The Computer Call

So last night as we're sitting down to a healthy dinner of chili dogs and Star Trek, we get a call from some guy with a Farsi accent telling me that he is calling about my computer. Now, these people have called before, but in my initial interrogation, they eventually hung up because the answers they gave made absolutely no sense. This time, I kept the guy on the line longer to try and figure out the purpose of his call.

Spoiler: I never did.

Anyway, he said he was calling about my computer, and I asked the most natural question that any geek should have in such a situation: which one? Well, without missing a beat, he said that they had detected that my Windows or Apple Mac computer had unsolicited programs accessing the internet and these programs were not viruses and could not be detected by regular virus software. I asked how, he said he had already told me that. I told him he hadn't, and he insisted that he could show me if I accessed my computer. I told him I would not give him access to my computer, and he said he would walk me through it to show me one of these programs.

Still curious as to what he is selling (I suspect some kind of registry cleaner or spyware/malware cleaner deal), I go ahead and proceed to my nearest computer and ask him to proceed. He asks if I'm the primary user of my computer. I tell him some of them. He paused at this answer, apparently, uncertain as to how to move on, but finally, he went ahead with his spiel. He then asks if I know where the keyboard is. I have to admit that I was completely thrown by the question. I was like, "What about the keyboard?" He asks again if I can find it. I just say yes, thinking he could not have possibly just asked me that.

Then, he asks me to find the C-T-R-L button in the lower left hand corner of the keyboard. I had to take a moment to inform him that he could speed up a bit here since I'm not a first grader, and am, in fact, a rather savvy user/programmer/sometimes hacker. I can keep up. He acknowledges and then asks me if I can find the little banner key that looks like the Windows symbol. I inform him that I'm well aware of what the Windows key is.

He asks me to hold that key down. I wait patiently for the next step, since there is no reason to just hold that key down without pressing some other key. He is guiding me to a Windows speed key combo, and I was not going to just plug that in without knowing what it is. He asks if I'm holding the key down. I ask him what the next keypress is. He asks if I can find the R button. I confirm that he is asking me to pull up the Run dialog box. I use the darn thing all the time.

Thrown by my phraseology, I guess, he mumbled out something I didn't fully understand. Still playing along, I opened the Run box and wait. He asks me if I see the box that says Run on it. I tell him that I can. He asks if I can see the white space in that box. I confirm that I can, and assure him one more time that I can keep up if he would cut to the chase.

Undaunted by my insistence to speed up, he asks if there is anything in that white box. I tell him that yes, there is the last thing that I typed in that box. It was, in fact, the IP address of a network drive in my house that I used to copy some stuff around, though I didn't go into that with him. He told me to press the backspace button to clear that box out. Little did he know that since the info in there is actually highlights when you open the run box, you can usually just start typing, but you know, whatever.

He had, so far, spent five minutes telling me how to pull up the Run dialog box using what was, no doubt, a page of step-by-step instructions in front of him. He finally got to the meat of his instructions. What to type in that precious box. He said to press E as in echo. I press nothing and wait for whatever he wants me to spell out. He asks if I have an E in that box. I ask him what he wants me to type in the box. He says E as in echo. I say ok.

He moves on to V as in Victor. I assure him, once again, that I can keep up and note, and I actually said "for QA purposes," that he was going irritatingly slow when I've repeatedly told him to move it along. He was unmoved and said to put in E as in echo again. He confirmed "E as in echo, V as in Victor, E as in echo." I confirmed, "Are you asking me to pull up the Event Viewer?" and I quickly typed in eventvwr.

About this time, the Queen was telling me not to do anything they told me to, and I assured her I had it under control, and was still just playing along. However, I glanced at the time, and noted that a) my chili dogs are getting cold and b) I was running out of time for Star Trek since they wanted to watch that Toy Story Halloween special at 7.

I told him I had the event viewer open, and asked very directly what I'm looking for. He asked what I see on my screen. I told him there are lots of things on my screen. What does he want me to look for? He asked if I saw event viewer local. I told him yes, and he asked me to list the items below that. I told him no, and asked what the point of this was. He said he was showing me the programs running. I told him that at this point I was kind of annoyed by how slow he was going and that I really didn't have time for this right now.

And I hung up.

I am still curious as to what he was going for, who he was calling from, and what he was selling since he was basically posing as a technical person calling in response to a message sent from one of my computers. This concerned me, and I really wanted to find out who they were to confirm whether they actually did get something from one of my computers or not. Perhaps they'll call again, and I'll torture them then.

Terrible

You know how sometimes you look at horoscopes and numerological studies and that sort of thing, and they usually tell you something you want to see, and you nod thoughtfully and say, "yeah, that's me." Most of the time, these things are geared to our conceit and we always agree because the good and bad could apply to facets of anyone. So, when I saw one about superheroes, I was amused. My birth month gave me a Superman theme of goodness and truth and justice, which does actually fit me very well. Then it went on to the con side where it indicated extreme conceit and condescension which also fits me very well. Unfortunately, sometimes.

