Chantal - Have Laptop Will Travel

Even when I ask people if what they are looking at is the one next to the Z or under the question mark, I find out they are looking for both on the screen and have no idea at all what I am talking about. Another customer asked me why a particular problem had occurred. It soon emerged that no matter however untechnical or simplistic an explanation I gave her, she was physically incapable of understanding it. I’m not sure I quite understand how people who are employed to use computers to carry out their job description can be so paranoid about all aspects of their computers’working or all matters technical.

Providing technical support to a company you have never visited, to customers you never have nor never will meet is a strange enough concept in itself. Perhaps so is the idea of phoning a number to humbly ask for help from a complete stranger. It isn’t really in human nature. Many of the customers, probably assuming we are internal staff and therefore aware of their reputation and status, are disappointed when we treat them with no more respect than we would their lowly secretary. Given that it is the company’s partners who determine our fix deadlines, it is often amusing to hear them rail against our inability to fix hardware problems on the spot over the phone, or page someone to run down the corridor to their desk before they have completed their next sentence. Frequently, and especially when a call turns out to be lengthy – dialup problems invariably take half an hour to fix – we chat and exchange personal details and stories, never to hear from each other again. Should they call and reach me again, my head will be too full of other customers’ stories to remember their own. For us, it’s a strange parody of friendship and social contact, perhaps a bit more participatory than a soap opera, but still as illusory and ephemeral.

Some systems seem to have been designed specifically to increase our workload and reduce productivity. Still, nobody has seen fit to alter procedures accordingly. For example, explain an encryption system which requires you to enter a password on switching on your computer; should you forget your password, or should it not be accepted, you face being unable to use your computer for up to two days until it is reset by the local IT. Or other teams working independently of everyone, leaving us to apologise to angry customers for their negligence of their service level agreements. ‘Nobody from the Lotus Notes team has called me, I was told they’d phone me within two hours!’ Yes, well, they don’t. Won’t. Save your breath, save it for when two days have gone by and they still haven’t fixed your problem. Given most of our calls were about Lotus Notes, that means much of our time was spent apologising for, or blaming the Lotus Notes team. No, maybe half; the other half was devoted to clearing up messes caused by our colleagues in another office who did not really know enough to sit in front of a computer and telephone and consider themselves qualified to fix people’s technical problems. During a telephone interview for another helpdesk job, I was asked what frustrated me about this line of work; without hesitation, I complained about teams who are unable to carry out their work and colleagues who are too incompetent to do their jobs, thus increasing our workload unnecessarily.

Helpdesk: the combination of technical knowledge and highly developed bluffing skills.

Who chooses this line of work? I consider myself atypical; maybe others do as well. My last company hired people with a fundamental level of technical knowledge; this current one does not appear to have any real selection criteria, linguistically or technically. It seems fairly unanimous, however, that careers in technology offer the best opportunities and growth potential, no matter how lowly you start. They do not seem to consider what a limited field technical support is, however; certainly, you can move into training, problem management, incident management, networking or cabling, but how many of my helpdesk colleagues want to continue working in such fields? Working at IBM should be able to open future doors for me, however if my future employees were to realise the low technical level of even its technical staff, I think I would be back to unemployed. Being able to diagnose a hardware problem or know your way around the control panel does not indicate high quality management or programming skills, and being on the phones eight hours a day does not give anyone the opportunity to work on programming or management projects to build up their experience and portfolio.

If anything, judging by two sets of colleagues, helpdesk is simply something you do to earn an income while looking for another job. Perhaps this is not an entirely justified observation; when I joined my last team, we knew we were likely to be out of our jobs within a few months, and even the permanent staff with job security – our team leader, and the problem management team - were unanimously job hunting every chance they had. My current team has just completed its second week of training, and a suprising number of us are already looking for other work. Fortunately we are sufficiently bored during the day that one of the few things we can do to keep ourselves occupied is scour every job page known to us. Once on the floor, however, it is a different story; almost everyone I have spoken to has been working on the helpdesk for at least two years; too long for any helpdesk analyst. What does this tell us? That we are about to enter a role without promotion or career development opportunities. We can look forward to earning each of our ‘Love The Customer’ flags and ‘Love the Customer Awards’; however, too long on phones surely makes staff too jaded and weary to force the necessary positiveness and enthusiasm into their voices. One moment at my last job that I found hilarious was listening to one of the analysts mumble in a monotone, ‘Good morning Manolito speaking can I have your staff number oh sorry it’s afternoon, good afternoon Manolito speaking….’ without the slightest change of expression or inflection. He had been on the desk for over two years. Within six weeks I was talking like that as well, reacting with surprise when the customer turned out to be friendly or cooperative.

