Pretty Darn Foolish

A customer calls in asking if I can convert a PDF to a Word document for them. I go through the basics of getting the customer’s name, the school, and the machine details, which she cannot provide.

Me: “You can do this yourself by finding the PDF in Downloads, highlighting the doc by clicking onto it and right-clicking, and use the ‘Open With Word’ option, and then you can save it as a Word document.”

Customer: “Oh, can’t you remote on and do that for me? I am in the middle of something.”

Me: “Our services are for technical issues like if you have no option to open with or it comes up with an error when you try to do this; this is a relatively easy task that takes only a couple of seconds. Getting remote setup on your machine would actually take longer, as you said you didn’t understand how to provide your machine name.”

Customer: “Oh. Oh, never mind. I’ll log a ticket!”

Me: “Feel free. I’ll provide written instructions to you so you can convert PDFs to Word.”

Customer: “No, no, so you convert it and send it back.”

Me: “We currently have three schools down due to power outages; it will take a while for one of us to respond to a low-priority ticket. It’ll be quicker if you follow my instructions. In addition, as I explained, this is not a technology fault for us to fix, so the standard protocol is to send you written instructions; anybody that gets the ticket will do so.”

Customer: “I thought you were here to assist us with our job? Never mind.”

Bye-bye, administrator who can’t do basic tasks.

We are here to help you if the technology refuses to cooperate and do a task for you, not to remote on and complete that task for you because you do not know how to do it. We can provide you instructions on how to do it, even training, but we will charge. Considering you have worked at the school for over fifteen years, you know how to convert a PDF. Don’t play dumb on me.

If I were having a less stressful day, and she’d provided the machine information, I would have remoted on and showed her and got her to do it and let her know why it’s the way it is. Not being able to understand basic instruction means no remote session.