The Wacky World of Chris Knight
Life is an adventure. A good life is worth selling the movie rights. These are my story notes.
These audio files came to me by way of an ex-Apple employee who had worked tech support. This person did not personally take any of these calls, but I trusted the source enough to know they were real. I know these are just eighteen calls out of millions that Apple Tech Support has handled over the years; but even as such a small sampling it serves as a reminder that not everyone out there is as comfortable with computers as us geeks. It has always been a struggle for me to get my co-workers to picture their parents, rather than an ideal user, when trying to design features and user flow.
When you call tech support, never, ever, admit that you have software on your machine for which you don’t have the install media. The tech support agent sounds a little suprised that this guy is admitting this. Pretending to be stupid is not a good way to cover this kind of mistake, no matter how much amusement it gives the tech support agent.
If I didn’t know for a fact that this was recorded years ago I would think that I was listening in to Jerry Taylor from Tuttle Oklahoma as he called CentOS about his website… This recording just goes to prove that you don’t have to be an elected government official with 22 years of experience in computer systems engineering and operation to make a complete ass of yourself. I guess Jerry Taylor can’t patent his approach to getting technical support, since this constitutes prior art. 🙂
Language and cultural barriers can be a painful obsticle when attempting to get technical support. Now that almost every major computer and networking company has outsourced some part of their tech support we encounter it all the time. This recording gives English speakers a bit of unique perspective, since we are able to perfectly understand the tech support agest as he tries to describe a common paper clip. Keep in mind as you listen to this that when you spoke to ‘John Smith’ in India about your Netgear router that everyone in his office understood what he was saying and they couldn’t understand why you were having such a hard time understanding his simplified explanation… This is a prime example of walking a mile in the other tech support guy’s shoes:
I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.