Sometimes, I do think I'm a rather terrible person, and it's always in retrospect because I never consider what I'm doing in the moment. I am actually a genius when it comes to intelligence. I think I'm kind of stupid sometimes, to be honest, but from a scientific perspective, I would be considered very, very intelligent in that I learn quickly and easily and can regurgitate most of what I take in (that'd be knowledge, not food, though I imagine I could be skilled at regurgitating food as well). This intelligence makes me very conceited and gives me a bit of a complex in that I know exactly how much smarter than you I am.

Admittedly, I do try to keep it under control when I help people so that they understand the concepts I'm trying to put forth, but a lot of the time, they come away feeling stupid, and people being how they are, it's my fault they feel stupid. Now, it isn't my fault they aren't smart to comprehend the concepts I'm giving them, but I'm the one in the hot seat for teaching complex math to someone who can barely find the numbers on a calculator (cal-cu-what? Go back to eating your glue.).

At my work place, people tend to take ownership of problems they deal with, and they get remarkably possessive about it. I don't care. If someone handles something sent to me, I scoff and shake my head at their impatience since the world won't fall down if it doesn't happen yesterday. In one such instance, I saw an email string where there was a problem, it got passed to other people because I had left for the day already, and then it got "solved" (using the term loosely since it was only resolved because it took long enough to get someone else on it that the only issue was a lack of patience to let something finish). This morning, someone on that string felt the need to ask me about it even though they knew it was fixed. I flat out said that I wasn't sure what she would want me to tell her about it since I had also read the email where it was done, and nothing more to do. I didn't know anything about it. I probably had "that face" that told her she was an idiot. I didn't mean to, but it really was a stupid question. Customer service will say there are no such things as stupid questions, but I assure you there are. If you ask the counter high schooler at McDonalds if they serve pasta, that qualifies as a stupid question. A) McDonalds isn't an Italian restaurant and B) if the answer were yes, I wouldn't recommend it because McDonalds is not an Italian restaurant.

On the flip side of terrible, I have some Star Wars cups on my desk, and in those Star Wars cups are some candy canes. These candy canes came out around Christmas a couple years back and have some images on the wrappers from the Star Wars series, The Clone Wars. I'm not a huge candy person, so my eating any candy at all is very, very slow (except perhaps Jelly Babies, which are scrumptious). Why do I keep these candy canes on my desk? To remind me of how terrible I can be sometimes, and how that affects people. Every time I look at them, I recall being in Wal-Mart with the Queen and her pointing how a box of these candy canes to me. I do like Star Wars, and I have been known to collect knick knacks related to the series, so her doing this is perfectly in line with me. Now, I have a tendency to think about cost more than desire, so in order to dissuade any notion of me wanting to buy this item, I derided the commercialism of the product and silliness of them only putting images on the wrappers when they're just candy canes.

Then I got them for Christmas.

You see, the Queen had already purchased said candy canes since I have an affinity for Star Wars, as I said. She told me this while fighting back the tears since she wasn't aware I would completely hate them, which I don't. I carried them around in my lunch bag for awhile, and then they sat on my desk at home before I finally packed them up and have them with me at work in those cups. Thinking about the situation even now hurts me. These rather innocuous items show me not only that she loves and thinks of me, but also that I am a terrible idiot sometimes and need to consider my words carefully because words can hurt.

I wasn't sure how this post would turn out, and it's gone down a rather depressing path, so I'll end it with this. Humanity is a social creature. Even the most antisocial of us need other people in our lives to achieve any level of happiness. I'm introverted by nature, and I can go enormous lengths of time without talking to anyone. In fact, most people think I hate them because I don't say anything, but the thing is that I get my socializing from both my friend at work (I believe I referred to him as The Mixer or something before) and from my family at home. I don't need much of anything else, but that does not negate anyone's status as a person. Some people need more than others, and I try to accept that.

It doesn't change the fact, however, that most of the time, I really do come off as a terrible person whether I mean to or not.

No Thought Given

So I am supposed to call people to help them through their technological problems, and most of the time, I have to leave them a message. Not only do these people have problems answering their phone, they also have issues calling back. And then, when they do, they act surprised that I need to get into their machine to help them (goes with the territory of a locally installed application).

Such was the case with this person. I left a message this morning, and this lady called back pretty soon thereafter. I was impressed. Then I said I needed to get onto the machine, and well, she was like, it is working right now, so you can't actually see the problem. It's a big job, too, and will take awhile before it finishes. I tell her this is fine because I can look at some of the data I need without disturbing the job it's doing.

