These Are The People In Your Neighborhood

You gotta love people you work with. You see them about as much as you see your own family, but sometimes, they are about as bright as the people who call in for help. Being in a position as a helper of "internal customers," I ran into all kinds of weirdness that one would think these people should know. Not just talking about in-depth info, either. We're talking basic training.

For instance, I took a chance on offending someone with this question:

They said: "I changed the phone's serial number on the customer's account. I made a test call and it didn't work."
I said: "Did you program the phone?"
They said: "Oh, I have to do that."

Yeah, report to HR for a drug test.

Or how about this one. We had someone ask for help finding the international rate to call Albuquerque, New Mexico. We explained that New Mexico was within their calling area and included in the domestic long distance. After a pause, they asked again about what the rate would be since New Mexico is international. We had to recap that Mexico is international, but New Mexico is one of the 50 states, and hence, covered in the plan.

With a huff and puff, the person asked, then, so what part of New Mexico is not covered and what are the rates? We stated that all of New Mexico is covered. Finally, they either took it or just got upset, because they said, "ok, bye," and hung up.

Then there was this highly confusing conversation: This one person called and asked what this oblivious 24.95 charge on a bill was for. I looked at it and saw CLA for an abbreviation among the nonsense. I told her CLA stands for Cigarette Lighter Adapter. Sure, the lights came on, but she said, "Oh, I just answered my own question then!"

Um, how?

So maybe you've noticed that the answers from Help desk people aren't entirely trusted by those who actually call in. Nothing illustrates that better than by this little exile from his high school debate team...

I had a rep call in and ask me why we were charging the customer $121. He wanted to know if it had to do with termination fees, but I quickly determined it did not. He talked about payments the customer made, bills from March, April, May, June, and July, and other irrelevant stuff. I told him the balance was from the april bill and nothing else since everything after april was credited. Overage and Service charges; that's it.

It took another 25 minutes to explain that all the irrelevant stuff was still irrelevant and that the charges were legit and no termination fees were there, etc, etc, etc, and tht the payments would not apply to the april bill because the last payment was before that bill came out, etc, etc, etc, for 25 minutes...

Did he understand when we were done? When I told him ingore all other bills and all other charges and tell her it is for overage and service fees from April?

Maybe, because then he argued about it in the customer's favor. There was a shadow of doubt on the service fees because the number was ported to a different carrier (according to memos) at the beginning of that cycle...not that this topic had even been breached. I gave that to him.

Now charges are only overage from April. Overage and taxes. Real easy right? WRONG! We had to go over it again! And again! And again! 40 minutes after the call began, he was satisfied and went to the customer, miraculously still hanging on.

I just shook my head. I always went for nailing down the problem based on the most obvious information, and then if any further information is needed to explain THAT answer, then we dig. This does not mean the answer must involve extraneous stuff.

To round this out, I'll throw in something that doesn't involve a call in, but cleaning people. You know, those people who always clean the bathroom at 12 and 5? Well, this involves cups, and it started kind of suddenly one month.

We'd gone through quite a few cleaning people, and the one batch did something I really wasn't expecting. I always kept a 32 oz. cup on my desk that I continued refilling with ice water as the night wears on. One day I came in to find it missing. I'm thinking, "who in the world would steal a cup?"

Well, I learned that the cleaning people had (without warning) begun bussing our desks and removing cups that appear disposable. I actually had one on my desk one night, and it was gone the following day. I was wondering, where in their job description it includes bussing cups off of desks?

They cost me 75 cents...