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I have to regularly help my aging mother (and sometimes neighbors) with their phones. The damn thing of every manufacturer having their own Android version(s)/skin(s), and UI/UX designers changing the layout every new version of an app, makes me want to violently slap their collective faces with a large trout
The annoying part of this is that any good UX person will tell you not to keep changing things around, but they get overruled by MBAs and shareholders.
the newest feature MUST BE most obvious so the metrics make it look worthwhile.
The metrics are the most important thing, haven’t you gone to business school?
And that’s why remote desktops became a standard in the desktop support industry.
When I worked a help desk job, I once spent seventeen minutes trying to describe to a customer where the semicolon is on a keyboard. I know how long it was because my then-manager listened in and thought it so ridiculous that he sent me the recording of the call because it made him laugh.
This is relevant because the reason I wanted her to type a semicolon was to press shift+semicolon to type the web address used by my employer to grant remote access. I don’t remember why she needed to type http: … It was more than half my life ago. I was probably following a script or maybe I made the mistake of saying the full URL and the customer fixated on it.
Point is, though remote management is better now than it was, it doesn’t solve all woes.
I remember decades ago when I did desktop support, we had found a software which could initiate remote desktop without the user (in our network) having to do anything on their end. IT Security was not happy with us when they eventually found out, but it was so goddamn convenient while it worked :D
Phone support in the 1990s was an absolute blast… 30 minutes round and around before “oh, NOW I understand what you’re trying to describe.”
The thing I learned from help desk was a profiency at mastering the mute button.
Right up until you miss the button and don’t notice. Or it just decides not to mute you. And then your customer gets an earful of just how you feel about them. And then you get an earful about how your manager feels about you.
The thing I learned from help desk was how to say “Thank you sir, and have a nice day!” outloud but actually mean “Eat shit and die, you asshole” in my head
This never happened. I was a fucking ninja.
The closest I came to something like that was when the customer on someone else’s call heard me, but they were crying with laughter. Fortunately, they only caught me when I roasted someone pretty damn hard.
They also heard me switch gears, and although it drove the tech’s AHT up a bit, it was so funny to her that she asked me out. We ended up dating for three years. (dated the tech/csr, not the customer. The customer was being a Karen until she heard me, and then she changed her tone and the tech’s call went much smoother.)
