Tell them you turned it off and unplugged it when you actually didn’t, just to troll them. Don’t worry, IT guys love that sort of humour. You can tickle them a little bit while they glance over your screen as well.
Thankfully my customers don’t have physical access to the servers. But I have told somebody to pull all the power plugs out of the wall and read me the serial numbers between the prongs once to force them to power off.
Customer; I need you to do XYZ PDQ because I am incapable of doing it myself.
Me: unfortunately the request you are making is not possible. However, I can do ABC instead.
Customer: Forester is stupid and won’t help me.
Me: “good luck, dumbfuck!” click
I have a… unique approach to customer reception and service. Almost all the time, the customer is wrong. Not my fault the dumbfucks are dumbfucks…
So are you the CEOs son or daughter?
I’m disabled now, but before I ran my own gig by word of month, and I also was contracted out to do work on behalf of other small businesses (along with other work, unrelated). Most customers actually weren’t as dense as bricks, but I did balk and leave on a few occasions when the customers were braindead.
I remember this one guy, his printer fucking died and instead of trashing it and getting a new one (it was a piece of shit hp that couldn’t have cost more than $60), the dumbass calls us and my boss sends me out. Motherfucker I’m able to fix shit like viruses, file and disk issues, networking, like a level 3 tech but in your house. I don’t carry fucking parts for your shitty 2006 inkjet, and because you didn’t tell me what the fuck is the actual problem and I had to figure it out myself, you get to pay 2h of labor for no benefit. He got all pissed off and we got into a heated argument, but he did pay the fee. Not my fucking fault you didn’t spent one damn second with your own shit and thinking “hmm maybe this bitch is broken”. I thought it was drivers, then it was communication issues, then I swapped the cable and that didn’t help, reinstall again, software would work but throwing errors every time… eye twitching
I had another with her shitbox Acer, was basically dead and needed a ton of work to revive. I spent 20 minutes on it and it was obvious - I told her this and her options (I had to charge an hour labor even if I was there a couple minutes, or hundreds to save this thing). Again, all pissed off, but I’ve seen the ads and the boss makes it very clear, 1h minimum and it’s not gonna be my ass paying the bill. I left with the check, and I assume she bought a new system. That one needed my care 5y earlier.
But sometimes I got great customers. One lady I remember was not knowledgeable but was eager to learn, and I liked chatting while doing the work. We got talking about how to speed up the machine, and I mentioned switching to an ssd (and explaining the details). She was all giddy, and it was an otherwise solid machine in good condition so I was confident she’d see an improvement. She asked me to go pick her up one and I stopped her - if I buy the drive, I have to charge you 100% markup (no bullshit, that was what I was told to do), but if she bought it, well, the customer already had the hardware. She understood what I was saying without directly saying it, and so we browsed what was available at the nearby best buy site. ‘get this one, it’s twice the space you have now, it has a 5y warranty, it’s by a company I use myself. Don’t let them talk you into any extras, I can clone the drive here. Just the drive, and if you need help, call me.’ and with that, she left me alone and wizzed to the BB. Half hour later, I was finishing up and she hands me the drive. Perfect. 45 minutes later, platter drive was wiped, ssd was primary, she was very happy, and I left with a tip. I even got to charge my car while I was working.
This was a decade ago, but yeah. Small businesses are cool like that, mostly. That boss would bitch me out for not trying to sell AV or whatever, but he had my back when customers were a bitch too. It was alright. Thought I should have been earning 2.5x what I did for that job, but I was young and nieve. It is what it is.
The few clients I stayed in contact with have been good, and they like my services, so for them I’ll still help them out. But the general population, nah. Let someone else handle those customers.
Yes, you’re correct, customer. The more likely answer is not that I am telling the truth, it is that I get off on being willfully obstinate and making up for problems. I’m out to get you.
The truth is I just enjoy wasting your time and my time. I don’t care about my metrics. It’s not tied to my bonus or anything. My one purpose in life is to slow you down and to spite you.
Why yes, I excitedly look forward to the time I can spend being spoken down to about my area of expertise, and would much rather engineer things to spend more of my time doing that instead of any of my other job duties, or browsing the internet.
Me: Unfortunately sir I am but a humble server mechanic. My expertise is with Apache, nginx and MySQL. If I sweat real hard I can kind of read PHP and HTML but the CSS is just beyond me. I unfortunately don’t understand what your complex javascript project is and in fact I’m not even sure why you’re trying to use JavaScript to do this. However, as this is beyond my expertise, I think you should consult with a professional developer.
Customer: but it runs just fine in my other environment
As someone on the other end of this, it’s incredibly frustrating when tickets are submitted, detailed issues provided, and then nothing happens for weeks only to be met with an “are you still having that problem we didn’t fix?” Reply, then asking for all the information present in the ticket, only to have the problem continue to not be fixed. No, it is not a user error when Adobe can’t validate an enterpise license or teams cannot make a voice call without crashing.
another thing, don’t append everything with “It’s very urgent we need it fixed now” because you’ll get put in the not listen to list
There are probably less than 5 emails in our internal helpdesk queue this month that WEREN’T marked as urgent.
Urgent problems this month include: ‘The glare from my kitchen window washes out my laptop screen’, ‘How do I change the color of my folders icon?’ and ‘Client reports hearing faint mumbling from their org’s landing page’
I handled the last one personally, she had a forgotten tab with a looping podcast playing on very low for the last few days.
When EVERYTHING is urgent, NOTHING is urgent.
“will the company go out of business if this isn’t fixed in the next hour?”
Litmus test for urgency
HELP!!¡!!!¡!!! ME!!!
COMPUTER IS BROKE!11!!!11one!
have one user that every subject is help, sequels get ! appended.
Urgently do the needful
Since you did not yet make a reply to me, I’m going to reply to this chain to prompt you to reply quicker. Please do the needful urgently
I love that phrase. Because it lets me decide what’s needful. Sometimes it’s my lunch or catching up on the news.
Sometimes it’s shit posting on Lemmy
3 decades behind the phone has taught me this one thing: Let them vent, they’re not mad at you.
Also: Some people simply cannot be helped.
You can actually get yourself out of the prerecorded script and into actual problem solving if you list all the things you did, yell a little bit, and then say you’re not yelling at the technician you’re just frustrated by their company. Guess what!? They hate their company too
Wait, you guys have self respect?
