Yeah. You would have had to triangulate your way around to getting the information that is exactly the information that you knew already that it was.
“Sir, I need you to go to the oil that you used and check if it is non-hydrogenated or hydrogenated. It should be printed on the back of the label.”
“What do you mean, I never had this problem before”
“Yes, I’m aware, they have changed the oil constitution recently. I’ll be able to resolve this problem for you, I just need to know if the oil is hydrogenated or not.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything”
“Can you just check the back of the bottle, please? Then I’m sure we’ll be able to get your recipe working again”
“Okay, well I didn’t actually use oil, I used toothpaste because it was expired and I wanted to get rid of it”
“Aha! Okay, I understand sir. I’m glad we were able to get to the bottom of the issue you’re having. So, if you make the recipe with toothpaste, it definitely won’t taste the same or have a good consistency. I think if you switch back to using oil you’ll find that the pancakes still taste the same as they used to”
“But I think I should be able to use toothpaste.”
“Absolutely. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Oh, you already rebooted? Okay, well maybe your power cable is loose. Go ahead and shut down for me real quick, so you can unplug that power cable and plug it back in. Great, now that you’ve power cycled your computer, the problem is fixed? Glad I could help.
Dude, ages ago when I did tech support. A simple question like: “are the lights on your modem on?” was met with a yes. Then after an hour of troubleshooting you find out, in fact, no they weren’t on the entire time and the modem was unplugged. Like, you lied, you never even checked. The real questions then become: why was the modem unplugged? Who unplugged it? What reason does one have for unplugging their modem?
I just want to say, as someone who is quite tech literate, these kinds of questions are incredibly annoying to get through. I called my ISP, and they tried walking me through restarting my router when I could ping their gateway already, but not the outside world (e.g. 1.1.1.1).
But then again, I’ve worked tech support and have been on the other end with tech illiterate people, so I get it.
Oh man that would be amazing. My ISP at some point stopped giving out modems with the internet contract and instead only offers these shitty routers with integrated modems. I read somewhere that you can still get a modem if you asked. So I called and spend 15 minutes trying to describe the difference between a router and a modem and gave up.
When I had DSL, I bought my own modem and connected it to the same router I used at a previous place. They when to charge ~$10/month, so I spent about $20 and got a basic modem.
My current internet is Ethernet at the wall, so no need for a modem, and AFAIK the company doesn’t even provide routers (didn’t ask, I just used the one I had). All I needed was the gateway, netmask, and our static (CGNATed) IP. They wrote that in a piece of paper, which I keep in my safe so I don’t need to call them just because I reset my router or something.
I think they know who I am by now because I call pretty much every time the Internet goes out. It’s a small company (only serves my town of 30-40k people), and I’m probably the only one with a ln enterprise-y router (Mikrotik) with a separate AP (Ubiquiti). Yet I still need to do the basic troubleshooting before they’ll actually look into the traffic on their end.
I would like to just buy a modem but somehow I can’t find any cable modems in Germany. There are a few I could import from Amazon US but they apparently don’t support EuroDOCSIS. I used to have one from Cisco, provided by the ISP, that worked perfectly but with a contract change they demanded it back (a condition they did not tell me about and I’m still angry about that).
Working in tech support be like
Except they don’t tell you that they did something different and you have to spend half an hour just figuring that out.
Yeah. You would have had to triangulate your way around to getting the information that is exactly the information that you knew already that it was.
“Sir, I need you to go to the oil that you used and check if it is non-hydrogenated or hydrogenated. It should be printed on the back of the label.”
“What do you mean, I never had this problem before”
“Yes, I’m aware, they have changed the oil constitution recently. I’ll be able to resolve this problem for you, I just need to know if the oil is hydrogenated or not.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything”
“Can you just check the back of the bottle, please? Then I’m sure we’ll be able to get your recipe working again”
“Okay, well I didn’t actually use oil, I used toothpaste because it was expired and I wanted to get rid of it”
“Aha! Okay, I understand sir. I’m glad we were able to get to the bottom of the issue you’re having. So, if you make the recipe with toothpaste, it definitely won’t taste the same or have a good consistency. I think if you switch back to using oil you’ll find that the pancakes still taste the same as they used to”
“But I think I should be able to use toothpaste.”
“Absolutely. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Fuck this is painfully on point. Both as someone whose worked in customer service and IT.
Flashbacks to trying to get the user to admit they unplugged the monitor
Yeah, Rule 0 of tech support is “users lie.”
Oh, you already rebooted? Okay, well maybe your power cable is loose. Go ahead and shut down for me real quick, so you can unplug that power cable and plug it back in. Great, now that you’ve power cycled your computer, the problem is fixed? Glad I could help.
Dude, ages ago when I did tech support. A simple question like: “are the lights on your modem on?” was met with a yes. Then after an hour of troubleshooting you find out, in fact, no they weren’t on the entire time and the modem was unplugged. Like, you lied, you never even checked. The real questions then become: why was the modem unplugged? Who unplugged it? What reason does one have for unplugging their modem?
@USSEthernet @Murdoc why we used to ask them if one was blinking fast or slow, it made them actually look at the modem
I just want to say, as someone who is quite tech literate, these kinds of questions are incredibly annoying to get through. I called my ISP, and they tried walking me through restarting my router when I could ping their gateway already, but not the outside world (e.g. 1.1.1.1).
But then again, I’ve worked tech support and have been on the other end with tech illiterate people, so I get it.
I just wish “shibboleet” was a real thing.
Oh man that would be amazing. My ISP at some point stopped giving out modems with the internet contract and instead only offers these shitty routers with integrated modems. I read somewhere that you can still get a modem if you asked. So I called and spend 15 minutes trying to describe the difference between a router and a modem and gave up.
When I had DSL, I bought my own modem and connected it to the same router I used at a previous place. They when to charge ~$10/month, so I spent about $20 and got a basic modem.
My current internet is Ethernet at the wall, so no need for a modem, and AFAIK the company doesn’t even provide routers (didn’t ask, I just used the one I had). All I needed was the gateway, netmask, and our static (CGNATed) IP. They wrote that in a piece of paper, which I keep in my safe so I don’t need to call them just because I reset my router or something.
I think they know who I am by now because I call pretty much every time the Internet goes out. It’s a small company (only serves my town of 30-40k people), and I’m probably the only one with a ln enterprise-y router (Mikrotik) with a separate AP (Ubiquiti). Yet I still need to do the basic troubleshooting before they’ll actually look into the traffic on their end.
I would like to just buy a modem but somehow I can’t find any cable modems in Germany. There are a few I could import from Amazon US but they apparently don’t support EuroDOCSIS. I used to have one from Cisco, provided by the ISP, that worked perfectly but with a contract change they demanded it back (a condition they did not tell me about and I’m still angry about that).
I don’t know anything about modems in Germany, but I found this. I got it from this Reddit thread.