Tech Support Drone

I talk to people all over the world in my job, and over the past six months I have noticed a few fundamental differences in how they approach their job.

Europeans are my baseline. They are generally very knowledgeable about what they do – not all of them, but most of them. They are no-nonsense and interested in solving problems without assigning blame because they do understand Murphy’s Law very well. French customers will always ask for French support even when their English is quite good.

I seem to get a lot of Americans whose knowledge of the subject matter is very basic. Not all, mind you – but a lot seem to require much less advanced help than Europeans. Management escalations also seem to be more common and more serious for them.

Japanese customers are very precise in their questions and will want to know the answers in unending detail. They’ll often follow up with questions for clarification or further details. It seems like they want to know every quirk and every contingency. I think this is their way of covering themselves in case their co-workers, bosses, or customers ask them and they do not want to have to reply “I do not know”.

Indians are the most “difficult” of the bunch. They seem to lack creativity and they will often ask a question multiple times, even after it has been answered. For example, I had one customer who asked me every few minutes “Can just reboot the device on our end?” – to which I repeatedly told him, “No, do not do this, you will lock yourself out of it.” They also expect you to babysit them the most, and they will very often ask you to “give them an official answer in writing for my management”. The reason for this is very simple; it seems that in India, an employee can – and often will – get fired for the smallest mistake. I actually can understand it – if there is almost no job security, you will not want to risk yours by taking any chances. Still, it makes working with them a little difficult at times. At least the Indian guys are unfailingly polite and exceedingly patient.

“Mobbing” is a German word for harassment of bullying at work. One of the really nice things when I started this job was that I was completely unaware of powerplays and who plays favorite with whom. Well, some months alter, these things are beginning to come to the surface: I really don’t like when person A tries to tell The Boss what to do about person B. Especially when person A is someone who is trying to get his brother hired. Person A has been nothing but polite to me, but I am making a mental note about this and watching my back.

I hate office politics.

“I cannot configure my cluster,” the customer told me on the phone. “I need your help.”

“What is the problem, sir?”

“Every time I connect to my server, it just disconnects me.”

“How do you connect? Telnet, ssh, web gui?”

“SSH. The web page does work.”

I pondered this for a moment. I had the customer check that ssh access was actually enabled. It was. So I asked the customer to tell me exactly what steps he was taking, and how exactly he was getting disconnected. Did the connection get refused, or closed?

“Closed – it just says ‘disconnected’ in Putty’s text window.”

Wait a minute. Putty doesn’t do that.

“Sir, it doesn’t mean your ssh disconnected – it just means your cluster nodes are disconnected. If you try to enter some text, it should work.”

“You know something,” the customer replied after I heard some keyboard clicks, “it does.”

Well, another job well done. I then walked the customer through a configuration I had never seen before – I am still learning about these products – and it actually worked afterwards. At least I now know why I am sitting on this end of the telephone line.

I like my job. I enjoy helping people. And the conditions and pay are, over all, okay; otherwise I wouldn’t do what I am doing. Still, there are days when I just don’t know why I put up with it. Like today. Because today is a holiday in Germany, and I am sitting in the office along with some – not all – of my co-workers.

There’s not really much going on, either – it’s quite evident that a large chunk of our customer base is sitting in a beer garden somewhere. And worst of all, we don’t even get any overtime pay for this – just another day off within six weeks. Crummy deal.

Thursday afternoon – in the US – a new patch for an important feature of our product was published. This usually results in an increased number of tickets and calls because a lot of people don’t read the release notes, and another large group of customers actually has trivial questions not specifically covered by the release notes. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem, except that half of our office was tied up in interviews (we’re hiring) and the US East Coast gang went on a long team meeting when they got to the office. Result? Three guys had to handle the traffic that ten should have handled.

Unfortunately I was one of those three guys.

By the time USEC got out of their meeting and I was finally able to close the last of my tickets, I was physically exhausted. I think I went to bed by 9pm and slept for nine hours.

Don’t get me wrong – Patches happen, and the interviews had of course been scheduled well in advance; but one would think a team meeting could be delayed or canceled. Meh.

So let’s get started with the most important thing on this blog: Me. I write it, so without me there wouldn’t be any blog. Ha. Take that, modesty.

The foundation of this weblog, yesterday, coincides with my birthday – May 5th, so I am now a 31 years old guy (or “old man”, as I tend to think of myself). I live in the beautiful city of Munich, Germany, but was born elsewhere; I came here in December of 2007 to start my current job in technical customer support for a very large multi-national IT company. Hence “Tech Support Drone”. I like my company, and I like my job, but if you know IT you’ll know that it is a very thankless job and you get to talk to a lot of people who should clean streets instead of admin computer networks. We’ll get into that more over time.

As a self-professed geek, I have an interest in science and technology in general. I read (way too little at the moment) and I also write (just for fun, I don’t publish stuff). I enjoy traveling, and while I am not the most-traveled geek in the world, I have gotten around as much as I could afford to. And of course I also treasure a good game of Dungeons & Dragons (or one of the various derivatives) but haven’t found a gaming group here in Munich yet.

I’m single – this isn’t to say that I am a hermit, like many geeks tend to be, or that I am a thirty-year old virgin. Rather, I suffer from the problem of seemingly being unable to find a woman that is interesting enough and that I can get along with for extended periods of time. I’ll get into more detail later; my relationships tend to be weird and messy. I am currently interested in a Japanese girl, where the complication is that she’s back in Tokyo for now. As you can imagine that isn’t helping.

I think this covers the essentials. That’s little old me – unfortunately not a millionaire playboy, but I guess I could have had worse luck in life so far.