   Worst tech support you've ever had to give..
  The worst tech support I''ve ever had to give was when I was working at a small ISP in Santa Barbara.  You get good at guiding people through their interfaces via phone or you die in that business.I was doing a simple dial up connection configuration.   The lady on the other end of the line was following flawlessly.  Except every time we got to the dialogue box that asked you simply to click OK to confirm the configs we''d just gone through changing or setting (often a much harder walkthrough because value settings/changings are involved and not a simle ''click ok'') she would tell me that she couldn''t see it.I''d walk her through it again, and we''d get to the box where all she had to do was click OK and we were all done with the call, she repeatedly couldn''t find it.  She just kept saying she couldn''t see the Click Ok dialogue box which of course as most of us know is the only thing that could possibly have been on the screen at that time.  A five minute phone call turned into 45 minutes, and the boss and I a trading e-mails through the other window about what is taking so long on this call, and soon everyone is listening in, and even the ISP sysadmin realizes that I am not doing anything wrong, and that this caller is simply not seeing the simplest and easiest to click dialogue box windows ever made.Soon, my boss is saying in another e-mail that they are losing money on the account now because they are paying me more for the time on the phone that the profit they will ever make on the call, and that another account would come along soon.I see that lunch is coming, so I ask the lady where she lives, and she lives not far from the ISP, and I volunteer to come over to her place and do the config personally.  She agrees.My boss looks at me wierd and I flip her off and go do this on my own time over lunch.I get to the ladies place.  She is nice, no psycho, no bad taste in interior design and her laptop is a good model with no bullcrap AOL account setup executables every 32K.  I make the configs and get to the dialogue screen where it says, "click OK"I ask, do you see the click OK?  No, she says, I have a rare eye disease that whenever I look below the horizon line, everything turns upside down and I can''t read things that are backwards and upside down.  Ok, your turn, one rule, nothing tasteless. 
  Not exactly tech support but..."Hey, could you convert our access 97 database into access 2000?  The macros are broken""Sure, when do I start""When you want, just come over, we set a laptop up for you so you can bring it on.  Should take between 20 and 30 hours,  I''ll put that as the min/max hours in the contract is that okay?""Sounds good."*Drive there*"Hello, well first you''ve got a lot of stuff to fill in.  That database content is confidential you know, don''t go giving information about the entries in that database...""No problem"*Fills in lots of papers and drive home.**Open the access 97 file in 2000*MessageBox:  "This file has been created with an old version of Access, to convert, go to Options -> Tools -> Convert to Access 2000 format."30 minutes of testing the macros to see everything''s ok.*Calls*"Sending you the file by email: its done.Bottom line: 1 hours of paperwork to protect dumb pregnancy data that no one would fuckin care about. 1 minute of job and 30 minutes of test to see if the shit worked.At least the 20 hours deal still held, and it was the easiest 300$ of my life.;  I dont think anything can top that. ;  You should have spent a week with the database and call them up every day "This is proving to be a real bitch, it could take a while.  And I''m doing this for free now you know..." ;  Hey adventuredesign, you use to live in Santa Barbara?  I''m there now getting my masters at UCSB, I dont know when you were here doing tech support for an ISP but the tech market around here really sucks now.  I cant wait to graduate and get out of here.  Anyway, its cool to see someone else who use to live around here.   "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." --Voltaire ;  Worst tech support, eh? I would have to say that I have had a fair share of lousy calls, granted, I think that my favorite, would have to be having to make a house call walking 6 blocks to an appointment to connect them to the internet, and all I had to do was double-click on internet explorer... I wasted that much time to do a 1 second appointment. Other than that, I have just had some lousy tech support appointments with some people who didn''t have exactly a nice personality.  ;quote:Original post by cmptrgear  Hey adventuredesign, you use to live in Santa Barbara?  I''m there now getting my masters at UCSB, I dont know when you were here doing tech support for an ISP but the tech market around here really sucks now.  I cant wait to graduate and get out of here.  Anyway, its cool to see someone else who use to live around here.   "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." --Voltaire   Yeah man, I used to work at Impulse Internet over by the other side of the airport.  The best little ISP in California at one time.  I wrote my first novel on Pardall looking at the Sorority houses. I went to City College, then USC Cinema-Television.  I lived in Cito up on Mission Drive most of the time, and got married in Alice Keck Garden.  I puked a couple of times doing the State Street crawl, and hey, that''s probably more than you want to know about me isn''t it?Anyway, too bad it''s too crowded, cause I love sailing the Channel Islands and I used to surf Shoals and Rat Beach before the erosion sucked the tube out of the break.  I live in the Bay Area, and you should haul ass up here unless you got 90K calling you on the east coast.  Game design is all over up here, and so is the VC.  I can''t say how tech is doing up here generally, but if you can do ASP and VB and C#, I can probably network you into one big place that does lame ass accounting and payroll database and app programming, so sad, but it''s a job.. that''s about all Gaucho..L8Adventuredesign_______________ Genius is the ability to do what the talented find impossible. 