Open a ticket saying you can’t upload to an application you’ve installed. Don’t include any other information. We love trying to . . . → Read More: How to piss off tech support, part infinity]]> When you are contacting us for support, because you’re working on a site for one of our clients, here are some tips on how to piss off the very people you’re asking for help.

Open a ticket saying you can’t upload to an application you’ve installed. Don’t include any other information. We love trying to figure out what the hell you’ve done to break something that’s been working just fine, and love even more rechecking ownership of and permissions on files, and tracking back through the logs.

While we’re working on that, open yet another ticket saying the site is entirely down. When we look at it, the site is in fact down, because it can’t establish a database connection. That seems odd, since the site has been working just fine. Until…

After we tell you the problem is the configuration file and the credentials the file is trying to use to connect are incorrect, tell us you haven’t changed anything. Except, oh, you changed the password for the main account user.

When we repair the configuration file to use valid and proper credentials, and then tell you that if you change little, minor things like, oh, PASSWORDS, you need to update configuration files that use those passwords, ask us how you’re supposed to change the file without FTP or control panel access. This will surely make us ask you what the hell you’re talking about because you just told us you were in the control panel and changed the password, and this has nothing to do with us correcting a database configuration file. Ergo, you should be able to do whatever it is you need to do, since presumably you were just in the control panel doing whatever it is you were doing.

An HOUR later, complain that you still can’t access FTP or the control panel. Since both are working fine, and the site is working just fine because we repaired things, this will make us even happier as we go hunting through the logs only to find you locked yourself out – and locked out the actual client as well, since you’re at their location – by continually attempting to log in with an incorrect password. A password that you changed from the control panel. A password that you should know. You kept trying to log in with an obviously incorrect password instead of stopping and just contacting us, which triggered the firewall.

When we tell you what you’ve done – without pointing out the definition of futility, I might add – and then tell you we unblocked your IP and reset the password, respond with a request to rest the password to “changeme”. Nothing delights us like easily guessed, massively insecure passwords.

And finally, when we tell you that we’re not resetting the password to that, give us a snotty “Fine.” followed by a haughty “I want it on the record” that you find our response insufficient and too slow. This despite the fact that the entirety of the issue, start to finish, was created by you, and it took you an HOUR to respond to something we managed to reply to in exactly seven minutes.

All of this will certainly ensure that we put you at the top of the douchebag list, and further will ensure that we let the client know – because they also contacted us about the site being down – exactly why everything was a mess. There was insufficiency going on here, that is certain. It is equally certain that it had nothing whatsoever to do with us.

This is plain English, I think. Only two words with more than one syllable. Seven words total. This is why it astonishes me that we receive a ticket from someone telling us they don’t understand and asking what they need to do. Is it that they are surprised . . . → Read More: What word didn’t you understand?]]> “No action is required on your part.”

This is plain English, I think. Only two words with more than one syllable. Seven words total. This is why it astonishes me that we receive a ticket from someone telling us they don’t understand and asking what they need to do. Is it that they are surprised they have to do nothing, that they don’t believe us, or that they truly don’t understand a simple sentence? I hesitate to claim the latter as the explanation but in reality, it does seem to be that way. How do these people manage to get through a day without killing themselves in some tragically humorous way?

Let me tell you about . . . → Read More: Tales from the trenches]]> I told myself when I started the previous incarnation of this blog that I’d try to avoid talking about work at all. But quite frankly, sometimes the only way to vent about something or share a funny story with other people is to put it here, so there we go.

Let me tell you about yesterday’s experience.

Our service is just that: a service. Like any utility or subscription – electric, cable, what have you. If you pay your bills, your service stays on. If you don’t, it doesn’t. It’s very simple. For some reason, though, various people seem to think this is different. I haven’t quite figured out why that is, exactly. Is it because it’s all Internet-based, and thus doesn’t seem quite real, or that they have a strange notion that it costs us nothing to actually run it? No matter; this is half about people who can’t grasp the concept that this is a business and half about people being deadbeats.

We’ve always been fairly lax about suspension policies, which isn’t exactly what we’d like to do, but there always seems to be something other than searching through billing for nonpayers to be done. Toss in the last few years with everything that’s been going on, and it makes the situation worse. We’ve been addressing that, and being more aggressive about either getting people to pay their bills or getting them gone. Cost efficient, the beancounters like it, and it cleans up the billing system. Works. We understand that sometimes circumstances result in an invoice here or there being declined. Credit cards are stolen. People get sick. They have an issue. Believe me, we understand, and really, our clients know that if they have some temporary problem and let us know, we’re fine with it. However…

Periodically, we rerun failed invoices, as people will update their billing information so the processing can be completed. Yesterday, we did just that. We then received an email from someone telling us that only one of her accounts was set to payment by credit card, so why were there two invoices processed? Well, that would be because you had the current invoice as well as the previous invoice outstanding. This is a paraphrase of her response.

