In which you experience part of my day.

Phone rings.

I answer, “Technical support. May I help you?”

A person immediately starts a harangue. She does not identify herself. She opens with, “Your message is wrong, because I live in Dayton and my Internet is down!” and ends with “There’s nothin’ comin’ on here at all!” and I’m pretty sure I can hear her gesturing at her monitor over the phone.

While she’s speaking I grab her number from the HUD, search my database for her account, discover her account type, verify the account isn’t suspended for non-pay, and quickly check the Radius logs and run the MNPP tool. I now know two things: her DSL is up and she doesn’t know how to communicate.

At all. Because she’s been talking the entire time and still hasn’t identified herself or made any sense. I’m not even clear on what it is that isn’t working.

“—and I know something’s wrong ’cause it only has two bars!” she finishes up, triumphantly.

“You have DSL,” I say, knowing that she’ll think it’s a non-sequiteur. (I can see from her account that she doesn’t have a wireless router, so her bars comment is completely irrelevant.)

“And it’s just not doin’ nothin’,” she says, “it won’t ever load your web page.” Ah-hah! Bingo. By this comment, I am able to infer that she’s running Internet Explorer 8 and that bmi.net is her homepage. I am able to do this because I’m a goddamned genius, and because it’s my job to guess what the lusers are talking about and to solve problems with hardly any clues whatsoever.

I am Sherlock fucking Holmes, people!

I decide to fix the issue without explaining what it is or what we’re doing. My years of experience in support have taught me that there are certain people who do not want to learn anything, ever, under any circumstances. “Click on Start,” I say, “and then click on Control Panel.”

I check the previous support tickets in her account; no opsys is selected. Great. I sigh. “What version of Windows do you have?” I ask.

She doesn’t understand the question, of course. “It’s a Dell,” she says. At least she doesn’t say, “It’s Windows 2010,” or something equally hilarious.

“In the Control Panel,” I say, just randomly guessing that she’s running Windows XP, “double-click on Internet Options.”

We spend three minutes trying to find the Internet Options icon. She swears she doesn’t have such an icon in her Control Panel. I decide briefly she must have Vista, and give her Vista instructions; she remains baffled. Then I go back to thinking she’s on XP, and I say, “Okay, the window you’re looking at, it says Control Panel up at the top, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the icons are alphabetical. Starting at the top left, they’re called Accessibility Options, Add Hardware, Add or Remove Programs… see that?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Second row,” I continue,” in the middle, probably, there’s one called Internet Options–”

“Oh! I found it!” she exclaims. I mentally congratulate myself for being so fucking awesome.

I have her change her homepage from www.bmi.net to my.bmi.net. It takes roughly four minutes to accomplish this. I have her clear the windows back to the desktop, and re-open IE. It works. I’ve fixed the goddamned Internet once again.

Now if only the developers working on the index page of our website would isolate or remove the code snippet that causes Internet Explorer 8 to crash, my life would be much nicer.

Phone rings again. I answer. Three minutes in, verbatim: “I’ve had a hacker,” he tells me. “He keeps comin’ up. His name is Anthony or something. I went in there and there was like a hundred emails in there that he’d sent to my friends! I’ve been a cop for twenty years and he emailed all my friends, sending some kind of advertisement to my friends. I wish I was still on active duty in law enforcement, I’d arrest his ass.”

“Or not,” I reply. “He’s probably in Russia or something.”

“But his English is so good,” he says.

“A lot of people grow up studying English in school.”

The customer remains convinced that the fact he doesn’t know how to send emails means he has some kind of system-wide problem with his computer, which is used, once belonged to someone female, possibly an ex-girlfriend, and is riddled with improperly uninstalled software. I end up giving him detailed instructions on how to send an email to his entire address book through his Yahoo! mail account, even though it’s not my job to teach him how to use a web property I have nothing to do with, and he ends the call abruptly when I tell him, when he asks why everything’s so slow, that he may want to reinstall his operating system from scratch.

I wish I could just say, “Because your hardware sucks,” but they don’t like that.

Next call. This customer has a brand new Windows 7 laptop. The error is DUN 633 (which means ‘the modem is not installed’).

“Is your server down?” he asks.

I lie and say, “I have several customers currently connected to that access number.” Well, it may not be a lie, but I don’t know it’s true because I have no way to look.

He says, “Oh.”

“Do you have an external dial-up modem?” I ask.

“No.”

“Did you specifically order an internal dial-up modem with your new laptop?”

“No.”

“633 means you don’t have a dial-up modem; your telephone cord is currently plugged into what I am pretty certain is your Ethernet port.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So I gotta buy a modem.”

“If you want to use dial-up to connect to the Internet, yes.”

“Oh. Okay. Um. Bye.”