She notes that, well, she isn't next to that machine. It's a few desks over. Then silence. It should not have been a surprise that I would want to see the problem and want to look into it. I finally tell her that I am open to suggestions, and she says she'll call back when it is done.

Why did she bother to call if she was not in a place for me to actually do anything? Happens all the time.

Insignificance

So why is it when you critique someone, and it prevents them from doing something they want/need to do, they focus on the most insignificant part of what you say and make that sound like the sole reason they have been denied. While I can't give the specific example here, I can relate it to a couple of real world ideas that sum up the situation nicely.

Consider a loan application at a bank. The bank person might deny with something like this:

Bank Guy: Thank you, Mr. Geek, for your loan app, but I'm afraid we'll have to deny you. You credit score is a 5. I'm not even sure how that's possible, but you haven't paid anything on time for the past 20 years, you've defaulted on every car you've ever purchased, your house is in foreclosure, and it appears your income to credit ratio is upside down. In addition, when you sign an application you should place the year after the date.

Irrational Me: You're denying my application because I didn't date it?! That's ridiculous!

Or perhaps you might go to a high scale restaurant that require the whole jacket and tie nonsense:

Maitre'd: Sir, I'm simply cannot allow you to enter the restaurant. Not only are you missing your jacket and tie, but what's left of your t-short is in tatters. You smell like you just crawled out of a dumpster, you actually tracked mud into our entryway (or at least I hope that's mud), you're overall very dirty, and your breath is atrocious. You also may want to tie your shoe, or you could trip as your search for a civilized lifestyle continues outside of this establishment. Thank you.

Me as a Vagrant: You won't let me in because my shoe isn't tied? That's ridiculous!

As stupid as these seem, I have a job that requires me to review stuff and occasionally send things back for further info. On more than one occasion, I denied stuff because info was missing or wrong, and then (purely as a courtesy) I commented on one point that was more minor, but I figured I'd mention it since I was emailing anyway. Yeah, recipient fixated on that point over any other. And yeah, pretty much to the extreme above. They were missing critical information that was central to this original request; I mean, to the point that the request could not be handled without it...oh yes, and I commented on the format of something else that was crystal clear, yet technically incorrect. I would have fixed it if everything else was right. Seriously.

So people need to actually read emails in their entirety and not just the last sentence. Maybe I should put the important stuff at the end...

The Drama of Black Friday

I had completely forgotten about this until I looked at my archive of ideas here. I never talked about Black Friday. You see, there were some precious items to be had at Toys R Us at midnight on Black Friday, and as I didn't want to send the Queen out by herself, I went. I thought I'd go out there about an hour before midnight to see if there was a line.

Heh...

Yeah, there was a little bit of a line. The Toys R Us I went was the one at 71st and Memorial, if you're familiar with Tulsa. The line from the entrance stretched to the north from the front door across their entire parking lot, across their alley entrance, past five store fronts on the strip mall next door, turned the corner to go west past three small store fronts, one large one (Vintage Stock), and all the way to the door of the dollar theatre in that strip mall. I was amused, but there were some good deals, so I stood in line.

The line went well past me as well, but once it started moving, it went pretty quickly to get in. Some thugs cut in line behind me and then talked very loudly about how it wasn't right that they had to wait in line. I'm not racist, but they weren't of the Caucasian persuasion and acted their stereotype well. There were cops at the entrance holding back the crowd on the South side of the door who also didn't want to track down the end of the line going North. There were quite a few cops in the parking lot to control the crowd actually.

Once inside, it was wall-to-wall people. There was no line once inside. It was a mob. I fought my way around the store and got all but one item that I'd come in for. I was afraid my one big ticket item was gone when I found the row it belonged on and an empty shelf. Fortunately the checkout line was so long that I found a display of them.

As for the checkout line... Ok, so Toys R Us is a large department store, right? Department stores have a general "action alley" aisle that runs around the inside of the store with stuff on either side of it. This line went from the registers at the front of the store and snaked in and out of the individual aisles toward the outside of the store all the way down the south side of the store through the games and then the clothes, and then down the west side through the baby accessories and furniture, but when it got to the north side, it stopped snaking, though that's where I started with the line that went beyond me right back to the registers. They had this poor employee standing at the end of the line with a red balloon who kept moving back and back and back. Other employees were trying to keep the lines snaking through the aisles. It was a nightmarish situation. One employee who was trying to control the line said they never planned for that level of chaos.

You see, Toys R Us was the only store open at midnight, beating out everyone else. I saw on the news later that the other Toys R Us in town had a fight break out. People get cazy during the shopping season.

Anyway, I waited patiently in line for two hours to checkout, which went smoothly, and to her credit, the cashier still had a smile. I was impressed.

