Worst Explanation From Tech Support? 1907
Disgruntled-with-Tech-Support asks: "Let's face it: At some point or another, we've had to deal with some form of tech support. Quite often, it's a hit-or-miss experience depending on the level of support required. Occasionally, strange, bizarre, or nonsensical explanations result from the problems reported, such as this one: I had just had DSL installed, only to find it much slower than the 56K line I was looking to get rid of. On calling the provider, I was told (by someone who likely reading off cue cards) to visit one of their internal websites for measuring bandwidth. While there, I observed that they had both bytes per second and bits per second listed, and that the number of bytes/sec != bits/sec * 8, rather a factor around 13 or 14. I pointed this out as a possible problem, and the guy's reasoning: 'Uh, it looks like the bytes are getting through to you ok, but the bits are getting stuck someplace.' What was your worst explanation from tech support?"
Worst reply i've GIVEN.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I work in tech support.... (Score:3, Insightful)
They're not reading from que cards (Score:5, Insightful)
At issue is the level of training provided.
All this is not to say that don't find the horror stories, from a tech's and customer's point of view, funny. Speaking for myself, half the people I speak to assume I can see their monitor and the other half think you can't open Outlook Express without connecting to the internet, despite the big 'work offline' button in front of them...
Whatever you do (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Worst reply i've GIVEN.... (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, you don't say: "We are going to reset/restart your unix server" you say: "We are going to bump your server" You don't say: "A backhoe dug up your local T-1 line, and now you're on dialup, credit authorizations are going to take longer" You say: "Please don't call me, call the credit authorization company" There are so many more, but I just can't think of any handy right now.
Key is, you have to dumb things down a bit so the average lay person doesn't take 45 minutes chatting about what could be the technicial difficulty.
Please Press 6 If You Have a Clue (Score:3, Insightful)
"If you are an advanced user, i.e. you know more than our flunkie tech support people, please press 6. We will connect you to an intelligent person on this side of the ocean. Please hold."
I hate trying to boot a machine (or convincing the guy on the other end that I'm trying to boot a machine) 10 different times when I know the hard-drive has failed.
It's bad. It's under warranty. Come replace it.
Re:Oh that's easy. (Score:2, Insightful)
The best part is that if you say "no" then *that* can be the problem... "if you don't run a firewall, you leave your computer more open to attacks"
Fun stuff. "Damned if you do..."
Re:tech no-support (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, what would you prefer?.. someone saying, I'm not sure, let me find out for sure.. or someone making shit up that can get you into more trouble?
Re:My ISP is retarted (Score:3, Insightful)
When we got the Rogers guy to come he couldn't figure out why it was hooked to that outlet, and couldn't even figure out how the cable got to that point in the wall (it had been that way since I moved in about 3 years before). He put in a new wire, closer to where it came in the house, and we were fine from then on.
Re:Please Press 6 If You Have a Clue (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you know the hard drive has failed. But for each user like you, there are ten users that THINK the hard drive has failed, when it really turned out to be something else. It's much cheaper to make everyone go through basic troubleshooting than to replace everyone's hard drives.
Re:Worst Explanation? (Score:5, Insightful)
No they don't. Any Mechanic I've even seen will look at a car for Free and try to tell you what's wrong. If its something which requires hours of diagnosing then yes they will usually charge a fee but its by no means automatic. I've been taking cars to dealers and private mechanics for estimates and second estimateas for years and I've only been charged a few times.
If tech support worked that way they would at least listen to your problem for Free and notify you if a quick fix is available. I'm not against charging for tech support if a problem involved lots of trouble shooting and hand holding on the Software makers part, but they should be making a determination if that's really necessary before they start charging you money or taking your credit card number. Asking for the card up front is just a scare tatic to try to get consumers to not call in. Personally I don't care for the pratice.
Re:Not to mention the submitter has it backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not to mention the submitter has it backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
If only this choice was made more often....
Re:I work in tech support.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"it's a feature, not a bug." (Score:3, Insightful)
And I don't know about your flat panel, but all of my analog flat panels support several refresh rates, including 60 and... 72, if memory serves, and occasionally higher, depending on resolution. That has nothing to do with the way the image is displayed, and is strictly a factor of what clock speeds the VGA decoder hardware happens to support at a given resolution. However, you still have to feed it a sync rate that the decoder can handle.
