Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 21, 2022

… and as a person who spent a couple of decades for 3 years or so doing tech support, I can ASSURE you that the ones who are NOT familiar make at last 90% of the calls. Even if they are only 33% of the customers.

In fact, there’s another 80/20 rule for you: 20% of the tech support calls take 80% of the time.

“Mom asked me to stop the VCR from flashing ‘12:00’.”

Saving and rebooting is often the solution.

Sometimes the best Tech Support can offer is expanding your vocabulary to express your frustration with the tech.

Almost all phone calls to any support business office, or medical service seem to take much longer now than they once did.

Most of my time spent on “tech support” is spent listening to hold messages claiming (lying) that my call is very important to them.

While AT&T is miserable to their customers, they were pretty good to me as an employee. One of the best things was intraoffice tech support. Something went wrong with your desktop, they were on it like a flash.

I won’t bore you with the whole story but here’s the short version of it. Tech support is fielding a call from someone who says her new computer doesn’t work. [Here fill in lengthy array of trouble-shooting questions.]

“Why do you need to get a flashlight?”

“Because the power is out in the building.”

[Detailed explanation of how to box up the new computer and send it back.]

“Oh dear, do I really have to do all that? How come?”

“Because you’re too fücking stupid to own a computer.”

The support worker got fired, of course, but is currently atop the pantheon of tech-support demigods among countless others thru the years who’ve wanted to use the same line.