An affliction of trained monkeys

Part of my job as a Resolver is to be available through an internal Web chat for our level-one techs in the Circulith and Gemini call centers.  They can ping us for help with hard problems, if they get a customer who wants a manager to yell at, or if they need special blessing for something that goes outside the rules.  And when new-hire level-one technicians first go onto the floor to take calls, they have to ping us for review and approval on every single “hard” call—cases that end in a dispatch of parts or a service technician.

Right now we have a bunch of new-hires just starting in both call centers, so the Resolvers are handling a LOT of Web chats.  Many of the chats are just rubber-stamping new-hire dispatches, but sometimes we get ones that make you wonder “which rock did we find this one under, and can we please send him back there??”  And these days an awful lot of that kind of chat is coming in from Gemini.

Late Friday afternoon my chat client “wheep”ed at me with an L1 on line from Gemini.  He told me his customer said that “she only has two percent of her memory free” and what should he do about it?  I made the mistake of thinking that he had already identified this as a real RAM issue and needed to help the customer kill background processes that were bogging down system performance.  I told him to look at the processes running in Task Manager to see if perhaps she had useless background guff (e.g., QuickTime auto-update) running that can be killed with impunity, and if he found anything, try turning them off with MSCONFIG to improve performance.  This is stuff that’s basic to Windows XP troubleshooting.  An end user might or might not know about it, but any Auric tech is supposed know how it’s done without having to be led by the hand.

Not this guy.  He didn’t even have enough gumption to know which running processes in TaskMan were legitimate and which might signal trouble, and when I told him to start MSCONFIG and try turning off startup items, his response amounted to “uh . . . what’s that?”  About that time I realized that if he didn’t know that much, he probably hadn’t grilled the customer about what she meant by “two percent free memory” and she might have nothing more than a full hard drive that needed clearing out.

I asked him a couple of questions that determined the customer did have a full hard disk, the customer couldn’t tell the difference between “memory” (RAM) and “drive” (hard disk), and the L1 either couldn’t tell the difference or didn’t know the right questions to ask.  I swore and rearranged my mind for a hard disk cleanout.

I told the L1 to open the Windows Explorer, un-hide the system and hidden folders, delete any leftover files in the user’s temp folders, delete the Internet Explorer cache files and sub-folders, then go to the Control Panel, open Add/Remove Programs, and start looking for unused or unwanted applications to uninstall.  I rattled off a set of commands to tell him how to unhide hidden folders in Windows Explorer.  (This is stuff I’ve been doing ever since Windows 95.)  He answered “What?  You mean Internet Explorer?”  I told him no, NOT Internet Explorer, go into Windows Explorer and do this.  In a minute he typed back “What is it?  I don’t know where that is.”

This time I swore loudly enough for the Tulip, in the cube next to mine, to hear me.   I didn’t have a technician on the other end of this chat, I had a trained monkey, and not a well-trained one at that.  I told him how to get to Windows Explorer (right-click My Computer, then left-click Explore from the context menu).  Even after that, and the explicit directions I gave him for finding temp files he could delete, he couldn’t manage to get anywhere.  (When I was young, the description West Texans used for people like this was “too dumb to pour piss out of a boot with the directions written on the heel.”)

To complicate matters, the customer refused to consider burning any data off to CD or moving files to some other location.  She also wouldn’t uninstall any programs regardless of whether they were wanted.  She even refused to uninstall iTunes, which had sneaked itself in as an unwanted piggyback on QuickTime, and was completely unused.  Instead, she asked couldn’t we send her a bigger hard drive.

I lost patience with the customer and the L1 both, and fired back, “No we cannot!  We are not responsible for being her housekeeper.  She has only one weapon against a full hard drive, and that is delete, delete, delete.  If she wants a bigger drive she can buy one from Spare Parts and install it.  And then she’ll have the happiness of reinstalling the OS and every last one of her applications from scratch and porting all her data across.  We can walk her through reinstalling the OS and drivers, but after that she is completely on her own.  Anything further is outside your scope.”

After a minute, the L1 typed back “She’s going to think about it.  That’s all I need.  Thank you.”  Obviously my refusal had been as welcome as a dog turd at a dinner party, but I can’t say I much cared by then.  Once the L1 disconnected, I sent a “coaching opportunity” note to his team lead that he needed to get a much firmer grounding in Windows, and described all the things he hadn’t known how to do.  The team lead may well ignore my note—they often do—but my recommendation’s on the record.

The flowerpot of the Chrysler Building has polished some menhaden.  Fnord.