If you really don't want to care about refresh, you'd better be using a digital flat panel (DVI or ADC-digital).
Re:CompUSA (Score:0, Insightful)
The most resent encounter occured during Crismass, when my mother thought it would be a good idea to buy me some compute hardwear. She ended up buying an AMD 64 FX @ +3000, a K8T Mother board, and 2GB DDR2 ram. Total cost of $3100. I wake up crismass morning to find all these wounderful gifes under the tree (I still think my mother spent WAY to much, even after all I did for her this year it was still TOO MUCH!). I pull out the new ATI 9800 card out of my main computer, and plug it and everything into the MB. Turn it on and nothing hapens. I check the PSU works perfictly, I check the powerswich no problem. I then check the post LED's... there all lite wich means the BIOS Never gave the CPU control. My conclusion the CPU if faulty. So I wate untill compUSA opens again and I try to take it back. The guy at Tech desk says it's proably the MB, Wich I know it's not. After arguing with him for 20 minutes or so I give up and let him exchange the MB. with a promise that once this dosen't work I'll be back.
I try it and it dosen't work, so I take it all back again. This time the Guy at the Tech desk wount take it back, and tells me to go to costmer service where they try and tell me that I'm to blame and they wount take and of it back. After arguing for litteraly and hour and a half, I gave up an told him I was going to call CompUSA main head quirters. He finaly says fine I'll take it in back and try the CPU on another MB. He takes the CPU off the MB. and gose in back I sit there at the Costmer Sirveice desk wating when he finaly comes back and tells me that the pins are bent on CPU and he will not take it back. After some very loud shouting at him he threteans to call the COPs if I don't leave imditly. So as I'm leaving in the one sales girl there gives me a note with a number and name. She told me it was for the distric manger of this CompUSA and to call.
To finish up this story I call him he basicly says theres nothing he can do, and he sorry for any inconvinec. The moral of this stroy don't go to CompUSA Unless you fell like being Roaly @$$ #^@#.
Re:No wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
*runs for cover*
Re:Some of my best lines : (Score:2, Insightful)
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Re:Oh that's easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
And the whole point of troubleshooting is to isolte points to failure- REset the modem, reset your computer, disconnect the router, still not working, next step, try a ping to the internet, try a ping to the server, try a ping to yourself, reset the modem again (just in case you ignored the tech the first time he sugested it, reset the computer again.
That above scenario will solve somewhere around 70% of all network problems, and if you take out the request to reset the modem and computer the second time the rate drops sharply, because peopel have a tendancy to assume that tech support people have no idea what there doing and can safely be ignored. We've been given a script to follow that says to do exactly that, and we get in trouble if we don't do that scenario first; so sit tight, let us establish that it is not your firewall, your computer, or your modem, and then we can get to some real tech support- or hell, do it yourself, first, before you call in, and be sure to say that you did it yourself, first, how you did it when you get connected and save time.
Re:Some of my best lines : (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:I work in tech support.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not to mention the submitter has it backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. He may have just assumed the caller was a moron and was either having some fun or trying to get rid of him ASAP.
Lying makes my job HARDER (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do I do this?
Because educated users make less work for me than ignorant ones. This is a long term strategy, and I am telling you now that it pays off. Of course, if you are a temp or something, don't bother. Just fix and go.
Even then though, it's kind of fun teaching people who are about as technical as celery about the history of peripheral connectivity, and then getting the impression that they actually picked up something that would be useful to them in the future.
Re:You said it... (Score:2, Insightful)
no, not in this decade. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 1960's, yes. Now, no, not really- and your linking to a dictionary doesn't prove it. That dictionary definition is decades old.
For over almost 30 years, a byte is 8 bits, a nibble (no, I'm not making that up) is four. A word contains four nibbles or two bytes. Insisting otherwise is anal retentive at best.
pfft. stupid TECH SUPPORT? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worst Explanation? (Score:5, Insightful)
1- Charge someone money to diagnose what is faulty with someone ELSE's product.
2- Charge someone money to diagnose what it faulty with your OWN product.
