~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

[gneebore]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Man do I hate computer geeks. I have some very intelligent vendors that I work with. I also have some sincere ones and dumb as rocks ones. I will take the sincere ones any day of the week. The intelligent ones are the worst. Know-it-alls. Have the network locked down so tight. I have a mom and pop store using an "intelligent" IT. They buy an MFP and it took an act of Congress and the blessing from the Pope to get simple drivers installed. Of course they bill for every little thing too. The mom and pop were getting corn-holed by the IT, but they were somehow convinced that it was worth it.

I had a box of rocks teacher once that I told her never to call me for scan to email on her copier ever. Brand new install a few years back when ISP's were still using port 25. I asked about her computer education and got it that she teaches keyboarding and word processing. No formal computer education, other than school of observation and hard knocks. 3 hours later, no success. Something blocking port 25 on copier only and not my laptop. I ask her to use smb instead, she doesn't want to do it that way, I said email will not work because of port 25 blockage and leave at an impass. She goes renegade and I am forced back for another 3 hours of misery trying everything under the sun then leave. She called back raising cain. Mgmt told me to go back out, I said no, mgmt said yes. So I called her up and said I would come back under one circumstance, she needs to have the company that first installed their network there. He came. She went on and on wanting him to tell me that our machine was defective and at fault. However he confirmed I did everything correctly. A couple clicks later copier was scanning. Apparently the school had built additional constraints for equipment and port 25 into their firewall. Never even got a sorry or glad it is now working from the teacher, she just walked away without saying a word.

Oh yeah had a very weird one like that too. Seems the servers were off site and the networking for a group of doctors was handled by a contract IT company. Fun part was they used Red Hat linux back then. And a lot of copier companies did not write drivers for Linux. The It guys insisted on having all drivers installed at the server site. No local drivers on the windows pc's. So poor me goes off to install an early network copier Copystar 2030. I get there and the office manager has the ip address I need to set. I set it up, hook up my laptop and crossover cable to test it and things work fine. Then comes the real fun part. After the office manager sees me test the machine in walks mr. IT expert. I hand him the cd's and he hits the roof, "Where the he** are the correct drivers? We specifically require linux RPM drivers and all you have are these useless windows ones." Fun part I actually used Red Hat at home so informed him that the system was very new and the manufacturer has not written drivers for anything but the most common os, windows 95,98 and win2k. Also informed red faced idiot that the only communication I received about set up was the IP address to be set on the network card. That was done. So I gave hime the 800 number and suggested he call Mita and see if they had drivers available for Red Hat. Meanwhile the office manager has already set up and tested one of the pc's with the windows drivers and then shared the printer with the other three pc's in the office and told the idiot IT guy to get out. The doctors did not renew the contract with the IT service company preferring to run their own in house network. And not allow anything to be stored off site. Kept that account for another ten years until the practice insisted on buying color machines which we did not sell yet. Had a few more run ins with that company too. But they switched to windows server software when they had even more problems with linux drivers not being available for a whole bunch of the new network MFP's back then.

[tonerhead]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Good one about Red Hat. I started with that around 98. Didn't really get to far with it, too much coding for me. Then later I picked up Ubuntu, haven't gone back to Windows in about 7-8 years. I still encounter the same issues but lately it has been Citrix and dummy workstations at banks. We had popped some Kyoceras into bank satellites running Citrix. The bank people are constantly calling saying this or that not working. I love fielding those calls. I just throw the grenade back and say not my problem. I have no control over your network. "But it don't scan" scans to my laptop just fine, see. "But it won't print" Watch it print from my laptop. Later this account left us for another vendor. Good riddance I say. We took a lot of calls there that were merely nuisance calls.

Also have a nursing home, out of state IT. They are all locked down to only user status on all pc's. Their IT struggled to get the drivers installed. They whined about it not being hp drivers. Then they had to create 3 profiles for each copier.

1. B/w
2. Color
3. Card stock

You should hear the people whine when they want to do color on cardstock or duplex, I just smile as it is not my problem. Yet their IT keeps trying to dump it into my lap. I guess that is why IT gets the big bucks. They lock things for job security a lot of times, I swear they do.

