Thursday, August 11, 2005

Tech support Wizard?

Tech support?
A good friend of ours said that their 20-something daughter in Florida needed help because she didn't know how to get her new printer to work with her laptop. I figured I could walk her through it on the phone (to Florida) since I have set up hundreds of printers and drivers. I was not prepared for this, though. It took about 30 minutes for 5 minute's worth of actual work.

The daughter, I will call her "Jane", is a teacher, and I figured would be somewhat savvy. NOT! I asked what the problem was, and she explained the printer was still in the sealed box, she was afraid to open it, but she thought that the "wire thing" (USB Cable) that her mother sent was the right one probably. Now at this point, I should have told her I would call back after she had it set up and connected, but I was on their phone, and wasn't going anywhere, so I gritted my teeth and grinned, and said, "First, take it out of the box and take all the packing and tape off of it." This took her many minutes with me coaching.
Jane, "What is this little cube box thing that says Ink Cartridge on it?"
Me: "It is an ink cartridge. Take the tab off it and put it in the printer."
"Where in the printer?", said Jane.
I said I had never seen the printer, so she would have to figure it out. This went on and on. . .

About 98 % of my frustrating step by step process was through, and all there was was to send a test print to see if we had succeeded, she denied me of this pleasure as well. All of a sudden she unfolds a big quick start instruction sheet and says, "Hey, this has all of this stuff on here that we have been doing!" And she starts READING IT TO ME! 1. take tape off 2. unwrap black cartridge, pull tab, etc. etc.... EEEEKKK! I had to laugh, because I had to stop her from going over this back to me, but she didn't get it. Finally, I got her to print a test page, which would have been automatic if she had read the instructions.

Then I get ten minutes of praise and nonsense from her and her mother about how smart I am for doing this , as if it were a wizard and they were mere muggles. "Oh, it was nothing", I heard myself saying, If they only knew how true that was.

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