Re:CompUSA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Worst tech support explanation (Score:1, Insightful)
Any customer who tries to "tell" me there's a problem on our end is identified as a "Taco Bell Sysadmin" and goes on Penalty Hold while I count the number of geese on the lawn today.
If there really is a problem on our end, we either already know about it and I'm about to associate you to the outage, or I find it on the call and escalate it to get a trouble ticket opened. That's *my* job, not the end user's.
For every horror-story-generating Tier 1 agent, there are probably three more who gnash their teeth because they aren't ALLOWED to go off freelancing (good) solutions that deviate from company-prescribed troubleshooting.
Re:Worst Explanation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Standard at the shop I worked at was to only charge the fee when it was a bitchy customer or involved removing the transmission from the vehicle. Otherwise, a lot of diagnostic work was done free (You could argue it was made up for in what we charge for other services, but that's true for everything "free")
In my experience dealing with other shops, that's generally true of nearly the whole auto service industry. Take a look at their car, check for the obvious things, and if more extensive testing is needed you start charging the customer for it (letting them know before hand of course.)
Re:i've run help desks for almost 17 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:neh, Fry's (Score:2, Insightful)
Dell tech support Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I don't doubt that the Germans have quite a high level of quality when it comes to manufacturing machines, optical components, AMD processors and the like, but their customer service is definitely one of the worst I've ever had to experience.
We had a Dell laptop with what we supposed was a damaged wireless LAN card. It would report "Network cable unplugged" even when the card's MAC was clearly allowed to get on the wireless LAN and had the correct SSID set. I'm a UNIX tech and don't know much about Windows, so I felt it might be nice to call Dell to find out what's wrong and get someone to send a replacement card if it really is the card's fault.
After waiting patiently through 10 minutes of pop music three times (their system kicks you off after 10 minutes) I finally managed to get a real, flesh-coloured human on the other end of the line.
Them: "Hello, Dell Inspiron support, how can I help you?"
Me: "Ah, well, we have a Dell Truemobile blah blah card here that is acting odd. How can I verify that it really is defective?"
He asks for the service tag, the usual details and I tell him the precise nature of the problem.
Them: "Oh. Well, I see that you have Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled there. Home Edition does not support networks. I'm sorry, we can't take that card back, you need to upgrade to Pro and try again."
I really hope he was fired afterwards, since as they say, "your call may be recorded for quality control". Swapping in the same model Dell TrueMobile card from a different shipment of notebooks worked just fine, by the way.
Why I hate Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in 1995, my family had been using our first PC (whitebox 486 with Windows 3.1) for about a year. Our Microsoft mouse had been trouble from day 1. It kept sticking on screen as if the pointer hit something, even though the mouse itself was fine. I called MS, and over the course of the next few weeks they had us clean the mouse (several times), buy cleaning kits, change drivers, get a new mouse, nothing seemed to work. Finally, one tech (perfect English in those days) said, and I quote, "Well, I guess it's obviously your mouse pad. I guess you could always take your business elsewhere."
The next day we bought a Logitech mouse, and have used exclusively Logitech mice for the past decade without the slightest bit of trouble. I later went on to help found a Linux Users Group in college.
The moral: Dude, NEVER dare your customer to take their business elsewhere. Not even if you're Microsoft.
Re:Overheard at Best Buy (Score:5, Insightful)
His response, "if you know how to use a crimper you shouldn't even be in Best Buy!"
Re:Not to mention the submitter has it backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kill the process! (Score:2, Insightful)
What would you call it instead? It is kind of a process. It just doesn't take part in the normal scheduling process as it is running at DPC/dispatch level. It also doesn't have a normal priority but is ranked as lowest-prio process [lancs.ac.uk] just below the zero page thread (has priority of 0). Articles and tools saying that the idle thread runs at priority 0 are wrong. For a tad more information look at this explanation [microsoft.com] of its functionality.
layer 8 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Worst reply i've GIVEN.... (Score:3, Insightful)
(And for the sake of simplicity, let's just assume a Windows XP machine... maybe with the My Computer icon turned on because thats what he asked the user to do..)