[gneebore]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Good one about Red Hat. I started with that around 98. Didn't really get to far with it, too much coding for me. Then later I picked up Ubuntu, haven't gone back to Windows in about 7-8 years. I still encounter the same issues but lately it has been Citrix and dummy workstations at banks. We had popped some Kyoceras into bank satellites running Citrix. The bank people are constantly calling saying this or that not working. I love fielding those calls. I just throw the grenade back and say not my problem. I have no control over your network. "But it don't scan" scans to my laptop just fine, see. "But it won't print" Watch it print from my laptop. Later this account left us for another vendor. Good riddance I say. We took a lot of calls there that were merely nuisance calls.

Also have a nursing home, out of state IT. They are all locked down to only user status on all pc's. Their IT struggled to get the drivers installed. They whined about it not being hp drivers. Then they had to create 3 profiles for each copier.

1. B/w
2. Color
3. Card stock

You should hear the people whine when they want to do color on cardstock or duplex, I just smile as it is not my problem. Yet their IT keeps trying to dump it into my lap. I guess that is why IT gets the big bucks. They lock things for job security a lot of times, I swear they do.

Heck they whined when even having to select between color and b/w. Best one was once the secretary had this gem to say. "But it is in color on the screen how come the copier doesn't know that when I tell it to do a screen print?" It got to the point though when explaining four color black I just gave up and told them the leave the default to black and white and when they wanted color to tell the copier to print color.

But the offsite IT departments were always a great big pain in the butt. Installed a 24 pin dot matrix Okidata once when IT decided hp 4 drivers were fine for any printers. Even ones hooked up with a parallel cable. Too bad for them the office manager discovered that the drivers were included in the os for the pc and did it locally herself

[tonerhead]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Oh, since you are here.........

I cringe at that one every time. I was on a call recently and got this one. I told the gal to put in another service call and I would get back to it as soon as I could because I was swamped. Yeah, but you are here...... I have others waiting for me......we are an important customer.......yes, you are, however you are not my only customer. Finally I said When you go to the grocery store, do you like it when people cut in front of you or the customer leaves in the middle of checking out to get that can of soup he forgot to throw in the cart before checking out? Of course not. I have my day scheduled, I have made promises to other customers, I will be back as soon as I can.

[SlipperyCat]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

I had another one where I spent like three hours installing their machine on the network and it was a very difficult install and their IT person was a royal pain and wasn't cooperative at all, nor did he know what he was doing. Anyway, my phone was ringing off the hook the whole time, emails coming in, text messages, the works. I was very stressed I remember. I finally got through the install and I went up to one of the users to ask something (I forget why now) and she didn't even look up at me and says, "I hope you brought your vacuum because you need to clean our other copier, it's a mess!"

If I had a knife she wouldn't have a head right now ...but I calmly collected myself and said, "Maam, with all do respect, I am not your service tech, I am an IT professional and I don't carry a vacuum. You'll have to place a service call for that particular machine and explain to the customer service rep what you need done." She never once looked at me or took her eyes off her monitor. I just walked way.

On the inside I was fuming... but once again, if you want to keep a job you have to take it up the rear almost on a daily basis . It's a very disrespectful job most of the time. One of the most challenging careers I think people just take for granted.

[CompyTech]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Customer says this to me the other day "Took me half a day to get these printed... I don't get paid to work on the printer."

What I wanted to say " I don't get paid to listen to your bullsh!t"

Some customers will complain, that's fine. Some won't even care to listen, that's fine. But when you have both together at the same time, you get one hell of a customer to deal with..

[SlipperyCat]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Oh those? Those are "bush" screws. ?? Yeah, you throw them into the bushes when you leave.

[tonerhead]

Re: ~ Things you Hate to Hear from a Customer ~

Oh those? Those are "bush" screws. ?? Yeah, you throw them into the bushes when you leave.

Reminds me of when you leave and they ask if you have any extra parts ( like you didn't put it together correctly). One guy did this and I said you can have my used parts though, I put them on his desk and started walking. Then I turned around and said just kidding, but the deer in the headlight look on his face was priceless. Bet he never says that again.