If you support technology or work with those that do then you’ll understand and commiserate with this painful but funny story.
Everyone has bad support calls and, as bad as this one is, I’m afraid I couldn’t help but laugh, and I think you will too, when you read this copy from an email sent to me by my brother, a senior tech here in Vancouver;
“I was at my client today doing various tasks and one of them involved assisting the controller in setting up directory permissions on the shared drives on the network.
We’ve been through this before…a day last month which resulted in quite possibly the most painful two hours of my career. I’ll preface this by saying that he’s a nice guy and probably means well, however the English language barrier, an excitable nature and a mild stammer (on top of an infuriating need to over-analyze things) proves to be the catalyst that pushes my patience to dangerous levels.
Today was a “refresher”, so in other words, that day last month may as well not have happened at all.
As we’re doggedly managing a very large security structure on a folder he’s stopping me every minute to:
- Create screen shots and paste them into a word document at a glacial pace.
- Tell me that the permissions are stupid since some of them appear to mean the same thing.
- Request explanations of why permissions exist and what their purpose is
- Click in the wrong place, even though I’m walking him through the procedure. (“No… don’t click there, you want to click the Edit button remember?”)
- After every person added to the permissions list, check their permissions on other shared directories for comparison.
After we were done adding the permissions and I had lost an hour of my life that I will never get back, I told him we were done and to click ‘Ok’ (while silently thanking the IT Gods that this ordeal was finally over).
At this point, I heard him say “Whoops, I think I just hit Cancel…oh well, this will be a good refresher for me to make sure I understand the concepts. Let’s do that again!”