Although start>run>cmd>ipconfig
For example, on an XP machine:
Start
Right-click My Computer
Properties
Hardware Tab
Device Manager
Expand Network Adapters
Right-click your network adapter
Properties
Advanced Tab
Select Network Address from the list
My wireless card has a hardware address in the value field when you click on Network Address when looking at it's property sheet. My ethernet card doesn't, however I am not hooked through ethernet at this moment. Your milage may vary. Seems much easier to do an ipconfig
He makes the rest of "us" techies look bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My ISP is retarted (Score:1, Insightful)
But actually, this is pretty common when multiple companies try to share a wiring room. At a company I worked at a couple years back, one of the T1 lines would get disconnected multiple times in the wire room when some other company was trying to either hook up a new tenant in the office complex or disconnect someone else's service. This despite the boss going in and labeling the lines. As the lines were used for Internet and long distance calls to download data off client modems, it was a direct hit to the company's bottom line every time it happened because either the clients couldn't access their webpages or the data division had to switch to using regular long distance for modem dialups (a heck of a lot more expensive per minute).
Re:True story (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a pro-microsoft/anti-linux guy (heck, I'm using linux right now), but let's not ignore serious shortcomings in the OS we love... :)
The out (Score:1, Insightful)
I define "the out" to be the thing that "i" have done to make it so they dont have to help me.
The out can be that I have a "linux server" somewhere in the building. ie "Oh, no so we dont support Linux so I can not help you on any network issue you might have."
Comcast recently did this. For a real estate friend, I went over to look at what was wrong with her network and cable modem. I called up tech support and when I told the tech support person there was an internal network, i got "OH NO, no no. We can not give you any more support because you have an internal network. Thank you for calling though..." The tech support person had found his "out".
Next time you are on a call with tech support, watch them try to find their out, the piece of knowledge that will free them from the obligation of helping you.
Re: Mebibytes and Megabytes (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides which, kilobyte and megabyte and gigabyte is not jargon. It is a computer term. Sorry but your attempt to revise history has failed.
the best lie we ever told. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, coworker came up with a novel idea. Instead of asking them if the router was plugged in, he'd ask, "Can you unplug the power cord, and plug it back in upside down? Those cords are defective, sometimes you need to flip them."
Every once in a while, the guy at the other end would stutter nervously for a moment, then say, "Hey, that worked! Thanks!" Of course, the plugs in question were three-pronged, so there was no way they could have been plugged in "upside down," but they were grateful for the opportunity to save a little face.
Re:Widescreen idiocy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Some of my best lines : (Score:5, Insightful)
Customer asks : Why do I have to hit the Start button when I want to turn off the computer?
Not how Americans talk : I am very happily to be helping you with your problems. You see it says right here that for you to be shutting down your computer you must be pressing the Start button and then verily nicely selecting the shut down option. It was my pleasure to be helpingly assisting you.
How an American that didn't personally know the caller would reply : Because you have to.
How an American that knows the caller on a personal basis would answer : Because you fucking have to.
Once someone has mastered a particular instrument in music, they then enhance and personalize the music, make it -their- music, through improvisation. The English language is the same way - develop a mastery of the language and then extend it to better express yourself. A first year English student making up words and pronouncing them wrong, using the wrong tense and timber
To all the overseas Tier I tech support phone professionals : next time you get a call that is so blatantly obvious, something along the lines of 'Why do I have to (do something obvious)?'
Re: Oh wait I'm an idiot. (Score:3, Insightful)
A 9600 baud serial link is only 960 characters per second. There are ten bits per byte, because you have a start bit and a stop bit for each character. That makes 10 bits per byte.
Things get even stranger over ethernet... When measuring bandwidth in terms of bytes/sec, if you use FTP to measure it, then your measurment throws out the ethernet headers, which results in a lower number.
So it all depends on how you measure.
Re:Not to mention the submitter has it backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. But parity and stop bits do. I usually pretend that a byte = 10 bits (and simplify my mental arithmetic) when looking at dial-up throughput rates.
Re:Some of my best lines : (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who has dealt with tech support/customer service at a large company already knows why the "insecure user" doesn't want to hang up: they probably had to navigate through a 10-level automated system and wait on hold for 30 minutes to get support on the phone--and they know if they call back again, they'll have to repeat the explanation/troubleshooting of the problem from square 1.