“I didn’t know there was another invoice too, and now this is going to cost me another $35 because there is no money in that account. Take it off the card and put it on Paypal with (other account).”

Let’s examine this, shall we? At the bottom of every invoice is a notation of any other open invoices that might exist, and the total due of those other invoices, so if you’re actually looking at anything that’s being sent to you – and since you’re asking about two processing notices, you appear to be – or if you simply log in to the billing system to look at your account, there is no reason for you not to know about this. The total charge here, for these two invoices, was a grand total of $12. If you don’t have $12 to pay for your service, and you’re habitually behind on invoices, perhaps you should rethink having that service. Beyond that, you’ve just told us to take it off the card and change it to payment by Paypal. That’s what the above means to us, and being the nice people we are, and even though we will incur an additional transaction fee, we void those two invoices. In the meantime, we’ve looked at the billing for the other two accounts you have, and lo and behold, you have half a dozen invoices open for one, and two on the other, which doesn’t make us inclined to do what we’ve just done for you so you can avoid whatever overdraft fees you have. So we ask you, nicely: when can we expect payment for these other accounts? This is the response we received, verbatim:

“Please stop with the tone – I’m doing what I can – go ahead and just park the (name) site and that won’t be an issue right?
(Other site) may get caught up on the 5th, the other one on the 20th.”

Let’s examine this, shall we? First of all, you’re lucky that the one account still exists at all, given that it’s so far behind, and that any of them are still up, period. Second, whatever “tone” you think there is in a simple question is a mystery, but guess what? This isn’t a charity, and being a bitch to us isn’t helping your case. Third (and this is rich), “doing what you can” and telling us on the 29th of a month that one account “may” get caught up in a week, and the other in three weeks is entirely insufficient. You know what all that gets you? Suspended.

And that’s what we did. Which, in turn, led to this same person telling us we were “petty and vindictive”, that she just made payment in December, and that she wanted the sites back on because having them down was “impacting a lot of people”. Wrong: this business is not a not-for-profit enterprise, and no matter how much of a unique snowflake you believe yourself to be, you are not above our policies. And yes, you made a payment in December. To pay not one, but six open invoices on one of the accounts, for June through November, which still leaves you with December and January invoices open and past due. As to the third: well, quite frankly, the impact to others is being caused by your failure to address your obligations. Perhaps they should have chosen someone more capable of dealing with keeping the account current to handle this.

She further went on to claim that she had been asking for the three different billing system profiles to be put into one, and since it hadn’t been done, that was the reason she hadn’t paid. Au contraire: no such request had ever been made, but even if it had been and wasn’t done, leaping from there to the conclusion that it absolves someone of having to pay open invoices is absurd to say the least. It certainly has no basis in reality.

It also led to another rather amusing little game on her part. As we moved through helpdesk tickets, I came across one from someone asking how long an account upgrade would take. Not long, I replied. Just long enough for whoever caught the ticket to do it. The response to that was “Good. There is currently a problem with my account (name) and two others, because they were suspended and I think that’s unethical.”

I see. Apparently it’s unethical for us to expect to be paid, but opening a support ticket under a dummy name, using a freebie email account, and asking a bogus question in order to waste our time is entirely ethical.

In the end, because she continued to insist that we were wrong to suspend the sites, wrong that she had told us to take any charges off and recreate them, wrong to claim she was behind by two months (rather than one) on one account, and just plain wrong about anything else, we told her to move along. Others may live in bizarro world, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be dragged down into it as well.

All of this took away from the time I was spending tracing power cables in order to put together a plan for replacing certain power distribution units and moving some equipment off one buss to even the loads. I completed a bit of that work, but there is more yet to be done. Now that the current nasty, seemingly crazy person has been dealt with, though, maybe we’ll catch a break until the next one comes along and we can get some real work done for our real (paying) clients. I am not sure, though, that there will ever be enough time in the world to understand why peopl behave in the manner this person did. It strikes me as a rather odd way to move through life.

What I do mind, however, is people who refuse to even attempt to do anything . . . → Read More: Lessons not learned (Or, why my dogs are smarter than some of our clients)]]> I don’t mind helping people learn new things. During my college days, I used to tutor people in various subjects, and one of my instructors tried pretty hard to get me to change over to an education major. No thanks.

What I do mind, however, is people who refuse to even attempt to do anything for themselves, or who complain about things being “too technical” when they are not, or who insist that everything is – and this is a direct quote – “ridiculous” or that we must be “kidding”.

