In which I give you a picture of call center life.

Yesterday, for my first call of the day I was on the phone with a customer for 106 minutes trying to set up his DSL. It should have been a 10 minute call, tops.

The hardware was properly cabled and all the correct lights were lit on the router, but Vista would not let him login to the modem GUI. I manually put the machine on the proper subnet, disabled all other connectoids, and IE still wouldn’t let the customer into the damned GUI.

It was frustrating because I don’t know Vista, and all Vista users are over 60. Which means I can’t just say, “Close out of that window,” or “Open your firewall application,” because they don’t know what statements like that mean. They need to be directed through absolutely every single click – especially those stupid Windows Vista security pop-ups – and it’s hard because I don’t know exactly what they’re looking at and, to make it even betterer, most people can’t read very well. If I say, “What does the window say?” they gurgle and mumble and I have to guess.

Later I had a guy who was super upset that I couldn’t help him – not wouldn’t, but couldn’t. The problem was that he wanted to connect his computer via USB to a DSL modem but he didn’t have the driver disc. I explained that he had to have the driver disc to go any further, and that since he hadn’t bought the modem from us I didn’t have one I could send him. He insisted that we “should be able to go into Control Panel and Internet Options and install the USB driver in there” because he’d “done it that way before.” (Which is, for you non-techies, utter bullshit and just plain wrong.) While I was trying to explain to him that drivers can only be installed three ways: from files stored in Windows, from a driver disc, or from the Internet, he hung up on me in a fit of pique, but not before telling me that he’d never had such bad service from our company before. And I was being NICE!

I’ve been doing this computer shit for a long time now, and while Windows will typically find drivers for USB cards themselves, there are very specific and particular drivers for weird USB peripherals like, say, ebook readers or DSL FUCKING MODEMS FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Then there was the guy who ran the CD he got from the telco after ordering DSL from my company, even after we specifically told him not to, and it killed his WinME machine. Killed it, dead. The thing won’t even boot. And I had to tell him it wasn’t our fault and there was really nothing we could do about it. I felt so bad.

Then there were about five calls from DSL orders that had gone strangely awry and had weird, totally unusual things wrong with them. No path, or strange hardware failure, or actual telco outages…

Damn near every call was an exception call, the whole day. My call time average yesterday was about 45 minutes and when I left – after working a nine hour shift – the queue had still not been cleared.

Today my department supervisor was agro because he’d been yelled at all morning by customers who didn’t get called back yesterday. He fired off a few emails to us techs that made me agro too.

Because shit, as they say, flows downhill.

Today it’s slower, thank god, but the morning was all angry voice mails left by customers who can’t connect because they don’t know how to type but think it’s my personal fault and that I’m maliciously keeping them from being able to surf for porn over their cheapo dial-up connections… Okay, maybe it’s not that much about me, but STILL.

Right this second, I’m on my second DSL call in a row with a customer whose order was lost or halted for some reason only the telco knows, and of course it’s after five so I can’t do anything about it until tomorrow…

And even though it’s a new day, the attitude of the great unwashed “them” is pretty much what it was yesterday: pissed off and petulant. And I really do take it personally when I can’t fix it for them, because that’s why I do this job: I like to be able to fix shit for people.

Long story short:: work’s been kicking my arse these past two days. Gah.