So in the end, I went to Toys R Us at 11pm. I got home at 4am just in time to wake up the Queen for her shopping time. However, I saved more money than I spent that night, which was significant. But I was very grateful to go to bed. If I find the pics from that night, I'll post them as well. I took some, but it's been a couple months and I forgot about this post.

Black Friday. I'm sure I'll be there again this year.

Black fri. Drama of xout line. Line 2 nxt dr theatre. Pics 2 post. Line out
4 hrs.

Perceived Insignificance

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.

I got a land yacht car from my brother-in-law to drive to work, and in the back seat was a book called God's Little Devotional Book For Men. After I disposed of the cover, which was in poor shape from sitting on the floor of the back seat for three years. One window didn't close completely creating a heck of a humid environment, though the book itself never got wet. But I digress... What I wrote above is a quote I read in there this morning, and personally, I try to do the jobs I do as well as I can because I know the result reflects on me.

Not everyone feels this way, however. No where is this more apparent than in the service tickets that people create to send to this other department. As I indicated in a previous post, people get away with stuff because they can, and I'll grant that this other department's requirements are more than just a little over the top. Yet, we have to follow them, and since people don't, I get to do something called gatekeeping to make sure they do.

What is interesting is what you can perceive about people through these little virtual items that pass by me in droves every day. People tend to create their tickets the same way and have the same types of information every single time. For any given person, you can tell whether they take the requirements seriously, have any respect for the other department, understand their job, or sincerely want to do their best every time. There are people whose name I like to see come up, and others whose tickets I dread opening because I know what I'm going to find.

These people boil down to three basic categories. The best one is those who follow instructions and do a great job in ensuring that these tickets have sufficient information to not only complete the job at hand, but give sufficient understanding to anyone looking at the ticket. By looking the ticket over, I know what the problem is, what the customer wants, and even what needs to be done to fix it (if only I knew the first thing about how they do their job to fix it). These are works of art, and you can tell the people making them respect either the people receiving the tickets, or have at least been threatened to the point that they understand and respect their jobs. These reflect well on them.

At the other end of the spectrum are the ones who either can't or don't want to follow the simple list of instructions for these tickets. Something is always missing, and when you bring it up, they get ugly stating that the other department will accept the ticket without this. This attitude of theirs led me to correcting these tickets myself in most cases, since the information was actually contained in the ticket; it was just in the wrong place. They couldn't be bothered to even move a piece of info from point A to point B. Clearly, they despise the other department's requirements, have a disdain for having to make these tickets to their specifications, or just don't understand why they need to do what they need to do. It's usually the same people too.

In the middle are actually the most irritating of the bunch. You see, while you have a leg to stand on in requesting more information from the rule-breakers, this next lot gives you enough to fit the bill, but not enough to understand the problem unless you "know" enough about the background processes. Trouble is they do include the information that is required on the list of instructions, so as much as you might want to send it back for more clear information, you can't because they followed the rules to the bare minimum letter. They know exactly how much it takes to get by, and they do no more than that. Their regular tickets that only have no requirements are nightmares to decipher. When I get one that I have to actually fix in my real non-gatekeeping job, it usually takes me twice as long since I have to decipher what the problem is before I can even begin. By contrast, I can usually solve tickets from the first category without any information gathering because of their completeness.

So, if I ever become a manager, having had the insight I'm getting from this gatekeeping process, which group do you think I'd want on my team?

Some Very Lazy People Out There

To begin with, I'd like to open with a joke that came out of no where on a recent day. I've overtold this one in the Queen's presence to the point that she's tired of it, but each new audience likes it. It so happened one day that Optimus and I were talking about nothing in particular and at the end of this pointless ramble, I said, "Sure, I understand. But what would I do with a monkey and a phone jack?" Optimus replied, without batting an eye, "Start a call center."

If you've ever worked in a call center, you'll laugh about twice as hard as not. Anyway...

I've talked about the Medicare Direct Data Entry system before and my involvement with it, and today I had someone that just exemplifies the level of effort that some people want to put into their work. Everything I did for this person was well within their realm of access, so it wouldn't been too complicated.

You see, they'd been getting an error at random on their claims coming back from this DDE system stating that one of their hospital identifier numbers was not valid. I had explained that this error typically means that the login being used is not authorized to use the number they're trying to send or access. It's pretty simple. So they called up Medicare to see what the deal was, and there are no problems with their numbers. Well, I never said their numbers had a problem. I said their LOGIN had a problem.

So they did it all over again, and again, big surprise, their numbers are fine. Yeah, they are. Never said they weren't. This time, however, I got some examples to look at and compare. Well, since it's a login problem, my first (really, my only) inclination was to find the job that sent (or attempted to send) the claim, and see what login it used. They can see this from their side of ePremis, and they don't need my super-wide access to do it. It's a simple matter of comparison.

