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One frustration I deal with is people that can’t seem to ever get to the point.
Sometimes I will get some pretty outlandish emails that we like to call “novels” in the tech room. A novel does not always mean a long-winded email either. To be a novel, one must color their email with events of the day that have absolutely nothing to do with the reason why they are emailing technical support in the first place.
Here’s an example of a novel:
“One day I was painting my grandmother’s house. She’s rather old so she can’t paint it herself, so she called me up and asked me to drive over and do it for her. The house used to be white, but she felt that maybe a nice shade of light blue might improve the value of the home. While I was carrying my supplies around to the back of the house, I saw the dog lying motionless on the ground. I set down my brush, my paint can and my ladder and walked over to the dog. Much to my surprise, the dog was dead. I was rather sad as this dog had been in the family for nearly 20 years and I have grown very attached to her. I ran inside the house to tell my grandmother about the tragedy. My grandmother was in the laundry room, which is past the kitchen and on the other side of the dining room. To get to it, I have to walk through the living room. The living room is where my grandmother’s computer is located. As I walked past the computer, I noticed a blue screen of death up on the monitor.”
Of course, this is not an actual email, but it’s very much like some of the emails that I will get from time to time. I’m dead serious.
About three quarters of the way through such an email, the customer may begin to mention what troubleshooting they did or what component they figured out to be the cause of their problems, but when I’ve got about 50 more emails in my mailbox that need tending to and 90% of those emails are only one to two paragraphs long, I may miss some of the more important information conveyed in the novel because I’ll tend to skim.
“Did you reinstall Windows?” I will ask.
“As I said in page three, paragraph four of my original email;” the customer would respond, “Yes, I did reinstall Windows.”
Some of the customers I get just love to come to their own conclusions about what kinds of problems they are having and what’s causing them instead of emailing or calling tech support with the symptoms they are experiencing and leaving the troubleshooting to the professionals.
One such customer sent an email stating that there must be a problem with his AGP video card because Windows XP was saying it was a PCI card. I asked him to clarify what this meant, but all he could say was that the card was AGP and XP said it was PCI and that he’s already installed the newest drivers so he thinks the video card must be bad.
The guy seemed pretty confident that sending the video card back was the thing to do, so I pulled up his invoice, found what video card he bought from us as well as the motherboard he bought, issued him an RMA number and told him to send it back.
Once we received the video card, we popped it in a machine on the test bench and fired it up. We installed the drivers for the video card, reboot and ran video diagnostics on the card. The OS properly recognized the video card and the machine ran as to be expected. We boxed the video card back up and shipped it back to the customer.
About a week later, we received another email from the gentleman. The email stated that there was a compatibility issue between the video card and the motherboard. Knowing what kind of motherboard and video card we were talking about, I responded back with “The motherboard and video card you have purchased are compatible with each other.”
The customer responded, “Well, I had sent this video card back because XP stated that the card was PCI, but you all tested it and said it was good so I think the problem must be that the video card is not compatible with the motherboard.”
I’ve got to find out where this guy’s train of thought is coming in from, so I asked him where in Windows XP he was seeing the AGP video card as a PCI video card. He told me that in the device manager the display adapter is showing up on the PCI bus.
“Sir, your AGP video card IS on the PCI bus. That doesn’t make it a PCI card. Why don’t you tell me what kind of problem you are having instead of drawing your own conclusions?”
“Ok.” He said, “Whenever I play a movie, I get an error and I’m dumped to the desktop. Whenever I play a game, the machine locks up.”
Great. Now that I have symptoms I can actually test for the symptoms and figure out what the problem is myself.
“Ok, sir.” I respond, “You may have a defective motherboard, but I don’t know for sure until I test it. I would like for you to send back the motherboard, but also the video card. Let me ask you about the CPU and the RAM because I don’t see where you bought these items from us.”
“Well, all of my parts are from my old machine which worked perfectly with Windows 98. I was only upgrading the motherboard and video card because I wanted USB 2.0 and AGP 8X.”
Of course, Windows 98 doesn’t tell you what bus a video card is on when you look in the device manager so that explains why he reacted when he saw this once he installed Windows XP, but instead of thinking that THIS was the cause of his problems or was a problem within itself, he should have come right out and said, “Hey…. I’m having such and such problem.”
Getting to the point seems to be something that quite a few people have a problem with. Some of the emails I get will say, “Yeah, I bought a motherboard from you. I replaced the CPU and RAM and that didn’t help. I then tried the video card and power supply in another computer and they worked in it. Can you help?”
“Umm, sir.” I’ll respond. “What kind of problem are you having?
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