The call lab and Tonya

We have our final exam in training class tomorrow, and Monday we’re to be turned out onto the floor as Real Live Support Techs.  Not that we haven’t been Kinda Live Techs already, because we spent most of the day Tuesday and today actually taking live support calls in what’s known as a Call Lab, diagnosing and troubleshooting under supervision.  ’Course, with all the Web-based internal diagnostic tools we’re given, you could likely train a Village Idiot to troubleshoot computers.

We weren’t turned completely loose today.  As trainees we could do the troubleshooting and create repair tickets, but then had to wait for a coach to review and approve what we did.  That’s mostly to the good; it’s already kept me once from sending out the wrong part altogether.  The bit that isn’t good is that waiting for review added several minutes to the time the customer had to hang on the phone, waiting for us to say “OK, the system approved the request” and give them the trouble ticket reference number.

All of today’s calls were real work.  I didn’t get a one that was a quick transfer-to-the-correct-queue or answer-a-fast-question.  Every one was a troubleshooting call with parts dispatches, the kind where you only get off the phone in twenty minutes if you’re both fast and lucky.  I wasn’t lucky; mine tended to run thirty to fifty minutes, with one hour-and-a-half marathon that made me more than an hour late for lunch—and being more than an hour late for lunch, when lunch was supposed to be at 12:30, meant the in-building cafeteria had already closed the line by the time I got there, so I ended up with a mediocre ham and BLT wrap out of the cold case.  My stomach wasn’t happy about this at all, and kept sending it back to visit all afternoon.

The marathon call was one I felt really pleased with, though.  A woman called in from a Jackson-Hewitt tax service office in Florida with a no-POST situation:  black screen and a message saying “Press F1 to continue, F2 to enter System Setup.”  Seeing that message means that something major has just gone wrong with the computer, and it is not time to do the Happy Dance.

We began troubleshooting.  Pretty quickly I eliminated all the fast and easy fixes, and we got the to truth of it, which was that she was going to have to open up the box and get her hands in there.  I’d already decided from the tone of the conversation that I was not talking to a geek and she didn’t have big tech skills, so I asked if she was willing to do stuff inside the computer case as part of the troubleshooting, and if she wasn’t comfortable with it, she sure didn’t have to.  She told me she was willing to try, so I waded in.

Now let me reiterate:  I can’t see the box she’s working on.  I do have photos of a system teardown I can refer to so I know what a typical example of this model looks like inside, but I was depending on her to be my eyes and my hands as we went through the process.  She had to describe what she saw and heard for me, and I had to be able to tell her what to look for and how to take it all apart and put it back together.  Try doing it sometime, blindfolded like that.  It’s an education.

We ended up stripping the system down almost completely.  Following my directions, she unhooked all the cables from the back of the box, opened it up, unhooked all the internal data and power cables, disconnected assorted other wires, and pulled out the RAM sticks.  The only things left inside were the motherboard and the power supply, which is about as close as can be to having an empty chassis and still have something to operate.  She told me about the diagnostic lights on the back of the case and what they did in different situations, hooked up parts one at a time when I told her, to see how far the boot process would go each time, and generally acted like an intelligent assistant ought to.  She was the kind of caller every support tech hopes he’ll get when the phone rings, and I said as much to her.  She deserved to be complimented, and the more so after she told me that she’d never opened a computer case before in her life.  Complete novices usually don’t do nearly so well.  In return she complimented me on my patience and skill with her and the call, said she’d learned a lot about the inside of a computer today, and allowed it wasn’t near as scary as it first seemed.

So far I’ve been lucky on the phones.  I haven’t yet got the caller I know I’ll get one day soon, who’s shouting as soon as I pick up the phone because he’s so mad at the computer and the situation and who knows what.  Those are the calls where I have to pull myself out of the queue for a few minutes once they’re done and try to compose myself.  But as long as I can have some callers like Tonya in Florida to make me feel like I did some good, I think I might be able to tolerate the others.

Sailor Moon must seize the blue sex toy from Jean Chrétien.  Fnord.