Customer Service

With all the years I've been doing PC support, one truth is self-evident: every company has approximately a dozen users who are unmitigated pains-in-the-ass. It's either because they're willfully ignorant, refuse to learn and expect you to hold their hand through every step of a process—or they're arrogant assholes who they think the entire organization will collapse if they can't do their work. Usually the two go hand-in-hand.

Yesterday I had a very unpleasant interaction with one of these Dirty Dozen. Afterward I mentioned this user's name to one of my coworkers, and he responded, "Oh, you mean 'Queen-Of-All-She-Surveys?'" Glad to know it isn't just me who has this opinion.

I have a bit of history with this person. Several months ago I was assigned a ticket to help her recover some pictures from a CD. I didn't think anything of it until I actually got deskside and found out that they were personal photos from her daughter's birthday party.

I told her I would be unable to assist because this was not work related. She lit into me about not providing good customer service and how the entire support structure here was crap and she was going to speak to my supervisor…yada, yada, yada.

It was all I could do to not roll my eyes.

Well, after I got back to my desk I immediately called my boss who backed me 100%. "That was definitely not work related and she shouldn't have called it in. You did the right thing."

Well about a week ago I got a request from her admin to install a certain piece of software on five workstations in her department (including Queen-Of-All-She-Surveys). Thankfully QOASS was out of the office when I did the install. Unfortunately, I immediately ran into a snag because the software has to be registered online before it can even be used and it appeared that our firewall was blocking access to that particular website—as well as its alternate.

I let the admin know I would try connecting to the website with my Mac (which isn't on the corporate network) when i got back to my desk, and if successful would circle back around with her to get the necessary activation codes entered into the five machines.

I wasn't able to reach the website from my Mac either. I checked that night from home and it still wasn't reachable. This told me the manufacturer was having issues. I spoke with the admin the next day and told her I would keep checking over the next few days and when the site was back online I'd be in touch. "No problem," she said.

Well, yesterday morning I got a nasty email from the subject of this story asking why the software still hadn't been activated. "It's been over a week!" (Yeah, bitch, there was also a four-day weekend in there in case you hadn't noticed.) Before I contacted her, I attempted to reach the website through our network and lo and behold, it was finally working.

I called her, connected to her machine, and activated the software. The software of course, required additional user-specific setup to be done before it could be used, and when I told her it would be a few more minutes, she snapped, "I don't have time for this! We ordered this software weeks ago and it should work without having to go through all this!" At this point I had to bite my tongue. I very calmly asked, "When do you have time available to finish setting up the software?"

"I don't know! You have control of my PC and I need to look at my calendar!"

I told her to take the mouse, open Outlook and check.

"1 pm. It's the only time I have available."

"Great," I said. "I'll send you an Outlook invite for 1 pm today."

I called her at 1 pm. "I don't need your help any more. My admin set it up for me."

What. A. Cunt.