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Adventures in technical support

Well, not adventures, actually, so much as nightmares. Take the example of the non-talker. You ask the person to click on something and they appear to get lost in thought. You wonder whether they heard you. You repeat yourself. You repeat yourself again. With infinite patience. And still they can't find the Start button. So you ask them what they see. They describe the desktop. You say "Good". And then you ask them to click once with the left mouse button on the Start button. And they grunt faintly. So you repeat yourself. And repeat yourself again. With infinite patience. And then they say, "Okay! I've clicked on it!". So you say, now click where it says "Settings". And they reply, "But when I click on Start, nothing happened!". And you say, "Nothing happened?" trying to keep the incredulity out of your voice. After about thirty seconds of agonized waiting, you hear a vague noise indicating that the customer has put their hand over the receiver and is talking to the person who is really sitting in front of the computer. Then you hear some clicking like they're doing something entirely unrelated. Finally, you ask them to try again to click on Start. They say, "I did! What now?" And this means that they've been sitting there wondering why you keep repeating yourself. So you go on with the call and do all sorts of troubleshooting with settings, etc. Finally, you figure it's got to be something wrong with the modem. You go to the Modems control panel and....there's nothing there! That's when the customer suddenly becomes communicative and they tell you that they removed the modem driver because someone told them they might have a problem with it. So after spending nearly an hour troubleshooting a computer that can't communicate with its own modem, much less with the internet, you have to refer the customer to their computer manufacturer. This is where they get talkative again, loquacious even. They are extremely angry that they keep getting shunted from one technical support number to another. Can't I do anything to resolve the problem?

Or how about the existential technical support queue? You know, when the customer suddenly asks: "Why is this happening to me?" I always say, "Well, ma'am, I have a degree in Philosophy and even I don't know the answer to that question. You're just lucky, I guess!"

Isn't that the truth about all the unlucky things that happen to us in life?

Oh well