Several of the other trainees are extremely nervous about taking their First Call – perhaps as much due to linguistic difficulties as to the nature of the work – certainly, I postponed my first call for as long as I could, then was in the middle of laughing about something when the phone rang. The most important skill, I think, is to be able to say in a very cool and confident voice, ‘Bear with me for a minute while I put you on hold’, knowing you can squeal, panic or rack your brains in the lull. Sometimes I would go to someone to ask them for advice, only to chat about completely irrelevant topics until I managed to change the conversation to the problem at hand. At other times you might put someone on hold while you howl with frustration, or mutter under your breath. I don’t see why they should be so nervous, however; as newly trained staff – and I am starting to think the training period is an initiation in itself, more than anything else – we are not expected to know anything, and asking countless questions is simply a matter of form. Having reassuring excuses to put customers on hold will be as important as any amount of technical knowledge.
The other important thing I think to bear in mind is that the reason these people are calling you is because, ultimately, you know more about computers than they do. On this helpdesk, I am not entirely sure that is necessarily the case, but at least you have the power to assign their call to someone else who is expected to be able to resolve it within their allocated deadline.

Some problems are simply generic; you become so familiar with them within the first few calls that you forget how to resolve other problems during an epidemic. One of our phenomena was the ISP generating irrelevant error messages which simply meant ‘this line is busy’ or ‘this number is not working, please try another.’ All we needed to know was that they were using the Freephone number, and we could have the problem solved within a minute or less. A lot of technical support, however, simply seems to be a matter of common sense. Even if you do not know what the problem is, or how to fix it, knowing which settings to check is a logical first step. Perhaps a lot of what we do, at least initially or with an unusual problem, is basic guesswork; we are simply better informed than those who are not hired specifically for their intimate knowledge of menus and the control panel. Although both companies have online databases with solutions to most known problems – at Cap Gemini we rarely wasted our time using it, at IBM apparently it is worshipped – the entries are usually too lengthy to read, the solutions too complicated to dictate over the phone or time-consuming to implement when there is probably a shorter solution somewhere in our memories.

One of the things that worries me about working for IBM is its overtly strong company culture. Perhaps I was too spoilt in my last job, where there were few rules but enough allowance for our common sense to be able to work professionally and efficiently through our own initiative. The main rule was our opening speech; too much of what we say and do at IBM has already been predetermined, with no scope for deviation from the company line. I am reminded of the stereotypical telesales managers who ardently believe that if each employee recites the same speech, they will guarantee a sale; if they fail to, it is obviously because they digressed or ad libbed in some way, whether deliberately or subconsciously. Our trainer has already recited the list of rules, which exclude virtually any form of distraction or brainpower although we have also been told unofficially that these are not very rigorously enforced. I can’t imagine many people capable of deriving their life satisfaction from awaiting each new technical problem to solve, although that appears to be what awaits us. At least at Cap Gemini we could take pride in our technical ability, however what the situation appears to be now is that there is a very firm line between who has technical knowledge and who does not, and we are on the wrong side of that line. I’m not interested in an entry-level job, no matter how illustrious the company; what I want is to get back to what I do well, before my brain disintegrates in the face of Powerpoint-equivalent presentations.

I had meant for this to be an anecdotal, narrative piece. Here’s an anecdote, then. I used to sit next to Mano, who was acknowledged as being the most technical person on our desk. I listened in on his calls when I first started, and had never quite lost the habit of looking at his screen for something to read. One morning I looked over to read ‘Customer has funny little balls coming out of his new laptop.’ Apparently they were also kind of squishy and kind of bouncy, but he didn’t add that to the call details. We had a good laugh about it after the call finished: quite literally, there had indeed been funny little balls falling out of the laptop. About an hour later I had to ask our incident manager for advice on a problem, and overheard our team leader saying something like, ‘well, it does say ‘funny little balls’ in the call details, um…’ as he tried to negotiate over the phone with an equally baffled and annoyed member of the hardware team. When I returned to my desk, our team leader was discussing the matter with Mano. Apparently, at a loss, he had assigned it to the local IT, who had taken one look at the call details and decided that funny little balls couldn’t possibly be a software problem, must be hardware. The hardware team paid a visit to the customer and, similarly, had decided that they weren’t hardware, must be software. No idea what to do next. The funny little balls were simply remnants of packaging material that hadn’t yet been removed.

Mano received a Quality Issue for his description of those balls.