I work in a small office environment, and our manager is a very hard person to please. He has his Favorites, then the next down are the Liked, and the rest of us are merely Drones, apparently there to do the Liked and the Favorites’ jobs for them. Whenever Mary or John Favorite, or Sue or Linda Liked, go to Mr. Boss and tell him they have too much work to do, then Mr. Boss calls in Bob or Sally or Jane Drone to give them a hand.
Customer: “I got DSL, but it’s not working.”
Tech Support: “What kind of modem do you have?”
Customer: “Ummm, I dont know. It’s built into my laptop.”
Tech Support: “Ok, did you receive the modem package we sent out?”
Customer: “Modem package??”
Tech Support: “Well, it looks like the modem was shipped to (address), Pennsylvania.”
Customer: “I don’t live in Pennsylvania. I live in New York.”
Tech Support: “Huh. Do you know this Pennsylvania address?”
Customer: “Yes, that’s my Mom’s house.”
Tech Support: “Ok, this DSL phone number you gave me — is that your mother’s number?”
Customer: “Yes, they told me in order for me to have DSL, I need to have your company’s phone service. My mother has it, so I gave them her telephone number.”
The idiot office manager at the bizzarro law firm I used to work at was REALLY dumb. She’d started out there as the receptionist and had gotten her promotion because of an affair she was currently having with the managing partner. Whatever the current receptionist said was considered law. Now, at the time (mid 90’s) at every other law firm I’d worked at, we’d billed clients for long distance calls. It was a simple system, you wrote down the number you called and the time and date and what client you made the call on behalf of. When the phone bill came, receptionists all over the city simply went through the bill, found each charge and added it to the slip on each long distance call and that was sent to the billing department and it went on the bill (this was a few years back before computer systems evolved that tracked phone calls like this).
Customer: “Hi, my manager’s computer isn’t working, and she asked me to call you.”
Tech Support: “Ok, what’s happening? Is there an error message?”
Customer: “Oh, I don’t know. She just said it wasn’t working. Can you fix it?”