Find number on claim; find job from that date and time with that number on it. See login.

Fifteen minutes later, my suspicion was confirmed. One login was giving them fits. I told her which one, and she told me that they don't have a login for that out there. I assured her they do and offered to fix it, but she wanted to run this by her boss and get back to me. Um, ok.

The point of all this was that using some basic comparison skills, I was able to solve a problem with information she had at her disposal. A mountain was made out of a molehill because they didn't listen to a word I said and went under their own assumptions over what they thought I said. I fully anticipate their calling back because they "did what I said and it didn't work."

If you did what I said, it would work. Clearly, it means you weren't listening, but hey, there's a precedent for that.

People who make problems

Some people just want to make problems where none exist. Maybe they didn't get enough attention as children; maybe their kids ignore them every day; maybe they're not beaten as much they feel they should be. Whatever the reason, they dig and look for things to be wrong, and if nothing's wrong, there must be something they aren't noticing, so they create something.

Such is the case with one of the people I work with now. This particular individual had someone come to them and say there was a problem in our magic little elgibility checker because when the birthdate was run through, it came back invalid and said the person, who was born in 1985, was born in 1885, but this claim went ahead and went with the errored birthdate.

This being a little weird, I went ahead and dug in to find the problem. First thing I did was see if it would break again, but strangely, it didn't. I checked the screens in the eligibility system and the birthdate matched what was on the claim. The first oddity I noticed, though, was that the "screen shot" they'd sent in showing the 1985 birthdate was the screen where you ENTER the information; not the one that spits the correct patient info out. I would think that screen would have to show exactly what you enter into it...since it is manually entered.

Well, given that the birthdate on the claim was right, I looked at the screen where we actually do make the birthdate comparison and output the error if it doesn't match. Well, that screen only has a 6-digit birthdate: mmddyy. No century. This would mean that we can't be using the 18 vs. 19 as a comparison; in fact we only pop that in as an output for their benefit. I checked out the code and sure enough, it's a legit bug. But that means this didn't cause the birthdate not to match either.

Finally, I ran our favorite report in the entire world: Claim Changes History - All Fields. You see, the beauty of this report is that it gives every single change that was ever made to any claim. I ran it on the claim in question and - gasp! - the person who made the complaint changed the birthdate based on what we pulled back from the eligibility system three hours after it ran. This means our system worked just fine; they just wanted attention.

To shift back to cell phones...

I rather enjoyed this guy who had no problems whatsoever that called to say that the two phones he'd purchased and activated just that day wouldn't ring when someone called them. He stated you could make calls on them, and if you called the other phone, the voicemail would pick up but the phones would ring.

To "prove" this to me (while I'm blindly listening on the other side of the phone line), he made a call from one phone to another and held the phone up to the phone he was talking on to le me listen to the voicemail. Swell.

After the second listen, I asked him what screens show on the phones being called when they're being called (to see if they're "ringing," but maybe the ringer's off). He responded with one of my favorite responses: "You mean they have to be on?"

Um, yeah. To function, an electronic device must be "on."

Next to finally, there was the guy who called in to argue about his bill. Now, I got lots of these calls, and it was always convincing the person that the bill being $400 higher than normal is actually correct. This one was a bit different.

I had a guy call in and tell me that he has charges on his bill that he paid for, and he doesn't owe them. My answer? I agree. He didn't owe them. He did pay for them. He wanted a credit for them. Huh? He insisted that he did not owe the $250 his bill showed was due. I agreed. He only owed $70. He didn't believe me.

This argument went on for 30 minutes with my completely agreeing with his assessment of what he owed, but not crediting the charges he already paid. It was the only time I've ever had to try and convince a customer that he owed less than he thought he did. To make this just a bit more amusing, would you believe he never accepted my explanation? But he did agree to pay only $70...and no more!

And now the final one... Sometimes the queue time for customer service is a long wait. On this particular day, it was 20 minutes. That's 20 minutes you'll never get back. This joker not only waited the 20 minutes, but once on the line, he asked for a supervisor, and so I got him. What did he want?

"I just wanted to let you people know that your logo on the bill should be in black and white - not color." He just wanted to let us know we could save money by not printing the logo in color. How nice...

And he waited 20 minutes to tell us that.

Contract Renegotiation

More stories from Customer Service.

This one I've run across this a couple of times. Someone will send in a payment (any payment), and on that payment, they will write something like "This is my final payment" or "Payment in full." When the horror of another bill comes, they will dial in and say that cashing the check constitutes a legal agreement to the terms they write down.Um, yeah... no. You see, there are a couple of problems with this theory they are putting out there, which is quite the techno urban legend on par with "making any payment at all will prevent collection activity."

