Unfiltered Story #233814

I’m a programming major who is working at a tech support call center for a certain company, and all of our callers are from said company. Most of my callers are generally pretty chill and don’t get too upset even when I am not able to solve their issue. Not this time. This guy calls in and before I’m even done with my scripted greeting he sounds fed up with me. He wants to convert some pictures of notes he took during a meeting into a text file. This is a function in Microsoft OneNote, which he luckily had installed on his machine already. He also had a thumbdrive which he had already moved the pictures to from his phone. Great. But here’s the problem: his notes were all handwritten, and very sloppily at that, and the pictures taken were not high quality. Predictably, the image to text function did not work very well, and this is were things went downhill fast. I told the guy that at this point, there’s not really anything we can do to help him and he will just have to transcribe the notes himself. The caller then got really passive aggressive with me and said that he should be out drinking right now, all the while complaining about how stupid it is that the program couldn’t read his lousy handwriting from a picture taken on a phone from 3 feet away from the paper it was written on. The kicker though? After (predictably) telling me to escalate the ticket, he said that we, the tech support desk, should fix this program (Note: we are not Microsoft employees and generally do not even support microsoft applications). It was at that moment that the programmer in me wanted to break something. Yeah, I can totally create a image recognition software that outperforms Microsoft’s and have it read your crap handwriting. I just wish I could hear this guy’s reaction when the “Tech Expert” he told me to escalate the ticket to tells him the exact same thing I told him.