How to irritate tech support

One in a never-ending series.

1. Open a ticket whining that your site is down, and that there have been no visitors in an hour.

Your main problem here is that we have access to the monitoring reports, which show no issues, and access to your site’s logs which not only show continuous, unbroken traffic to the site, but shows you logging right in the site yourself – multiple times – in the same “hour” that you’re claiming the site has been down. If you’re going to try to exaggerate, or just lie outright, as least make a tiny effort instead of tossing something our way that can be debunked in the span of less than two minutes.

2. Whine that where you used to receive a couple hundred pieces of spam a day, you’re now receiving next to none.

Your main problem here is that you’re a dumbass: no one wants to actively collect spam except those people running honeypots. You are not one of these people. The single largest group of tickets we receive in any given day revolves around email. A large portion of that subset of tickets revolves around ways of reducing spam. We do quite a lot of continual adjustments to the filters we have at the network and server level because all your neighbors on that same server do not share in your perverse need to feel important because some spambag sends junk to your domain. I have never, in all my years of being in the tech field, found anyone who ever wanted more spam and not less. Telling us that our quality has “deteriorated” because your ego requires that you collect junk mail wins you no points.

3. Threaten any sort of legal nonsense when your site is down. Because you allowed your domain to expire.

Your main problem is that I despise it when people do that sort of thing. It’s pretty much a one way ticket to getting your account terminated instantly for being a douchebag.

There is a reason that a lot of tech people burn out and seek other fields. The 85% of people that are nice and civil when they contact support for anything are far outweighed by the 15% who are rude, clueless asshats when contacting support for something.

Moving right along

We’ve been motoring along here.

The chickens, at just over three weeks, continued in their baby dinosaur phase.

Baby chickens

Mostly, like any babies, they ate, slept, pooped, and required frequent changes of their dirties.

A new puppy, just in time for my sister’s 29th birthday, and my 40th.

Einstein sleeping

He – Einstein – sleeps quite a bit, too. But only after he’s been running around like he’s on puppy uppers, playing as only puppies can.

We were also awaiting the arrival of yet another baby, who would continue that time-honored tradition of eatings, sleeping, and pooping.

Gabs

Fortunately, she held off on making the birthday party really lively.

My sister and I had been letting our hair grow out so we could then have it cut off and donated to Locks of Love. We had decided that would be a fine birthday present for both of us.

Hairy

That turned out well.

Aubs after a trim

Although for some reason – and we didn’t realize this until well into the evening during the party when my sister pointed it out – mom and I were wearing the same color. Must be that whole spring thing.

Birthday 2008