First, most check payments are run through an automated process, and no one reads what is on this check beyond the amount; account information is read from the bill stub that is sent with the check, but no one physically reads that either. They are just passed through a big machine that reads this stuff by doing an OCR scan of the writing like some home scanners can do. So no one sees this check. If they called in, no one would agree to what they are saying, nor would anyone in person. How many companies would take seriously a check for $5 against a $10,000 balance that says "Payment in full"?

Second, you agree to charges that you incur and dutifully owe to someone else. Trying to circumvent this with a statement on a check is like borrowing someone's chainsaw and giving them back a yardstick with the word "chainsaw" scribbled on the side of it. They wouldn't take that, nor would a short payment constitute payment in full on any planet -- not even the one these people came from. As in the previous example, the logic on this thinking defies the sanest of minds. This would be like owing $80,000 on my house and if I write "paid in full" on a check for $1, that means I'm done, right? Yeah, we'll see how far that goes...

If we move on to our next winner, this guy had called in with a lot of calls to Directory Assistance, otherwise known as "411." Over the last three bills, he'd managed to garner over $50 worth of charges per month and could not understand why he had been charged because the store had given him a "special number" to program into his phone where this wouldn't happen. After some probing, I learned he'd been given 1-800-FREE411 to call for directory assistance, and he'd even been told to program it into his phone book.

This is a number that works identical to 411, but it contains advertising that pays for the call, so you don't have to. It's an immensely clever idea, and of course, we can't officially recommend it, since we charge for dialing 411. There's even a service in the EasyEdge product that allows 411 information for a nominal monthly charge. So in this guy's case, he needed a solution for his habitual 411 calling, and this 800 number really was perfect. So why was he charged? Did we circumvent the 800 number? Were we onto his scheme of taking our $1.50 per call?

Nope. This genius thought that if this "special number" were merely programmed into his phone book, he'd be able to call 411 an unlimited number of times without being charged. That's dial the 1-411 number, not the 800 number he'd been given. While it's true calling the FREE411 number allows this, having this number simply programmed into the phone won't magically dissipate the charges when you dial the regular 411 number.

I guess with some people, you have to be painfully specific. "Program this number into your phone AND DIAL IT INSTEAD OF 411." Ugh.

And to wrap this trio of insanity, let's talk about questions. I tend to be very specific when I ask questions. It makes my family nuts because I'll keep drilling down with questions to find an answer that they may not know or not feel I need to know. Anyway, I'm just this specific with customers and so this joyful person came up one day.

This was one of those times when the customer doesn't want to lie, but doesn't want to tell you the truth either. What a predicament. Anyway, they had roaming on their bill, meaning they went out of their home area as specified by the plan they selected. The phones tend to be really specific when it comes to whether they are roaming or not. Usually, it's the decrease of service quality and the indicator that gives it away. Once this person got their bill and saw these charges, they called in and immediately asked for credit "because I've been a long time customer."

Long time customers love using that phrase. "I've been with you people a long time and I never ask for anything." It's always "you people," too. They tend to be very impersonal. Sometimes this is good enough, and it's not much, but this wasn't chump change, and this person called in all the time asking for stuff. But I digress... My first question was, "Do you know what your coverage area is?"

The answer I got was, "Yes and no, but not to this extent."

... What?

A Taste of the Other Side

So, not all of the stories about Customer Service involve being on the worker side of the issue. Sometimes, stuff happens when you deal with someone else on that end, and it ends up being just as good as some of the customers we talk to. I just have to wonder where some of these people come from. Well, actually, India is the typical response there.

Here's one situation that I just laughed at afterwards. I was minding my own business one afternoon waiting for the microwave to 'ping', when I got a call from a survey company. I was asked if I was the man of the house, and since the IRS seems to think so, I said yes. I thinking I did good that survery. Was that it? Nope, just the beginning.

It was concerning talk radio stations in my area here, and the very first question was "How often do you listen to talk radio? Always, sometimes, or never." Well, I have a radio for music, so I said never.

She asks me if I've heard of talk radio stations in my area. I mutter around a moment to see if I can think of anything and I remembered NPR. Someone I know listens to it, but it's apparently such a vital piece of info, I don't remember who.

The kicker was when she asked me which of the following talk radio programs I listened to in the last week! Apparently, "never" wasn't a good enough response to actually circumvent this question. She got to the first one before my shock wore off, and I reminded her that when I said never, I actually meant never. I said she can not bother with her little list of programs before I haven't listened to any of them.

After all, I seriously doubt my flipping back and forth between two Christian stations would come anywhere constituting a talk program I might have caught in between getting annoyed with all the chatter on my radio and looking for more music.

Now one might wonder if there was the clink of a bottle in the background, but I honestly wouldn't have been able to hear it over the sitar.

