So which would you kill, the caller or the technician?
I'd go for the Technician's senior staff, myself. Here's sequence of events, as the user sees them (I'm not that user, but I've called tech support before).
I also list the user's likely level of annoyance with the situation, measured on the following scale:
0 = Generally content with the situation.
5 = Amount of annoyance a naive user would expect to experience while calling tech support with a question like the one at hand.
10 = Amount of annoyance this user is willing to put up with to get an answer.
15 = Amount of annoyance at which this user loses his ability to be civil.
20 = Amount of annoyance at which this user loses his ability to be nonviolent (should the cause of annoyance be physically nearby).
1. The user has a fairly simple query, and calls the support line on his cellphone.
2. The user navigates through about four levels of the automated answering system menus to get to the service he needs. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +1(1).[/size] Most of the levels of the answering system's menus begin with a long advertisement for some new service provided by this company, repeated in several languages (here in California, it's English and Spanish). The user has to listen to these before it tells him what button to press. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +3(4).[/size]
3. At least one of the advertisements the user is forced to sit through is about the web-based support program that is Shiny! Faster! Easier! than the one he is currently using. However, he cannot take advantage of it because his only computer is currently in a state of perpetual shutdown. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +1(5).[/size]
3. While navigating the menus, the user probably has to hang up and restart at least once, because the menu distinctions aren't always clear, and occasionally he goes the wrong way and can't get back. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +3(8).[/size]
4. At some point through the navigation, the system asks him for his "service tag". He punches it in. [size=-2]Annoyance level: 0(8).[/size]
5. After all the information has been entered, the user is put in the queue, where he remains for the next 20-30 minutes. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +5(13).[/size] Meanwhile, he is accumulating air time on his cellphone, which is probably not free. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +3(16).[/size]
6. At about 40 minutes into the call, the user hears what appears to be a live human on the other end of the line for the first time. [size=-2]Annoyance level: -2(14).[/size]
7. The first thing the technician does, is ask for the "service tag" that the user has already entered into the system about 30 minutes ago. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +2(16).[/size] The user is dismayed, since the system should already have it, but provides it anyway, expecting the actual support service to begin shortly.
8. Instead, the technician then asks another series of questions about the computer, which do not appear to establish anything about the type/configuration of the computer -- only its ownership. Because god forbid, you should answer a simple question about a supported Dell that is not currently in possession of its legal owner. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +5(21).[/size]
9. Having established the ownership of the computer, the technician asks more questions about the caller, which are not only irrelevant to the problem at hand, but also invasive of the caller's privacy. [size=-2]Annoyance level: +8(29).[/size]
10. Having spent about 2 minutes on the preliminaries, the technician proceeds to spend 5 seconds (not including the user's belligerent interruption) answering the user's question. [size=-2]Annoyance level: -1(28).[/size]
11. The answer is a procedure that is user-hostile (in other words, unobvious, unintuitive, unprompted, and unlikely to be tried by accident; you have to have done it before, or (maybe) found it somewhere in the manual that came with the machine and is likely thicker than the machine itself). [size=-2]Annoyance level: +2[size=+0](30)[/size].[/size] However, it does solve the user's problem. [size=-2]Annoyance level: -10(20).[/size]
As you can see, the user ends the call feeling merely violent (as opposed to homicidal) and while none of the reasons by itself is deserving of violence or even verbal abuse, their cumulative effect is understandable, and most of them could be avoided. I rest my case.
