Customers--gotta love 'em!
I work for two ISP's in the local area where I live. As a network technician, I handle Internet installations and troubleshoots. Most of the clients are college students, so most of the installs occur at the beginning of each semester, leaving most of the rest of the year's work as troubleshoots.
It is a most unfortunate fact of life that Shit Happens. Here in central Illinois, quite a bit happens. Much of it can ultimately be traced back to either the weather, or the crappy electical grid we have here. We don't seem to get nearly as many blackouts as people do up in northern IL with ComEd, but that's more than made up for with frequent brownouts, power spikes, and the occasional lightning strike.
Anyway, sometimes when crap happens we get some rather unreasonable customers calling in. Not that they don't have the right to be frustrated when their service goes out, but I've just gotta chuckle at the way some of them behave.
One common thing I hear is, "My Internet's been out for two days!!!" Translation: it went down at 11pm yesterday, and they're calling in at 1am today.
One unfortunate side effect of the local university's vast computerization of many of its classes, including homework assignments, is that students are now dependent on the Internet like a crack addict is to his rock. As a result, when a site goes down now I hear a lot of, "I've got homework to do and it needs to be done tonight!" This is usually in a voicemail left at 11pm or so.
Now, both the ISP's I work for are what you might call economy service providers. The prices for service are cheap, about half what the local cable company is charging. AT&T/SBC DSL is cheaper, but they require you to have a land-line phone with phone service through them, and that isn't cheap. We don't, and that's a big plus with college students nowadays, the great majority of whom only use cell phones. And while our networks probably aren't as reliable overall as cable or DSL (though I don't have exact figures to compare), our response times are a helluva lot quicker. Most of our troubleshoots can be solved in an hour or two, compared to maybe a day or more for cable, and good luck getting anyone from AT&T/SBC to come out and look at your DSL. (If you can, expect to get charged through the nose for it.)
But of course the customers don't know this. Not that they should be expected to, but it's kinda frustrating to know this, and it's not like that's something I can tell the customers. Still, I have received numerous compliments from them on the quick response time, and actually had some customers switch back to us after they got frustrated with the Big Names.
My job could be a stressful one, but I'm usually a pretty mellow guy and it takes a lot to make me lose my cool. In three years I've never snapped at a customer or treated them poorly, though I have bitten my tongue on several occasions. Customers usually mouth off the most when leaving a voicemail message. They're not so bad when I'm talking to them live on the phone, and are usually quite well behaved when I visit them in person. Interesting psychology there....
I encounter a broad spectrum of customers. Like I said most of them are college students, but even so there's a lot of diversity, especially since there's a large foreign student population here. (Most are from India or China.) Some are pretty mellow, others are high-strung. Some are obvious boozers. There are quite a few prima-donnas and spoiled brats too, of both genders.
Some are chronic complainers who call in the minute something happens. These are the people who expect you to wait on them hand and foot, and can't understand why at $25/month they can't expect a technician to be sent out immediately at 2am in the morning when their net goes down. And we're not talking about some mission-critical situation where someone is remote-piloting a plane or doing tele-operation surgery. No, it's some student who procrastinated for two weeks on some assignment that's now due the following morning.
A few other students are just the opposite; I've actually had several calls along the lines of, "Yeah my Internet went down a week ago, but I just never got around to calling you about it."
Then there's your Internet morons who download half a dozen spyware and adware programs onto their computer, along with at least one virus, then wonder why they're having so much trouble with their net. Looking at their computers, these students are usually pretty easy to spot. Their desktop is an icon farm, and all the programs loaded into their taskbar stretch across half their screen. Their Internet Explorer (or as I call it, "Inter-nyet Exploder") has at least two 3rd-party search bars installed, from companies you've never heard of, complete with shortcut icons for shopping, gambling, and other spam sites.
But all in all, I like my ISP jobs. I get to use my brain, the physical activity keeps me fit, I'm forced to keep up on the latest tech advances (but this is a good thing), and I've also honed my customer-relation skills. The customers, for better or for worse, always keep things interesting.