But more of a kicker to something like that is when you can tell the worker how to do their job. And while this is occasionally on common knowledge stuff, we had a time where we knew how to do something a little more rare just because we'd seen them mill back and forth on it before.

We were at a Wal-Mart once getting a gift for a baby shower. Well, it was the Queen getting the gift, and I was tagging along, since clearly the geek would not pick a good gift for a baby (apparently, there aren't a wealth of affordable baby laptops). Well, to make sure we and the recipient were covered, we asked the cashier for a gift receipt.

Surely you've gotten at least one of these little jewels before. It's a valid receipt for that store but doesn't display the price, so only when the gift's recipient decides to take it back, do they find out how little you really spent on them. But on the bright side, they can get back the full five bucks you forked over instead of the clearance price of two-fifty that got marked down to before the shower.

No, I'm kidding. We're not that cheap on gifts...usually.

Anyway, we got to the register and asked for a gift receipt. The cashier was completely clueless, and immediately called over the CSM. While the CSM was coming, we mentioned tht they needed to hit the 'S' key (I think it was), but the cashier wasn't listening. The CSM arrived, heard the situation, and stared at the register. We commented again on that 'S' key, but they weren't hearing any of that nonsense.

They screwed it up a couple of times before they gave up and called yet someone else over. Next person arrives and also stares at the register. We mention again about this pesky 'S' key, and that third person shrugged and opted to try it. What do you know? It printed the regular receipt plus the gift receipt.

The cashier was pissed. I guess customers are NOT supposed to know more than the employees. Whoops.

And finally, another perennial favorite that is brought up quite often, especially when we hit the restaurant it happened at. The thing is there's a little backstory that must be told in order to fully "get" it.

The Queen Mother has a level of notoriety for cleaning up the dinner table. Now, this is a good thing, for the most part. She'll bus the plates and silverware and glasses and she can be very thorough with this. The down side is that she can be too thorough requiring you to guard your plate if she should be bussing the table to make sure she doesn't bus your plate full of food out from under you.

So we're at this Mexican restaurant called Arizona where our families variously eat on occasion. Well, on this occasion, the story of the Queen Mother and her obsessive table bussing came up, and we all had a good laugh over it. As we're laughing about this, who should show up, but the waitress, who spoke enough English to be able to take orders, and was clearly very new.

What does this girl do? She starts to take the Queen Mother's plate. The Queen Mother says she isn't finished yet.

This was too much to bear, and The Queen cracks up laughing. In moments, the whole table is busting with laughter over this very coincidental action on the part of the unsuspecting, but well meaning, waitress.

Well, unfortunately, the inside joke was completely lost on the waitress who began to cry as she rushed off. We never saw her again.

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...

Names and the Other Side of the Wall

Probably the best part of customer service is the sheer variety of people you meet, the names they have, and just the volume of information they're willing to divulge that, let's be serious, you really didn't need to, or want to, know.

The top story this time has to do with a conversation I overheard half of before getting the whole story. I heard this:

From the other side of the wall: Yes, we need another contact number for you, because when I called the one we have, I got ahold of your ex-wife ... Yes, sir, it was a really special moment ... Well, sir, we have this thing called QA, and I can't really tell you what she said, but what I will tell you is...um...you're still very much in her thoughts.

Now, the natural curiosity there is how did that conversation go when he did get ahold of that ex-wife using the wrong contact number? I was curious enough to ask, and here's how the conversation with the ex-wife went:

OSOW (Other Side Of the Wall): Is Harold there?
Ex: No, that lying sack of $h1+ moved out five years ago.
OSOW: I'm sorry, we have this number as his contact number. Do you have a better one for him?
Ex: Yeah, I'll bet it's still written on the bathroom wall. Hold on.

A moment passed before she returned and gave the number and said:

Ex: So is this his cell phone provider?
OSOW: Yes, ma'am.
Ex: Be sure and double bill him for me.
OSOW: Yes, ma'am, I sure will.

Add that to the conversation that followed (that came first here), and we laughed hard. I think one of the most distubring points of the tale was that his number was written on the bathroom wall. Think about the circumstances that would leave to such a need to begin with. She would have had to be in the bathroom with a pen an no paper. She was apparently unable to leave at that time, but needed to write it down. Money says the number was within arm's reach of the toilet...on the wall.

While working with a customer one day, I looked through some of the older notes on her account and ran across a most interesting story. A couple weeks prior, this customer called in to get some information about a phone problem and learned that she could renew her contract the following month to get a new phone. One hour later, we received a fax of a death certificate stating the account holder was deceased, so we canceled the account.

The following day, the account holder called in to find out why her phone wasn't working. We told her we received a death certificate showing she was dead. She said she is not dead and wanted her account restored. Can you imagine this argument? I could...