I can assure you that the only thing ridiculous when we deal with someone like you – is you. And no, we are most certainly not kidding about any of it.

Let me tell you a story.

We have two dogs now, both rescued from the pound. Great dogs. They have managed to learn a number of things in the course of the last year. One of the dogs will not push open a door. He was the one who was abused by whoever had him previously. The other dog will nose open anything at all, because he’s a goofy puppy. We have taught them to work together for certain situations. For instance, when they have to go outside, we open the door for them, let them out, and then leave the door not quite closed. The little dog does his business and then generally comes right back to the door while the goofy puppy runs around sticking his nose into things. Little dog whines a bit, as a signal, and goofy puppy, having learned that this is his job, comes running over to muscle open the door.

There is a gate to the side yard, and one afternoon, both dogs had gone out the gate. Goofy puppy had come pounding back inside, knocking open the door. I was in the middle of something and did not immediately close it. He ran off to another room. In the meantime, the wind had pushed the gate almost closed, so there was insufficient space for little dog to walk through. We all heard him calling because he could not get back in the gate. That includes goofy puppy, who came tearing around from the other room, flew through the open door, and who went over to the gate and knocked it open for little dog to enter.

Smart. Learned do a task after a couple of tries and subsequently performed that task without any issues at all.

If we could get some of our clients to do the same thing, it would be a miracle, because quite frankly, certain types do not have it in them. If we could get them to simply be less rude, that would work, too, but alas, all hopes we may have had for that have long since passed.

Want to know how to really irritate tech support – people, I might add, that you are contacting for assistance, not the other way around?

Be a jackass, for no reason, or when you are clearly wrong.

For instance, open a ticket with a subject line that does not seem all that incredibly urgent, with a first post that indicates nothing more than the subject does. The problem is solved. Then come back a day or so later, berating us because something was not working for two hours, and now you have to explain it to people. Here’s a tip: if something is an emergency, then say so. If whatever you’re opening a request for means some part of the site or server isn’t working, then perhaps you should indicate that, rather than just saying “abc isn’t working, please check it”, when “abc” isn’t required for the server itself to be operational. If you further bitch about the time it took because your subject line was so nondescript that a level one tech couldn’t really see anything wrong and had to bump it up, then perhaps you should use a tool that is readily available to you to have a higher up look at it immediately.

Or let’s say you want to give someone access to a portion of your site, without giving them your login details. If we give you a step by step on how to create login details for that person and then tell you exactly how to go about accessing the site with that information, and you respond with “It’s not letting me login” with exactly zero further information: you are not helping. If you further bitch and moan about the very precise, very clearly laid out information you are subsequently provided in the course of half a dozen back and forths because you simply were doing it wrong, asking us if we are “kidding”: you are being a jackass. No, we’re not kidding. Neither are we interested in spending boatloads of time telling you exactly how to do something that is not recommended in the first place. That is why we gave you the exact link that you need to use. All you needed to do was cut and paste it. Instead, you’re berating the people who resolved your issue. Do you think that will make us more or less inclined to think you are anything other than a rude moron?

Or, let’s take you, user who hasn’t been able to check his mail for “two weeks”. Who is also emailing us using an address from which you have already said you cannot receive mail. It would behoove you to use some alternate email address to contact us, just as it would behoove you not to let 43,000 (well, technically, 42,749) pieces of mail pile up in the main account that you never check but yet left active anyway despite recommendations that you not do this. We will be polite. We will suggest that you use, or provide, some other email address when you contact us and that you reset the main account not to collect mail. If you write back to us, telling us that you provided otheraddress@somewhere.com to contact you: we can read. Had you provided it, we would have used it. You did not. Therefore, you look even more foolish to us because you can’t read your own original request – which is embedded at the bottom of our response to you, something you received when we cleared out a little room to work in the mailbox.

And finally, if you act indignant, order us to “look into” why your site is deactivated, and we find that you have several invoices outstanding, have ignored the notices from the billing system itself, have ignored the requests that the billing department has sent you about your overdue account, and have not bothered to pay any of those invoices even after we’ve suspended your site: you are being a deadbeat. But I must say that I sometimes get some wry amusement out of the fact that suddenly the situation is rather urgent to you when you seemed to feel no particular urgency previously although you were warned that your account would in fact be suspended. And on this same topic, the reason we are not as lenient as we used to be is precisely because of the people who like to say “we will address all open invoices by specific date” and then do exactly nothing about paying their invoices. That includes you, Miss “I’ll pay all invoices by Friday” who not only didn’t pay a dime but also moved your accounts elsewhere. You, particularly, will be held up as a prime example of why there simply won’t be any exceptions any longer. Congratulations. You are the winning jackass for this round.