Halloween Horror Stories Support Edition
For this weekday Halloween, let's talk Support Horror stories. I feel like everyone who has worked support has a couple of these stories of badly behaved customers or terrible support situations. Here are two of my personal Support Horror Stories that are my favorites to tell:
The Tale of the Same Names
I worked doing support work for an email infrastructure company for many years. The main service that we sold was the ability to send a lot of emails very quickly. As you can imagine, that led to a lot of risk of customers using our service to send spam. To mitigate that risk, we had a whole system of delays, pauses, and suspensions if a customer were to exhibit spam-like behavior with their sending. This protected the company and often the customer, as account credentials were sometimes compromised, and spammers would use legitimate accounts to send bad email. But often we were just dealing with people who were using the system naively, not realizing they were sending like a bad actor.
I received a phone call from one such customer on day, and he was LIVID. He lit into me immediately after I answered "Hi this is Ryan from Email Company", calling me all kinds of names, telling me that I was personally destroying his business by temporarily stopping his ability to send emails. I went into a typical script for this kind of a scenario, giving the customer some empathy "I can understand this is a frustrating situation" and some options towards a solution "you should see an email from our compliance team in your inbox, and it lists the following options for you to get back up and running" but this guy had not yet burned out his anger--he was still emotionally compromised and it was going to be my problem. After attempting to redirect him, I ended up just letting him call me and the company names, and tell me how awful we were.
He turned a corner, however, when he started getting personal. "You're Ryan, right? I'm going to find you on LinkedIn and track you down" he said to me, and my small chuckle was NOT the response he was expecting. You see, at Email Company, there were 14 people named Ryan. We had a shared Hipchat room where we passed over mis-sent emails or chats. I sent a quick message in there to the effect of "sorry if anyone gets a weird LinkedIn message" and told the guy "Yeah, go ahead." I heard him angrily hit return on his keyboard and say "Oh" and he began listing different Ryans at the company. I was neither the oldest or newest Ryan at the company, so I was lucky that my profile fell towards the middle of the search, and after three or four names that I affirmed were not me, I stopped him. "Look," I said, "you can keep going through this list trying to find me, or we can work together to fix this. You said it was urgent, and this seems kind of like a waste of time." At this point, his anger had burned most of the way out, and he agreed to look at his email and reply so we could get things moving again.
The Tale of the Creepy Computer
(There's an image linked in this story that's a bit unsettling, you'll know if you want to see it based on the content of this story.)
I used to work at the mall for a well known computer company we'll call The Fruit Stand. I was doing computer repairs, late one night, when I came upon a computer that was having odd electrical issues. Ports were unreliable, the machine would lose power randomly. Based on the check in notes, I was going to open up the computer, check some connections to the power supply, and then reassemble to run some testing. As I began disassembly, I noticed some dust and bits of webbing. I pulled out the IR board (Fruit Stand desktop computers at the time came with a remote and had an infrared sensor behind the logo, so you could put your computer in "theater mode") and spotted some more webbing. I needed to document this, and the lighting in the repair room wasn't the greatest, so I took a photo with the flash on. The flash spooked a spider who was hiding in the plastic housing of the IR board, and it crawled out ONTO ME. I gave a little shout, shook off the spider and stomped it, and tossed the board onto the ESD mat onto the desk. The only other person in the back of house at the time was the manager working on the schedule in the next room. She asked "What was that?" and I responded, slightly frantic "There was a spider in that computer!" Next I heard the manager office door slowly creak closed. Then, from behind the closed door, I heard the manager ask "Is it dead?"
Not wanting to meet more spiders in that computer, I reassembled the computer, bagged it up, and sealed the bag with tape, and taped a piece of paper to the bagged computer that said "DO NOT OPEN: SPIDERS". I attached the image I'd taken to the case notes. The next day, I called the customer. After he asked what was going on with his computer, I told him "There was a spider in your computer, and I'm concerned there may be more," to which he responded "Well, did you run something on the computer to take care of them?" At that point, I explained "No, I'm not talking about computer bugs or viruses. There was an actual living creature inside if your computer. It crawled on me!" After he asked if I had killed the spider, and if there were any more, I told him that this was a mall computer store, not an exterminator, and he needed to please come pick up his computer.