Cust: I am not dead and I want my phone on.
Rep: I do apologize, but we did receive the paperwork and you are showing as being dead. Dead people can't use phones, so we'll have to keep it off.
Cust: I'm talking to you right now. I'm not dead.
Rep: I've always had a belief in the occult and stuff, so you must be coming in from the other side. Do you have unresolved issues?
Cust: Yeah, turn on my phone.
Rep: I'm sorry, but we don't provide service to dead people.

Anyway...I noticed we tried to run credit on her that day, but had some problems. Makes me wonder how far this death thing really went. We eventually found out this death certificate was intended for another account and phone number, so of course, we reactivated and "apologized profusely" per the notes.

Finally, let's talk names. Names are who we are, and more important define us as people to whoever hears our name. On The Simpsons, Bart has a tendency to call Moe's tavern and ask for people like Amanda Huginkiss, Al Coholic, and Mike Rotch. When I was in the Army I saw a Major whose last name was Dick. Honest. Well, I bet Bart never saw these coming. These are all real names because the cell company required a credit and ID verification and everything. Enjoy.

Peggy Greenquist
Patsy Crookshanks
Troy Biggerstaff
Harry Pinkstaff
Jack Dawson (of the Chippewa Falls Dawson's, of course)
Goin Postal
Chandrashekar Mungerveli-Puttappa (say it 5 times fast)
R U Outavit
Erick Ericksen
Gay Love
Candy Roach (yum)
Latoya Bisch
Richard Peters (this was had the added bonus of when you pull up the memos, the system warned it would take awhile)
Patty Pickles
Phuc Nguyen
Pas Pattipan
Shirley Shatswell (she complained of constipation)

And our all time winner...

Fuk King Kwok (but he was changing his name to Andy)

The Horrors of Customer Service

And now, to lighten things after the previous post where I found myself in the midst of my very own psychological thriller, I'm going to introduce a new category of post: Customer Service. You see, I've worked in call centers for six years before landing myself in a more techish position where I don't talk to the humorous ones as much. But during that tenure, I've acquired a plethora of stories that perhaps you can learn not to do when you call in and talk to someone in customer service.

To open, I'd like to tell two of the Queen's favorite stories. She knows these by heart and anytime I talk about customer service to anyone, she requests these.

Our first tale comes from the realm of cell phone activations. These are the types of phones where you go into a store of some kind, buy the phone in a box, and then take it home to activate it. Stores love 'em because you can stick any idiot behind a counter to hand these phones off to whomever wants them. All they need to be able to do is reach the phones and point to the brochures. Real easy.

So, I worked in the department that activated these phones, and I came to a realization while talking to people in that some people are so mechanically un-inclined that you can make them do something that is incredibly funny if you lead them on just right. I made a game of this after awhile because I found it so humorous, and I got at least three people to fall into this trap.

Phones have a number called an Electronic Serial Number that is unique to each unit. They're actually going to a different type of number now, but back then, it was all about the ESN. This magic number was located on a white sticker under the battery on every phone we had back then, and customers had a knack for taking the phone out of the box, and immediately misplacing said box which also has the ESN on it. So here follows that conversation:

Me: Can you give me the electronic serial number (gotta avoid the jargon) off the phone please?
Victim: Where do I find that?
Me: It's on a sticker underneath the battery on the back of the phone.
Victim: Oh, ok.
(Click!)

Always made me laugh. Ideally, I should have mentioned that they shouldn't actually be talking on the phone when we're trying to activate, but that would spoil all the fun. That's one of the first questions they ask now, but it wasn't required back then.

The next story involved a prepaid phone. These are the phone where you have to put money on the phone's account before they will work, and really there are a myriad of varieties of this phone. Some have a set number of minutes every month built in like regular credit accounts do, while other allow you to pay by the minute without expiration of those minutes.

Our next victim paid by the minute, and on this occasion, his account was quite empty, so he was unable to make a phone call, and when they call with this problem, they always have to make a "very important call." I know I seem a little desensitized to this, but in all my time with these people, I've only allowed one three way call for a prepaid customer because her description made it sound like an actual emergency (and when she relayed the short version to her husband, it actually was very serious; she should have called 911).

So when I wouldn't give him a "payment arrangement" (something that is actually not possible on a prepaid account, since they run off of a balance or minutes, not off of any kind of suspension of service), he got very, very upset with me. He screamed and yelled and carried on for a good while hoping to browbeat me into "changing my mind." To be honest, all I was able to do was repeat myself, since what he was requesting wasn't a possibility with his account type. The system wouldn't allow it.

Anyway, he got to the point where he asked me, "You ever heard a phone fly out of a window?" What could I say to that? "No," I said. He replied, "Well, you have now."

At this point I heard a loud whoosh of rushing air and then a crunch before the line went dead. And so he went from regular angry customer to a legend in one fell whoosh.