Welcome to Nowhere

Cross-posted to arinoch and techsupport.

This post Puts me in mind of my year and a half working for Dell. I spent most of it working nights, and my manager just so happened to be about as blatantly honest as they come. To agents, to customers, whatever. If you’re a complete fucking moron, he’d call you a complete fucking moron. And if you were a customer, he’d do it in such a way you had absolutely no idea you were just called a complete fucking moron. We had a couple folks on our team with definite middle-eastern accents. One of these guys happened to be Lebonese, I believe. So anyway, enough background.

About 3:30 EST on a Saturday night, when you’d think most people would either be sleeping or getting absolutely smashed rather than trying to fix their computer so they can go back to their porn, we just so happened to be getting completely and totally slammed. There was all of 1 person on average not on a call for probably the better part of 2 hours. At about that time, the Lebonese dood happened to be that guy. He sat like right behind me, so I got pretty much a front row seat to what went on. This New York sounding dood calls up, and for obvious reasons, ends up talking to mister Lebonese. Except he’d really rather not. No sooner does the guy get halfway through “thank you for calling Dell” does the guy hang up. Couple seconds later, he calls back. Gets the same agent. Hangs up again. This time, he at least has the good sense to wait a minute or two. Then again, he calls back. Third time’s a charm. The guy behind me gets the call again, and yet again the caller drops it.

Now, by this time I’ve got the customer I’m working with restarting his computer, so I mute the thing, and call over my manager. I give him the 30-second run down on what’s going on, manager dood tells the agent to hand over his headset for a sec. We’re laying bets at this point he’s moronic enough to try it again. And sure enough, no sooner does the manager get the headset on then this guy calls in again. This time, manager dood goes through our thanks for calling opening. Customer then goes into about a 2 or 3 minute “thank God I finally got someone who speaks English” shpeel here. Manager mutes the phone, looks over at me and just sort of giggles a little. If anyone’s worked with this guy for any period of time, you just know he’s mentally taking notes, and as soon as customer dood comes up for air, he’s gonna be nailed to the wall. The manager just so happened to be black, and Louisiana born. So in other words, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone more American sounding in that call center. Customer finally stops yapping long enough for my manager to get a word in, and he ever so politely advises him that he is, in fact, not a tech support person (he’s technical, but they didn’t pay him to fix customers’ shit… that’s what we’re for), he’s a supervisor. Customer’s all “I don’t care, I’m just glad you speak my language.”

Caller then tries to get my manager to fix his problem anyway. Finally, after about another 15 minutes or so of back and forth, this happens. “Okay, sir, I’m gonna stop you, right there. No, just stop talking for a second. Now, here’s what’s happening. We’re incredibly busy tonight. The agent you just hung up on 4 times is the only one we’ve got not on a call right now. So, your choices are this. You can let him fix your problem so you can enjoy the rest of your night, or you can hang up right now and call back in the morning. If you call back tonight, you’re gonna be talking to me again. And if we have to have this conversation a second time, I’ll note in your account that you’ve repeatedly called in to and hung up on our agents, and you won’t be getting support from anyone. The choice is yours, and I’ll even give you a couple seconds to make it.”

The manager didn’t say a thing after that. He just handed it back to my coworker, and his problem was solved like 10 minutes later. And for like the next week, we all took turns immitating this idiot out of extreme boredom (Saturday was apparently fix your computer day that month, it was dead for the rest of the week). Sometimes, the stuff that goes on even manages to surprise me. And that doesn’t happen often.