Posted on February 12, 2007 at 10:15 am | 
By 
I was asked recently, d’ya remember any stupid technical support calls from AOL? Wow, did that bring me back… call centre days in 1996. If I remember rightly it was all a bit mad. My team was full of smart, but really crazy people and sometimes a shift was better than a night at the comedy club.
We had calls from members who for whatever reason couldn’t get online. We even gave “Tech support” for some weird stuff like how do I get my toaster to work! Other’s called just simply to listen to the Irish accent… As soon as AOL came to Europe it was as if every lonely person with a problem suddenly had a free phone number to call.
The usual technical issues (culprits) were open failed, no dial tone and lost connection. Luckily at that time all we had to worry about was dial up connectivity problems. Most calls were simple to resolve. Some calls I can only describe as ’special’.
I once had a call from a member who couldn’t get a dial tone. Lucky for him he had a second phone line, bad news for me. So, we go through the usual trouble shooting, client set-up, verify the com port, hyper terminal etc. Several minutes into the call still no joy. So, I asked him to change phone lines and try dial out to AOL. Get this… his wife gets on the phone and asks if its really necessary…
Can you do a house call as my husband has recently undergone open heart surgery and is already on his knees from running up and down the stairs to answer your questions. Simply carrying the PC downstairs would absolutely kill him.
One of the lads on my team was known as Angry Finger. The laugh we used to get from transferring all Mac support calls to his extension. Initially he thought it was just bad luck that each call was a Mac user. When he realised what the rest of the team was doing, he used to give out and point – hence the angry finger nickname…
Another fond memory was when a woman called because she had lost her password for a porn site. A good friend of mine took this call, the funny thing was, he said she sounded fit
To add to that someone else was trying to upload their photo by holding it against the screen and selecting “send”.
Or get this, caller
Hello? is that AOL tech support? I can’t seem to get my foot peddle to work can you help please.
After some (well, a lot) of confused conversation on both sides, it turns out that the caller is using his mouse as a foot peddle.
Users also called up because when prompted to press ‘any key to restart’ they couldn’t decide!!
I suppose those were the silly early Web days, they provided us with laughter that help us through the day.
Half way through writing this post Paul reminded me of a few stories that come from some of the calls his team used to take. I think some of these have made it around the world by email ever since…
After numerous calls from one ’suspect caller’ complaining about AOL destroying his PC with a virus and refusing to return his original installation CD, the user was asked to post a copy of his installation disk to the New Technologies team in Dublin. So, a week later the Dublin office received a photocopy of a CD on a piece of paper.
—
User
… I keep telling you, I can’t get my CD to work, AOL is crap, it won’t install.
30 minutes into the call, the user admits to thinking the CD drive was a coffee cup holder.
OK shoe on the other foot
Technical support engineer (Derek) using the phonetic alphabet to explain how to configure a modem string
A for alpha, C for Charlie, ampersand (shift 7)… and U for You.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
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7 Comments
So far,
February 14, 2007 @ 
Seamus
Ha!
” A for alpha, C for Charlie, ampersand (shift 7)… and U for You.”
I remember it well, and if I’m not mistaken, the actual phonetic option he used was:
Y as in You.
He also used to like asking people if they had a dog…those damnable chewed up modem lines….