0800 The Truth (behind support calls)

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL: The support desk reveals the truth behind those really stupid support calls.

Over the years anybody who mans a support hot-line starts to build a selection of support call anecdotes, some of which are genuine, and some of which are part of the urban myths of support calls.

Normally these calls are held within the cadre of support technicians and consultants, never revealed to mere end-users. But today we break the rules and for you - our support users - those support calls are revealed...

On keyboards and mice

Of course the mouse is not obvious until you know. There are those who try and talk to it, those who use it like the remote control for the TV, but the most difficult is the poor lass who found the mouse was "difficult to use". She was wheeling the mouse across the screen, which of course gave some sort of related movement, but...

Caller: "The dust cover on my mouse makes it very difficult to use".
Hot-line: "Yes, and have you actually tried removing the mouse from its packaging?"

Caller: "I've tried everything to get this computer started, but no matter how hard I push on the foot pedal it still doesn't go."
Hot-Line: "Sorry madam, that's your sewing machine, please put the 'foot pedal' on the desk, that is your mouse." (and the conversation goes downhill from there as some poor hot-line bod tries to teach computing over the phone).

Caller: "My keyboard has stopped working since I cleaned it"
Hot-Line: "I'm sorry to hear that, how did you clean it?"
Caller: "Well, first of all I shook out all the biscuit crumbs, then washed the coffee stains off in the bath."

Caller: "I have the wrong keyboard."
Hot-Line: "What makes you say that?"
Caller: "It has no 'any' key, and I keep getting told to press the 'any' key."

On support calls

Of course a lot of companies provide support only to named contacts, so the consequence of this is:
Hot-Line: "What is your name?"
Caller: "Er, I'm not sure, it could be one of three!"

Hot-line: "Yes sir, the information you require is on page 9 of the manual"
Caller: "Can you hold while I have a try?"
Background whispers: "He's right. It's there."
"I said you should have looked in the book."
"I know, I know. He's on the line. You talk to him"
"I didn't call him. I didn't screw up. Just hang up - maybe he won't notice."
"OK", click, beeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Hot-Line: "So you have your fax ready, now just press the Send key"
Caller: "OK", rustle, rustle, "It's still not working!"
Hot-Line: "Excuse me, just where is the fax?"
Caller: "I'm holding it up against the screen now."

On floppy disks:

Of course, when diskettes were truly floppy the biggest problem was always those people who dutifully made a backup copy, checked that it worked again and then promptly put it in the typewriter for typing on the label...

Since then diskettes have become more solid, a bit like the callers...

Hot-Line: "OK, now put the floppy disk into the drive and close the door."
Caller: "OK", sounds of floppy going into machine, footsteps across the office, door closing...

Hot-Line: "I'm sorry, could you send me a copy of the diskette in the post?"
Two days later, arrives an envelope containing a photo-copy of the diskette in question.

On hardware:

Caller: "My cup holder has broken"
Hot-Line: "Uh, what cup-holder? Did you get this as free gift or something?"
Caller: "I don't know, it slides in and out and says CD-ROM on the front, does that help?"

After many warnings about not turning off their Unix machine without closing down first: Caller: "My terminal has just exploded, and there's glass and smoke everywhere, is it okay to turn the computer off?"

On support consultants

Mind you, even us support gurus start off at the wrong end some times. Fifteen years ago when I first joined Uniplex my very first task was to specify the new look menus (we're talking V5 here if anybody remembers). So, first day at work, keen to make a good impression. I typed a few lines in, saved the file, called it up again just so I knew how to drive Uniplex. Then I sat at the machine and typed all day long, saving regularly (as you do) and ignoring the beeps about Demonstration Mode, not aware that Uniplex's demo mode only saved the first 20 lines...

And of course, for anybody who has supported any computer, any where...
Caller: "My printer isn't working properly"
Hot-Line: "Oh god, I mean good, I mean sorry", mumble, mumble, quiet hysterical laughter followed by "they're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee..."

MEANWHILE AT THE PSYCHIATRIC SELF-HELP HOT-LINE

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatric Self-Help Hot Line, please select from the following options:"

If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press one repeatedly.

If you are co-dependent, please ask someone else to press two.

If you have multiple personalities, please press three, four, five or six.

If you are paranoid please just stay on the line, we know who you are and where you live already

If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and the little voices in your head will tell you which buttons to press.

If you are a manic depressive, press all the buttons at once, and no-one will answer.

If you are dissociative, press no number and you will be disconnected immediately.

AIX NEWS

Firstly, AIX 4.3 is with us now, it was released in October. Key features in this upgrade:

The web integration includes the Lotus Domino Webserver giving you instant web hosting abilities for Internet or Intranet. The web server also supports remote management over the internet from any browser.

One of the quieter, but so useful benefits is the ability to do a completely parallel operating system installation. This means you can perform your system update, at your own pace, without having to bring the system down (until you reboot). It also means you are not committed to the upgrade.

Believe me, when you've done as many system upgrades as I have and you are continually under pressure to get the system back up and running as soon as possible this is a great benefit. I only wish Microsoft and others would follow suit.

Also, in a separate announcement, Novell has announced NDS (directory service) support for AIX. If you are a Novell shop with AIX tacked on this will be great news!

WARNING FOR AIX 3.2.5 USERS

As of 31/12/97 all official support for AIX 3.2.5 will cease. If you haven't already moved to AIX 4.xxx you really should any day now!

MANAGING DESKTOP SOFTWARE IN LARGE ORGANISATIONS

OK, so you've got all your users on the latest version of Word, and along comes an update, just how do you deliver that to all your users sensibly?

I've recently been spending a lot of time at Sheffield Further Education College. Sheffield FEC is Europe's largest FE college, with over 25,000 students.

They run on a Novell network support a few thousand PC workstations. Here they are, a nice stable system, until they want to deliver a software update to all desktops.

So, the simple management process is to set the update for automatic delivery on next login. Except when a few thousand people login at 9.00am on a Monday morning you find your network gets completely saturated.

Then you find that delivering that many updates in a short space of time overruns the compression system, causing a massive disk overflow.

So, this in turn means you have to restore from backup, which also overflows the compression system...

Now, this just happens to be a Novell system, but clearly this problem exists anywhere PC's are in use, regardless of the backend system. Even Microsoft's widely hyped Zero Administration won't help with all these problems.

WHY CITRIX WOULD HAVE HELPED

It is another one of the issues where the Citrix, multi-user for NT (the Hydra solution in NT 5.0) would win hands down. Here all you would need to do is make a centralised server update and all users automatically pick them up. No horrible extensive network downloads, no massive disk updates, just nice, simple centralised administration.

In the end the college lost 10,000's of man hours work (each hour downtime is over 5,000 lost man hours of courses!) Not through any real failure of system administration, but because the system architectures themselves are not built for this kind of operation.

Now anyone from a Unix background will now be shaking their heads and asking "Why do they do it?" To which there really is no good answer. PC's are not multi-user systems, no matter how much extra stuff we bolt on around the outside (or inside) your PC, it is still not a multi-user system and does not have the 20 years of experience of Unix (or VMS or whatever) in managing large scale multi-user environments.