I recently heard of a PAUG member encountering a sales clerk who had rung up technical support for a malfunctioning office computer. The clerk had the mouse in one hand, the phone in the other and was wildly gyrating the mouse in the air saying, "But I am moving the mouse!"

It is stories like this that leave tech support people sighing. From the gent that used his CD-ROM tray as a coffee mug holder, to the secretary who thought the mouse was a foot pedal, stories of catastrophe and mayhem abound. The most frequent troubles lies in one of two areas: P.O.E. (Probable Operator Error) or recklessly designed software.

The scope of this column is so broad that it is going to take two months to cover it. This first part deals mostly with how to make the most of the fact that we are dealing with a human being on the other end of the line and with the background for why we approach technical support the way we do. Next month I'll give specific scenarios and how to deal with them.

Before I give you the golden words to say to get the best technical support, let me digress for a moment and share some of my own observations concerning my former life as a Microsoft support engineer.

As a technical support engineer, no one likes you. If you can live with that stigma, you'll do fine. The customers don't like you because you can't pull answers out of the air, the management doesn't like you because they have to deal with irate people who don't like your answers, the programmers don't like you because you document bugs in their program that a cabbage should have noticed, and the hardware vendors don't like you because you send people to them to get updated drivers (that they have not yet written because they "haven't gotten around to it.")

Not a cushy life.

Thus, it comes as no surprise to find that support engineers don't have a whole lot of goodwill toward people that attack them personally as rude, incompetent or as liars. (That isn't saying that some aren't, but screaming it at them isn't going to move you toward getting your problem solved.) The cherry on the top is that tech support is one of the lowest paying jobs in the computer industry, despite the fact that getting the right answer, right now, is what keeps the top end of the organizational food chain in business. This is akin to balancing the USS Nimitz on a teacup: Don't expect the teacup to last for long. Because these jobs are so low on morale and pay, support engineers operate on in a "revolving door" environment, gobbling up all the knowledge they can and then leaving to become consultants where they can earn significantly more money.

Based on this anecdotal knowledge of the working conditions of a technician, I hope everyone can see that it does pay to be nice to your technician. This doesn't mean that you act like a rug; Just keep a positive attitude when dealing with them. Be prepared to be humble and contrite. If you don't know those words, look them up.

Let me draw an analogy: Your 1967 Peugot breaks down and you drag it in to the Peugot shop. Do you expect the mechanics to push everything to the side to get your car in immediately? No, you'll likely be asked to wait or to leave the car. When you return to talk over the diagnosis with the mechanic (who has been trying to interpret your problem statement: "It went whoop-whoop-drict!-bllrrr..") and he suggests that it is a faulty fuel jet, do you argue with him? Worse yet, do you call him a liar or suggest that he is lazy and doesn't want to deal with it?

I think the parallel is clear: we give cars, washing machines, toasters, and vibrating armpit rests more latitude for breakdown and trouble than we give a computer. The reasons for this are two-fold: As a culture we have been told that computers are going to make our lives much easier. Unfortunately, so much of our technology is based on the real knowledge of so few individuals that we can't all be gurus. Therefore, most of us limp along, waving the magic stick (mouse?) the shaman gave us and muttering what we hope are the right incantations. Get the word order mixed up and you can accidentally raise a digital demon.

The second reason we expect a computer to be as straightforward as a shovel, is that we have no mental concept of anything so complex. Just the boot up procedure of a computer involves processes that are orders of magnitude beyond the next most complex thing we can imagine. Even Programmers no longer directly address the hardware of a computer; They simply "call" a function that someone else wrote and move on to the next task. The stratification of knowledge is truly frightening, so it is not surprising that things occasionally go wrong: Compound the inbred complexity with a poor or incompatible hardware or software design and you have a recipe for disaster.

These incompatibilities are part and parcel of living in the market driven world: every hack programmer and his brother "Bubba" believes that they have developed a premiere protocol and intentionally design it to be proprietary so they are ready to make a killing on licensing the royalties if their product becomes the new standard. This attitude, while it makes sense to the business mind, drives users and tech support personnel to the edge. Intel did this with the 3DR solid model rendering system. Just after Caligari announced the inclusion of 3DR into their popular trueSpace 3D rendering package, Intel got run off the road as the new OpenGL protocol passed it by at Warp 9. So all of the trueSpace users are stuck with a 3DR system that no one supports and no one is writing drivers or hardware to support.

After doing application and system support for the past 3 years, I believe that it is more than an anti-social mindset that keeps programmers locked in their digital deprivation tanks: I think they are afraid of the users revolting and coming after them with torches and dunking stools. Consequently, they set up unwary support engineers like dummies along the parapet of their castle wall to take the slings and arrows of outraged users while they give themselves raises and company cars to make their getaway with.

So most of all, be aware that the person that you have been waiting for 40 minutes to talk to didn't design the computer, Operating System or application. They are typically some underpaid, overworked, stressed out computer mechanic who is used to having everyone not like him. If you can express confidence in their ability, compliment their knowledge, and express your annoyance at the problem and not at them, you will find most engineers will be happy to help because they are, after all, in that line of work because they like to solve problems. Focus on the problem and not on the personality and you will have a hard time failing.

The notable exceptions are the fodder for next month.

Peace,

Webwalker