Rant About Work

#define RANTING
I worked as a tech support guy, programmer, PR dude and general computer fixer upper. Basically what this means is that for over a year I had people shout at me, blame me for things that weren’t my fault, get pissed off at me, and whine at me to do their jobs for them. I had one guy tell me that it was my job to help them 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year (no I am not joking).

They have no want to learn. I can tell them how to do something, and then, literally seconds later, they will ask me again. For a period of time we did tutorials. Basically what this means is that I would read the instructions on the screen to the Realtor, over and over and over. I don’t know how many times I have had to say “Well, if it says ‘press enter to continue’ – yes, you do press enter!” Instead of experimenting with something to see if they could make it work, they just called us. Most of the time they would already know how to do it, but “were just checking” with me. Why not just try it and see if it works. Is it really possible to break your computer or totally destroy all your data if you press enter when it says ‘press enter to continue’?

This reminds me of doing a job for a friend of mine’s mother. She had installed WordPerfect, then it gave her a GPF, so she removed it and called me. The $20 I charged her was for sitting there for half an hour swapping disks… she apparently was scared to try to install it again herself. [For the BOFH’s out there — yes, I know I should have installed it with a batch file that echoed “No means yes, and yes means no. Delete all files [y/n]“, but I had one of those ‘niceness’ attacks]

The system has now been up for almost 3 years. We still get calls asking how to do basic searches! A lot of people call over and over again, asking the same question. Some just forget, or don’t care enough to remember, while others inform me that it is my job to baby them through simple operations over and over!

We basically got rid of the old computer system (14 years old, kept together with hope, prayers, and Blue Glue™), and replaced it with a new system. The new system had pictures, the ability to search for anything you wanted (almost a regular expression search), and a lot of other good features. Admittedly it has a few quirks (e.g. converting a “Stellar” image to a .JPG renders a file with the extension “.C11“), but it was a lot better. Regardless, a lot of the members did not want to learn, and did not want to leave their old system. This whole experience left me with the conclusion that I will never work in a “service oriented” job. My opinion of real estate agents went down too (which is a shame because some are really nice people).
#endif RANTING