Customers...ya gotta love 'em!
It is a most unfortunate fact of life that Shit Happens. Here in central Illinois, quite a bit happens. Much of it can ultimately be traced back to either the weather, or the crappy electical grid we have here. We don't seem to get nearly as many blackouts as people do up in northern IL with ComEd, but that's more than made up for with frequent brownouts, power spikes, and the occasional lightning strike.
Anyway, sometimes when crap happens we get some rather unreasonable customers calling in. Not that they don't have the right to be frustrated when their service goes out, but I've just gotta chuckle at the way some of them behave.
One common thing I hear is, "My Internet's been out for two days!!!" Translation: it went down at 11pm yesterday, and they're calling in at 1am today.
One unfortunate side effect of the local university's vast computerization of many of its classes, including homework assignments, is that students are now dependent on the Internet like a crack addict is to his rock. As a result, when a site goes down now I hear a lot of, "I've got homework to do and it needs to be done tonight!" This is usually in a voicemail left at 11pm or so.
Now, both the ISP's I work for are what you might call economy service providers. The prices for service are cheap, about half what the local cable company is charging. AT&T/SBC DSL is cheaper, but they require you to have a land-line phone with phone service through them, and that isn't cheap. We don't, and that's a big plus with college students nowadays, the great majority of whom only use cell phones. And while our networks probably aren't as reliable overall as cable or DSL (though I don't have exact figures to compare), our response times are a helluva lot quicker. Most of our troubleshoots can be solved in an hour or two, compared to maybe a day or more for cable, and good luck getting anyone from AT&T/SBC to come out and look at your DSL. (If you can, expect to get charged through the nose for it.)
But of course the customers don't know this. Not that they should be expected to, but it's kinda frustrating to know this, and it's not like that's something I can tell the customers. Still, I have received numerous compliments from them on the quick response time, and actually had some customers switch back to us after they got frustrated with the Big Names.
My job could be a stressful one, but I'm usually a pretty mellow guy and it takes a lot to make me lose my cool. In three years I've never snapped at a customer or treated them poorly, though I have bitten my tongue on several occasions. Customers usually mouth off the most when leaving a voicemail message. They're not so bad when I'm talking to them live on the phone, and are usually quite well behaved when I visit them in person. Interesting psychology there....
I encounter a broad spectrum of customers. Like I said most of them are college students, but even so there's a lot of diversity, especially since there's a large foreign student population here. (Most are from India or China.) Some are pretty mellow, others are high-strung. Some are obvious boozers. There are quite a few prima-donnas and spoiled brats too, of both genders.
Some are chronic complainers who call in the minute something happens. These are the people who expect you to wait on them hand and foot, and can't understand why at $25/month they can't expect a technician to be sent out immediately at 2am in the morning when their net goes down. And we're not talking about some mission-critical situation where someone is remote-piloting a plane or doing tele-operation surgery. No, it's some student who procrastinated for two weeks on some assignment that's now due the following morning.
A few other students are just the opposite; I've actually had several calls along the lines of, "Yeah my Internet went down a week ago, but I just never got around to calling you about it."
Then there's your Internet morons who download half a dozen spyware and adware programs onto their computer, along with at least one virus, then wonder why they're having so much trouble with their net. Looking at their computers, these students are usually pretty easy to spot. Their desktop is an icon farm, and all the programs loaded into their taskbar stretch across half their screen. Their Internet Explorer (or as I call it, "Inter-nyet Exploder") has at least two 3rd-party search bars installed, from companies you've never heard of, complete with shortcut icons for shopping, gambling, and other spam sites.
But all in all, I like my ISP jobs. I get to use my brain, the physical activity keeps me fit, I'm forced to keep up on the latest tech advances (but this is a good thing), and I've also honed my customer-relation skills. The customers, for better or for worse, always keep things interesting.
Customers...ya gotta love 'em!
posted by Unknown at
4/21/2006 11:55:00 AM
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