Grim Tech Support Tales

Refactoring is the part of a programmer’s job that they never teach you in school. Universities usually teach you how to build software like an engineer, but they don’t teach you how to maintain it once the software is built. In software development, we’re faced with impossible scenarios every day. We’re given deadlines, requirements, and schedules that change on a daily basis. Building the

There is this myth that customer service can fix virtually any problem, from delivery trucks disappearing in transit to Kohls promo codes being expired. However, most people can agree that when it comes to fixing stuff, the people to call can be found in tech support. This is good, because people recognize that technical problems require technicians to fix. On the other hand, this also causes some problems. Namely,

Even if our customers aren’t always aware of it, there is a lot more happening between our ear phones than what comes out over the boom mike. Actually that is a good thing, because what comes in through the earphones gets some things going in my head that the customers… well, let’s just say that they don’t need to hear everything. Of all the people here in the call center, why does it feel l

A modern piece of consumer electronics has a quality that its peers from just a couple of decades ago do not: accessibility. The technology of today is far more user-friendly and flexible than anything that has come before, with the trend being to include more little features that help improve the experience. Whereas phones used to be just for calls, there are now models that have spelling and grammar check capabil

While both technologies have been around for a very long time now, it can be surprising for some tech support personnel to find that there are people who still don’t recognize the difference between the two. Some think that what holds true for one holds true for the other. There are some aspects that follow this rule, but there are also a few key differences inherent to how each one works. It sounds like some

Anyone that works tech support knows that, every once in a while, there are instances when the concern of the customer ought to be simple. The objective is something that only requires a bit of common sense or the ability to read what’s on the screen. Yet, somehow, the average – for a certain value of “average” – user finds away to make it so complex that they can’t figure out what to do