October 10, 2003

• Adventures in Support

  
  

  Support is more than dealing with customers. We also have to deal with hardware and software, networks, the economy and the weather. But the customers get most of our attention. They make the noise and they are the source of our income (a fact not lightly to be ignored or forgotten).

  
  

  Today was different. I've been screamed at a few times, but today for the very first time I received two email messages thanking me. One just said thanks but the other elaborated a bit. In neither case had I done anything more than relay the information that the engineers had done their job and fixed the problem. I had to let the engineers know that the customers appreciated their effort, so I printed the message and delivered it to them. They were talking about having it framed, never previously having seen a message thanking them for their efforts.

  
  

  I didn't really solve a lot of problems today. I solved a few small ones. The big problems I participated in I was mostly a bystander carrying bits and pieces of the puzzle back and forth between those who knew what they were doing and, of course, the customer. I was distracted by having to tend to other customers, live, wanting access to equipment. I was supposed to be in the Operations Control Center (OCC) but wound up wandering all over the building seeking help, then finally talking to the customer while juggling Instant Messages to several other people who were fixing things. In the end the customer was no longer mad and I was a total wreck.

  
  

  But normally I would receive a call or a message, figure out what was needed, go to whoever could provide the fix, and report back to the customer that a fix had been made. I don't usually have that luxury. I usually have to do all of the fixing myself instead of getting all of the credit for the work of others.

  
  

  I've spotted a few trends. When a customer starts to describe a problem to me, I can often tell them what operating system they're running and what software is causing the problem. The first one I hit on was the connection between a certain error message and the use of Netscape 4.x on Windows 9x systems; it happens when the program stores exactly 2048 items in its temporary storage and I've been advising victims of the problem to upgrade to a higher version of Netscape.

  
  

  The most recent trend is that when we have a glitch customers whose operating system is Windows XP find that their system has changed important parameters and they can no longer access their email. We are adding new mail servers to handle the increased load due to new customers, increased spam and a whole lot of virus infection attempts passing through, and every time we move a server, the XP customers start calling in because they can no longer get their mail. Should I tell them to thank Bill?

  
  

  I've been using a few XP systems lately. They set up a lot of stuff automatically ... and usually wrong. It takes me longer to figure out how the OS has screwed up and fix it than it would have taken me to set it up from scratch myself. Many of my customers are at a complete loss what to do, so I've had to debug their systems by remote control, mostly using guesswork. It's a time-consuming process that's only partly effective.

  
  

  And it only works until the next time XP decides to make changes on its own.

  
  

  That's a real accomplishment, you know. It isn't every company that can write a program that nearly always makes the wrong decisions, then makes changes when your back is turned to enforce its bad guesses. It takes a company like Microsoft.

  
  

  An example? A customer called up for an initial dial-up setup. We went through all of the procedure and it didn't work. Going back and examining the settings, we discovered that the settings XP had used when the customer had registered his computer had been substituted for the settings we had just entered. When you first start an XP system, it wants you to register it with its masters, and it knows how to make the telephone connection for that purpose. When you try to set up any other telephone connection afterwards, XP becomes unhappy and restores the settings it wants.

  
  

  Bad XP.

  
  

  Still, if you must get a new computer, seriously consider getting an operating system represented by a penguin, even one wearing a red hat.

  
  

  Today started off like magic. One customer called in that he had tried to arrange to pay his bill by phone and get his Web site unlocked but it still seemed to be unavailable. I put him on hold. In the hallway I ran into the chief accountant, who said he had just sent the account to the engineers for activation. When I got to the engineers, Turbo said he had activated the account thirty seconds previously. I was back on the phone to the customer in just over a minute, able to tell him the problem had been taken care of. It took him longer than that to verify that it had been.

  
  

  Nothing else was any easier than that.

  
  

  What a pity. But it's been a much better than average day.

  • 01:59
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