I Really Don't Understand People

I work at a computer helpdesk for a health care organization and answer calls all day long about software and hardware issues. Some of these calls are from people who are at home and are using our remote portal website to login to the system from home and either check their email or do some work. When we get these calls from remote users the first thing we determine is if they have a company owned laptop that we built and sent home with them or if they are just using their own personal computer to connect. Obviously we are responsible for making sure the remote portal is working, their login and password is working, and once they are connected we support everything on our side of the network that they are doing. If they are using a company owned laptop that we sent them home with, then we are also responsible for figuring out what settings on the laptop may be causing the problem they are having. If they can't use our pc to connect to their home wireless, for example, that's our problem and we need to work on resolving it. However, if they are using their own personal pc we are not at all responsible for anything at all that happens prior to logging in to the remote portal. Your laptop won't find your own network? Not my problem. It's your pc and your network, you figure it out. Call Dell. Call your ISP. Call your dad. I don't care because I am not responsible for your stuff.

The reason we operate like this is simple. One, we are being paid by our company to answer the phone for issues affecting the production of our co-workers. The fact that you can't get to www.google.com on your home pc is not something I am getting paid to take care of. It's a waste of company time and money. Second, we simply can't be responsible for perhaps accidentally messing up your pc. I'm sitting in a cubicle in town. I can't see anything about your pc. I don't know what version of Windows you're running. I don't know how your husband setup your wireless router or who your ISP is. I am clueless. So when I get a call like I did this morning I usually just explain that because it's a personal pc and the issue has nothing to do with connecting to our system remotely then I am unable to help. The lady that I told this to this morning, however, did not take kindly to it at all. AT ALL.

She called in because she is continously getting a pop-up dialog box saying that her Adobe Updater has failed to install the latest update. We went through several minutes of conversation involving me explaining that Adobe had nothing to do with connecting remotely, so the message was more than likely related to settings on her personal pc. She accepted that but still wanted to know if I could help her. I explained I could not because I knew nothing about how her computer was configured. She stated that she had called in before and someone had helped her get rid of this message. A) Fucking Whoopty Do, Goody For You. And B) Too bad you can't remember what they did you moron.

Of course, I did not say either of those things and I apologized once again but kindly declined to help her. I did suggest that maybe her user account didn't have enough rights to let the install complete and that whoever set up her pc might be able to give her administrator rights to see if that took care of the problem. But then she wanted to know if I could just tell her how to get into the task manager and do that herself. Uh... NO. It's not done in task manager and for the 4th time WE DO NOT WORK ON PERSONAL PC'S BECAUSE WE CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTALLY MESSING SOMETHING UP. At which point she said "Well what if I just call back and someone else answers the phone and they help me?"

My response? "That's a great idea, you should do that." CLICK. Yep, I hung up on her. Which I never do with customers. It got that bad. I don't understand people. Oh well, only thing left to do is hope she doesn't remember my name. Because if she does, I'll be hearing from the boss in no time. Sigh.