Not a word about pork

My attention span, when doing telephone technical support, seems to be very short. The type of calls I take tend to not be the sort that require any actual troubleshooting. More often than not, the only technical thing that I will go over is some known solution to a known technical issue. This, I have no problem with. I do not particularly like trying to do actual troubleshooting over the phone, especially with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing as the only intermediary between myself and the troubled device. Where the problem comes from, I think, is with the scores of calls that fall on the other end of the spectrum, with customers who call whose only technical interrogative is “Would you show me how to do ?” We have a manual. It tells you how to do .

Also, there are customers who, after being told exactly how to do in slow detail, being walked through step-by-step, and being told what to do in the event that it behaaves any differently, call back three or more additional times the same day, having forgotten everything that took place in the earlier conversation. I have a certain amount of patience for them, but it is not unending. It ties directly into my reduced attention span on technical support calls of the two non-technical types. Any call less than say, ten minutes, is no problem. Ten minutes is twice my average call time. Which means that more than half of my calls are less than half as long as a call that I would consider too long. If the bell curve of call length was balanced, it would mean that a very, very small number of calls ever goes over the ten-minute mark.

Unfortunately, if someone calls up with a list of things they want me to teach them to do, or if someone has managed to screw up their files by deciding to muck around in windows without considering calling or looking up what the right way to do things is, the call will surely take no less than twenty-two minutes. These calls are not difficult, in a strict, technical way. Instead they are difficult in more of a … my mind starts to drift after about six minutes on a call like this. Everything is going only as fast as … a factor of about {the age of the user in years times the age of their computer in months} over six … seconds per operation. (Note: It seems to me that the average age of an appraiser is no less than fifty-five, probably closer to sixty. So on an average call, I’ll be talking to a sixty-year-old using a three-year-old computer, and it will take 6 minutes to get them to right-click.) So, what end up happenning, I have found, is that I end up doing something else (surfing the web, reading amagazine article, playing a game, etc…) while I wait for them to get to the next step. Sometimes, I was paying so little attantion to their little mumbling-to-themselves that they all seem to do while they try to figure out how to follow clear directions that I have to have them repeat what thay said. Usually this ends up being them clarifying for themselves what I said three times a minute ago (“So I should right-click and then LEFT-click on Properties?” “What? You haven’t done that yet? Yes. Left-click on Properties.” “Ok, yeah. Remove all shared files.” “WHAT?!? What did you do?” “Oh something popped up. Now, where did you want me to be? Add/Remove Programs?”).

So, I don’t have too much trouble paying attention to people who can follow directions, or who call with a technical question I already have the answer to, but it is the rest of the calls that I have trouble with. I don’t think it counts as attention deficit, since while I’m not able to continue paying attention to them I’m reading ten and twenty page articles on everything from viral marketing of video games[dead link] to the political struggle surging forth between Scientists and publishers of their findings. I even have the patience to work with them without getting upset (though I do have the unfortunate tendency of treating people with the same level of respect the offer me), until the fourth or fifth time they do something other than follow the directions I have given or answer the questions I have asked. Which is more than I can say for a lot of people.

I forget whether I had a point, or whether I already made it. Anyway, it’s almost time to go home.