4 ms·

My mother in law (may she RIP) once called for help, saying her computer had stopped working. Partway through the series of troubleshooting questions, she start

• masklinn 7y ago
  Well at least she was honest and self aware. There are legions of tech support tales of users just lying their mouths off about having taken troubleshooting steps they hadn't, techs started making up workaround so users had excuses to do the thing they'd said they'd done. "Unplug it and blow on the connector" is a classic, the point is not to blow on the connector, it's to give the user an excuse to actually check the connection / fit after they've told you they have already despite there being 99 chances out of a 100 they have not.
  • goodcanadian 7y ago
    Unfortunately, I have often had the opposite problem where tech support "lies"* and claims my internet is fine when it clearly is not, trying to get me to go through pointless troubleshooting steps. Mysteriously, it starts working midway through the call. *I used scare quotes because I strongly suspect the first line tech support don't know it's going on. I suspect someone is frantically fixing things in the background and no one has officially reported any outage.
    • close04 7y ago
      > trying to get me to go through pointless troubleshooting steps There is a double edged sword here. IT support people are taught (or learn quickly) not to trust the user. In the sea of users who think they know better there will be occasional user who knows what they're doing but it's hard to tell them apart. So in comes the script, applied as a matter of procedure.