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My coleague's story

- before leaving after long day at the office final look at support cases (after official support hours)
- sev1 ticket logged an hour ago, noone called us (although should have; after support hours)
- angry manager calls and demands to get in touch with the client immediately (we're already after support hours, FTS should pick the case, not us)
- we reach out. Customer has business-impacting case
- after initial info gathering: some cert got expired, they got a new one and placed it in the app's directory. The app still does not work
- the first question we ask: "are you sure you have placed it in the right directory?"
- "yes, we are sure. No problems there" - answers a voice with indian accent
- noone finds the root cause for hours.
- It's already 1am
- someone from client's specialists comes up with an idea: "are we sure the cert is in the right place? Let's try to move it to the same directory the old one was in the first place"
- .................................................
- production is working again
- "Why didn't anyone from support suggest this?!?!"
- .................................................
- 2am. Case solved, manager is informed everything's allright now.
- In the morning we get yelled at by the manager bcz we supposedly missed a sev1 ticket and were incompetent during the conf. call

This reminds me why I stay away from support. And why I started hating people. And why I do not work with indians (our ways are too different for me to stay sane and not to kill anyone).

Comments
  • 3
    Ahh, support... Don't you just love it? :D

    Jokes aside, I'm on active support for a product and well... I can say that - people are too lazy to do something themselves and actually asks support to fix it. And I mean it! - you have to fix it for them. Not ask if they did something, just go and fix. NO QUESTIONS ASKED. Otherwise... You are bad support.

    Had few customers shouting at me that our product does not work, took over 2 hours each time to figure out that there was an error on their implementation and not our service. This lead to the question: Why is your service not supporting my implementation? IT SHOULD.

    So... I know that feel :)
  • 0
    @rutee07 I think it's time for you to leave support :)
    After 3.5yrs as unix/linux servers' support I've stopped answering phonecalls and only worked with email and shell. I was seriously afraid I'm gonna start yelling if another call came from a particular country *wink wink*.
    [I already had a couple of anger outbursts. Thanks God clients accepted my applology and I wasn't fired]
  • 0
    My most often repeated phrase to clients is this

    "Ok but let's do XYZ again anyway just to be sure"
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