In article <telecom24.370.16@telecom-digest.org>, Fred Atkinson
<fatkinson@mishmash.com> wrote:
> I've long since lost count of how many times customer service and even
> technical support people have given me bad information. It's really
> pretty sad.
> The telephone, cable, and other high tech companies are hiring lost
> cost people due to the state of the economy over the last few years.
> A number of experienced people have been practically unable to get a
> position during this time. They are told they are 'overqualified'
> when they apply. But, the folks they hire are underqualified. And
> they don't do an adquate job of training the ones they do hire. The
> truth is, these companies don't want to pay for experience right now.
Sad, but true.
Yesterday I helped an elderly woman restore access to her dial-up MSN
account. It seems it just stopped connecting one day recently, and she
couldn't figure out why.
The MSN support person told her she needed to re-install Windows XP.
It turned out that the real problem was that her dialing sequence had
*70 prepended to disable call-waiting, and she had stopped carrying
call-waiting on her service. Dialing *70 just got the standard "Your
call cannot be completed as dialed" message.
<sigh>
John Meissen jmeissen@aracnet.com
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: _Thank you_ for doing the right thing
and helping that elderly lady get her service restarted. She most
likely now thinks of you as a hero for helping her as you did, and I
appreciate it also. For those of us who have _some_ understanding and
abilities with computers, between the worms, other viruses and spam/scam,
these machines are really no longer fun to use. Imagine how people
like your elderly friend -- who probably knows much less than many of
us -- must feel when their computers are repeatedly attacked. I make
no bones about it; the task of getting this Digest out a few times
each day is tiring, given my brain aneuerysm. But like the elderly
lady you helped, I also have a couple of very good friends (I think of
them as my 'tech support staff') who are quite patient with me when I
get threatened, as I did this past week with the virus in Internet
Explorer. (More than likely it was just the profile which got pretty
well trounced.)When I get frantic trying to clear those messes, these
guys very patiently walk me through how to repair the damage, etc.
PAT]
jmeissen@aracnet.com