Re: Mebibytes and Megabytes (Score:5, Insightful)
A Table in English translates to "(a Table)" in German, but the germans have different cultural associations with the word, and thus the word Table in english in fact conjures up completely different connotations, emotions and sensibilities in the english speaker when compared to the word for the same objeect in germany.
(Not my argument - a paraphrase of classical translation pedogogy)
What we have here is a translation between base 10 for humans and base 2 for bounded arrays.
Most people use arabic notation, but in fact store and think of large numbers in base 10 scientific notation. We are essentially zero-counters when it comes to large numbers.
Computers on the other hand are first binary, and secondly store numbers in multidimentional arrays. They are not zero counters, and do not favor round numbers. Generally computers favor memory blocks which are bounded by n dimensions each of which is a exponent of 2.
All thiis to get back to the main point.
The limitations of translation ensures one will never be able to express computer number comfortable in english - and thus the attempt should be governed by the law of diminishing returns.
AIK
Re:MCSE (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the good analogy would be 'some guy plowed into me with his car; he had a license. Therefore, having a drivers license isn't an indication of actual driving skill.'
Well, having your MCSE isn't an indication of your actual skill; it's an indication of your ability to pass a standarized test.
Re:Worst reply i've GIVEN.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, I know it seems hard to believe but I'm sure saw it somewhere. My apologies to the person I've accused of lying/stealing/karmic whoring.
Re:Emachines (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats an incredible warranty.
Re:Some of my best lines : (Score:2, Insightful)
not really Changing the spelling of a word is like changing one note in a chord it does look/sound wrong. music is made up of relations beetween notes that don't change, it's what notes are used in what order and rythm that makes your music just like it's what word's in what order make up your essay the notes and words should never change e is e c is c. this is true even for jazz. Improvisation doesn't meen hitting random notes you still have to play what has been composed to sound like the song your doing.
Re:Worst Explanation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Mebibytes and Megabytes (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody that actually says either of those words in my presence is getting bitchslapped, no doubt, and probably sent packing during the next set of layoffs.
Re: Mebibytes and Megabytes (Score:2, Insightful)
As to the other comment, the tech language we use was derived in the context of our field. It'd be like a bunch of novices coming in and completely changing the jargon of the plumbing field or medicine based on their uninformed preconceptions. "That's not a crescent wrench! It looks nothing like a crescent. Let's call it a Variable Gap Bolt Loosener and require everyone else in the world to do the same."
Also... Kibi and Mebi are just very unprofessional sounding, like they belong in some Pokemon cartoon. I wonder how many person-hours in committee were required to come up with those terms. I know they preserve the K and the M but this is rediculous. As for me, I will refuse to use "Kibi" and "Mebi".
C'mon, man. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how much you can learn just from hearing someone's voice. And I haven't been wrong yet.
Re: Mebibytes and Megabytes (Score:2, Insightful)
All of the terms in question, "bit", "byte", "nybble", "word", "double word",
"quadword", "kilobyte", "megabyte", "gigabyte", "terabyte", and so on and
so forth, are *all* inherently jargon. End users don't have any clue what
any of them mean (and shouldn't have to, in this era of hard drives large
enough to store more documents than you have time to create before the sizes
have inflated so much that your drive is so hopelessly tiny it belongs in a
museum). Just because they're jargon terms is no reason to change their
meaning.
> What 1024 bytes are _really_ called now is a Kibibyte
*WAY* fewer people use that terminology than the traditional terminology.
The 1000-byte "kilobyte" and the million-byte "megabyte" were devised by hard
drive manufacturers who want to inflate their size numbers. No operating
system by *any* vendor uses this type of "kilobyte" or "megabyte", nor does
any bandwidth provider of which I'm aware, nor any common throughput-measuring
software or device, nor any popular application software I'm aware of. Pretty
much just the hard-drive manufacturers.
Re:Not to mention the submitter has it backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever since modems went higher than 2400 bps, with various protocols for compression and reliability built in, the actual data transmission (over the phone line) has not included start/stop bits. The transmission between the modem and the computer does, of course, when using asynch transmission modes. Combined with compression, that's why you want the data speed on the serial line to be higher than the transmission rate over the phone line, combined with a flow control mechanism (x-on/off or rts/dts).
