Patience.

One of my goals for 2009 is to be a little more patient with customers that are experiencing computer problems, especially when they think the broke the internet or the cat peed on their keyboard. (Both true support calls I have dealt with in the past six months, by the way).

My patience was tested today a little bit and my conversation with a customer caught my supervisor’s attention a few times when I used phrases such as “I don’t know what you mean by that” and “I’m sorry, but error messages usually give a little more detail than ‘the mail didn’t go'”. She called herself jeckel, she was apparently trying to download television shows over a dial-up connection and she wass wondering why her computer was so slow. After explaining to her that she couldn’t download video over her dial-up connection she decided that instead her e-mail was clogged. I assured her that there were no tubes involved with e-mail and Draino wasn’t going to help the situation. Everyone loves a funny tech! Turns out she was trying to send a video to her friend via e-mail and it wouldn’t send (because said file was huge and it would have taken her at least 24 hours to send it.) After walking her through various steps (“click start, yes that’s the green button down in the corner that says start”) I asked her to reconnect to the internet but only if she was on her cell phone as the call would get disconnected otherwise:

“Does that mean I need to go deep?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that…”

[MUTE]

“… and I don’t think I want to know.”

“OH! I click th…. [and insert dead phone here]”

Thank God. She never called back. I hope she went deep.

Here’s a picture of Mean Daddy Tech: