wasting my time – repeatedly. The second act takes on another time waster with a management tip from Dogbert: “Always postpone meetings with time wasting morons.” Dogbert hasn’t quite adopted the respect for people principle.
via: The final word on making meetings better
Related: Dilbert and Deming – Financial Planning Made Easy – CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers – posts on meetings
My frustrations with tech support are actually how I became a programmer.
I was a Mechanical Engineer, but our company had purchased a web-based application that fell under my responsibility to manage.
I would call tech support and they would get no where. Knowing next to nothing about programming, I would start doing root cause analysis on my own and discover the problems. Eventually I started play games with their tech support people by fixing the problem on my own first, then calling them to see what direction they would have me looking to solve the problem. I would even try to persuade them in the right direction, but they were always chasing down some other rabbit trail. Eventually I dropped their obscenely large annual maintenance contract, for which we got next to no value out of.
Another annoying thing? They would always ask questions that were part of the standard operations, but would oftentimes be completely irrelevant to the problem at hand, e.g. “What operating system are you on?” Sometimes that could play a role, but in probably 99% of the cases it was a useless question.
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