I rarely blog about my work here, because I like to keep my work and private life totally separate. I don’t want to be one of those people you hear about who got sacked because of their blog (though if I turned out like Heather Armstrong I would be totally cool with it).

I work on the support desk for a software company that develops their own software, but I also have the opportunity to branch into other areas, like software testing and documentation, report building and BA work. I’m constantly revising and enhancing our support process, implementing new features with our support software. So it’s not a dull job, I’ve always got something on the go that keeps my interest. Yet, amongst all of that I still have my main role – answering questions from customers about our software.

The majority of our customers are awesome. They’re down to earth, genuine people who respect that I’m a human on the other end of the phone, and not just a slave to their every whim. They treat me with respect, and in return I do my very up-most to help them. But then we have the exceptions, and apparently this week they held a convention and decided to all approach me at the same time. So far this week I’ve had:

• A customer’s tech support trying to reinstall our software on a new OS. If you follow the instructions, the software is incredibly simple to install. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the programs you can get away with not reading the manual though, as you need to install it in a specific location with specific settings. If you don’t, it doesn’t work. Simple. So Mr. Tech Support calls in with a problem, and I check if he has followed the instructions. He promises me that he has. Then he informs me that he has copied over the software folder from the backup prior to the new OS – wrong move. It has all the incorrect old settings and won’t work. 20mins of discussing the issue with him, I decide to dial in. I explain what he should set up so I can dial in, and twice he gives me the incorrect login details. When I finally get access, I’m forced to sit through 5mins of him explaining to me how great Linux is, how he develops for Linux, and how the Linux community are so welcoming of him and he’s totally honoured by that. Granted it was now 5.30pm, after work hours, and I was missing a personal training session to try and get this issue fixed, I wasn’t impressed with the time wasting. A long story slightly less long, I found that he hadn’t read the instructions, had installed it in the wrong place, copied the “old version” somewhere else entirely, and generally screwed the whole thing up. One uninstall and reinstall later (total time < 10mins from when I finally got access) it was working. I couldn’t help but rub it in a little bit, but I’m sure he didn’t notice anyway.

• A woman called in for help because she couldn’t see the invoices she needed to pay. Despite my best efforts, she wasn’t able to find the Print Screen button on her keyboard. Apparently saying “top right hand corner of your keyboard, near your scroll lock” wasn’t quite direct enough. I ended up telling her to call her tech support, and advising them I needed a screenshot of the window she was looking at when trying to see her invoices. She had gotten me totally confused. The issue? She had accidentally resized the window so that she couldn’t see the invoices at the bottom, only the column headings.

I know I could have had it a lot worse this week. I once asked a customer for a screenshot, and double checked to see if he knew what that was. He assured me he did, and 10mins later in my email I found that he had gotten his camera out, taken a photo of the monitor, and emailed it to me. I had tears from laughing at that photo, and I still look at it whenever I need a good laugh.

I’m glad the company I work for is specialised though. Our client base are people who work with computers every day. Even if we have some shockers that don’t know where a print screen button is, she still knows the difference between left click and right click. And when I’m dealing with the worst of the worst, I just remind myself how grateful I am I don’t work for Bigpond dealing with grandparents who just bought their first ever computer and are trying to get on the world wide web.

Oh crap, that’s right. I promised Mat’s mum I would show her how to use the computer to set up her first email account. Why did I ever get involved in computers??