Things would have been so much simpler if Hayes hadn't been so successful and modem control lines had been used. In particular, if synchronous transmission (specifically, SDLC) along with a variable clock rate, had become standardized, all of the garbage of trying to packetize frames over SLIP/PPP, all of the headaches (including patents) of +++, all of the hassle of trying to figure out interface speeds by looking at the bit pattern of A and T, and not noticing that a connection had dropped because the "CARRIER DROPPED" came out in the middle of a packet, would have been eliminated. Transmit clock, receive clock, RTS, CTS, DCD, and use DTR to signal between data and sending configuration commands. Combine with RS-422 signalling for better noise resistance and Ethernet might never have needed to be invented. Just using SDLC with a self-clocking protocol would have been a major win, as frames are checksummed and start/stop bits don't need to be sent (the overhead of flags and beginning/end of frame is irrelevant as when the amount of data goes up, the overhead drops as low as necessary). It works fine as an "asynchronous" protocol, i.e. interactive typing.
Re:Please Press 6 If You Have a Clue (Score:2, Insightful)
> Because everyone will choose that.
Quite so. There's a solution to this: make 'em pass a quiz. Use a bank of
100 questions and give them _three_; if they get all three right, you give
them tier-two support immediately. If not, you send them to Tier 1. Of
course, you should only make people spend time taking this quiz if they want
to get to Tier 2 without going through Tier 1. Normal people would just go
through Tier 1 instead, but in case they try the quiz, you want to word it
in such a way that they don't realize that they're failing and being sent
to Tier 1. I imagine it might go something like this...
Recording: "Thank you for calling BigCompany. If you know your party's
extension, press 1 now. For Sales, press 2. For End User Tech Support,
press 3. For Advanced User Tech Support, press 4..." [User presses 4]
Recording: "To help us diagnose your problem more quickly, please answer
these simple questions."
Recording: "What version of Internet Protocol are you using? If you are
using IP version 1, please press 1. If you are using IP version 2, press
2. If you are using IP version 3, press 3. For End User Tech Support,
press Star."
At this point if the user presses 1, 2, 3, or *, he gets thanked in a nice
recorded voice and put in the queue for End User Tech Support, otherwise
known as Tier 1. If he hits 4 or 6, he goes on to the next question...
Recording: "Which program do you normally use to edit your registry?
If you use Internet Explorer to edit your registry, press 1. If you
export the registry, use Notepad to edit the REG file, and then import
your changes, press 2. If you use Outlook Express to edit your registry,
press 3. If you use Microsoft Word or Excel to edit your registry,
press 4. For End User Tech Support, press Star."
Again, if they choose any of the wrong answers, a polite recorded voice
thanks them for this valuable information about their internet connection
and asks them to hold for the next representative, and they go into the
Tier 1 queue. If they get it right, they get a third random question
from the bank, and if they get the third one right they go into the Tier
2 queue.
The hard part is making a big bank of questions that clueless people will
mistake for regular diagnostic questions but the sufficiently cluefull will
always be able to get the right answer. There will be a *handful* of people
in the middle who will know what's going on but maybe not know all of the
answers, but they can call a second time and hope to get easier questions,
and in any case they'll be *way* in the minority, if the questions are
written properly. (You have to write them so the wrong answers are very
obviously wrong only if you understand the question and seem to make sense
otherwise.)
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to write 100 questions as good
as the IP version question. That one's impossible for a techie to get
wrong, so impossible for a techie to get wrong that the correct answers
don't even have to be listed as one of the options, meaning basically
nobody will get it right if they don't know. Most of the questions will
be more like the second one; end users might possibly be able to guess them
correctly, which is why I think there should be three questions, not just
one. If many clueless people get through to Tier 2 only to find out
the circuit the computer's on tripped a breaker, the system fails. The
reason for the bank of course is so people in the know can't easily tell
morons "the secret" to get Tier 2 support; each person has to prove for
*himself* that he knows more than the Tier 1 support reps.
The risk inherent in this system is a PR risk; some end users might notice
that the questions are different each time, and, if they're smart (yes,
there are smart people who aren't knowledgeable about