The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Anals of Customer Service, Part 235, 673,458,319

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Gotta love the unbending mind…

My favorite from the tech support end: This woman comes in. She’s from Piedmont. (This tells folks around here a lot about what comes next)

Anyway, she starts off by spending about 5 minutes telling me how much she knows about computers and how she has been using AO-HELL for over 2 years now and knows everything about a computer.

So I stand and listen and then she finely gets to the point. Her problem is that the computer was acting slow and taking a long time to connect.

2 year old machine with her and 3 others on AO-HELL. Running win 95 with 16 meg of ram and a 200 meg hd. Out of space. She can look at this and bring it in if she can’t clear some stuff herself… Yea right…

So I start with telling her to go to the My Computer icon on the desktop.

Now we are face to face. I wish it wasn’t so as this is a 250+ pound 5 foot 4 inch female in a dirty torn tee shirt and stretch pants (also dirty also torn). Bathing didn’t seem to have taught in the school, where I suspect she spent most of her learning years playing hooky, either. She also smoked. And drank. But back to the moment.

So we are standing there and she gets a funny expression on her face and is silent for just a minute so I repeat myself and tell her to go to the My Computer icon on the desktop. More silence and then she goes:

What’s an icon?

I had to turn and walk away for a minute to prepare for this one. And to snicker and chortle. Then turn and spent 30 minutes talking her through everything only to have to do it over the phone again later. And then to have her take the equipment somewhere else to be fixed…

Some days I think about getting back into the biz. Then I think of this and a few other similar episodes and suddenly feel much better about being gainfully unemployed…