No one wants to call the support line.
It sucks to call the support line and get someone with an impenetrable Indian accent and immediately think, Oh fuck. Because that’s racist. If you have the burden of being a liberal, you feel more racist every time you ask them to repeat themselves. And also stupid. You call a support line for support, not another opportunity to feel racist and stupid.
At the heart of it, you’ve had too much experience to have any faith that anyone in Support is going to solve your problem, and you might feel stupider and more racist to boot. So you put it off, if you can manage without it. Maybe there’s a neighbor. Not the kind of neighbor who will tell you what to do. The kind who will come in and do it while you stand behind and say “Oh my” and “Gracious you’re fast” and “Aren’t you just something. Would you like a hard candy?”
But last week I had to call my internet provider. And by “call” I mean navigate a self-help maze online until I reach the end and answer the “Did this solve the problem?” by writing “No” and being bounced back to the beginning of the maze again. But there was a chat box hiding in the bottom corner. With a robot. The robot had a lot of the same suggestions I’d already fruitlessly explored. You have to tire out the robot—they’re almost indefatigable, but you can fatigate them eventually—and then you can wait for a human.
My first human was Carter.
Now the relationship-building begins. I had in mind I would explain my problem and we’d go from there. Carter thought it was important to build my confidence first. “I am going to do everything I can to own your experience today,” Carter typed. Really? I explained I couldn’t get on a website even though my WiFi was of the opinion it was working just fine. Carter reiterated he was going to own my experience if I would give him a minute, so I did. He came back and said there was an Outage but they were on it and they estimated it would be fixed by 10:00am. I said thanks and he signed off.
It was 9:58am on a Thursday.
Nothing happened. On Sunday I tried the chatbox again. Coincidentally, my new guy Sahiv also opened by saying he was going to own my experience. I said Good, because Carter had taken it and fenced it in the alley for pennies on the dollar.
Sahiv wasn’t concerned about my Outage. He had me do a factory reset on my modem with a paper clip. It worked great. It occurred to me to ask if there was somewhere on Carter I could jam a paper clip but I had more support to get, this time from Apple.
They had a chat robot too! The chat robot wanted to know how I was doing today. I said I was fine and typed in my problem as briefly as I could manage. The chat person said “I can relate. I also use the App store a lot and I would feel terrible without it. Let me see what I can do to solve this terrible problem for you. Life is too short for these worries, isn’t it?” I told him it was getting shorter all the time.
Is this normal business now? Are we so starved for human contact that we need to be soothed by robots? Is this an emotional support line? If so, I’m holding out for a droid that will ask me how my tomato plants are coming along and inquire about my cat. I ditched the robot in favor of calling tech support. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel like I was being rude, hanging up on the robot. That’s what they’ve done to me.
Calling Apple Support turned out to be a rare delight. My human understood my problem, took over my screen, showed me what to tap on, and my problem was solved. Apple went into the alley and paid the ransom on my experience and gave it back to me. And lo, it was very good.
Ah! I didn’t know the chatbots could be fatigued–excuse me: fatigated–so now I have a new mission in my virtual life.
In all likelihood, they don’t feel all that tired, but they do make you give up.
The more soothing the robot gets, the more I respond by SHOUTING AT THEM. Which seems to make them try to be even more soothing, so it’s a veritable doom loop.
This explains some of the blank spots in my memory. I have been oversoothed.
I’ve had bots actually hang up on me because I’m such a prolific and imaginative curser. I can string together a bunch of expletives that make no sense either grammatically or anatomically. It’s one of my superpowers. These are phone bots, btw, as I’ve never felt compelled to talk to those computer bots. Maybe I should talk to one one of these days. I’d try to make it my bitch. Or make it cry. Either would be very rewarding to my sick little mind. I hate that actual people have been replaced by bots. They seldom understand me, or have several alternatives to pick from that don’t apply to my situation. People usually understand me, although I sometimes don’t understand them. I, too, have a problem understanding thick accents. Doesn’t matter the accent, btw. Indian… Greek… even Yorkshire English baffles me, although they are seldom on help lines.
Yorkshire baffles everybody. Re-read the first chapter of “All Creatures Great and Small.”
Well, now I’m going to have to do just that.
I’ve had great experience with Apple support. But only recently.
I was amazed.
Apple help has definitely figured out how to do it.
That’s three votes.
If I need Apple help, I make an appointment and go down to the store. That’s always a nice experience.
I definitely agree that the chat robots are never useful. My solution is to keep telling them “representative”. They usually get it after several repetitions.
Yep…..yelling “representative” no matter what is asked is my way of dealing.
Too many syllables. I just keep repeating “human”. That’s the only word they get out of me.
I yell “Son of a BITCH!” and that narrows down the possible humans a bit.
Well, gee. I need a new phone and laptop. Now I’m thinking about Apple.
Susan…..Apple is the ONLY way to go in my humble opinion.
It’s not racist to resent a poor rendition of English, if English is the purported language of exchange. I get pretty disgusted with some native speakers who smash syllables together in rapid fire. Sometimes I ask them to repeat by speaking a little faster. (That usually brings a confused pause.)
OOOoooh! I like this approach! I’ve been asking them to speak slower, explaining that my ears can’t hear as fast as they can speak. I’m also not above training youngsters who work in the health industry, who tend to speak in the direction they’re leading me, instead of turning their heads to talk to me. It can be fun getting old and curmudgeonly.
That is a great plan! Even a confused pause can be helpful.
I hate to ask, but Murr do you receive compensation from Apple???
Just kidding….maybe.
It’s only a few dollars a month, but it adds up.
I have routinely had good experiences talking with a real human at Apple Care.
The only time I’ve had to deal with an Apple human was a Very Good Experience. I hated getting to the Apple Store, as it was in the middle of a mall (I hate shopping, and malls, and humanity in general), but the human and I clicked based on my screen saver which shows a cat in front of an embroidered pillow stating “I fucking hate people”. She quite agreed, and fixed my problem for free.
We seem to have some solid endorsements here. While I’m at it, I recommend Consumer Cellular for their service and Bissell carpet cleaners for everything else.
I have always been an Apple consumer. I have never been charged for solutions and they answer in the middle of the night…
I was once a computer programmer. (Please do not curse me; I tried very hard to make programs that were intuitive to use. Let’s say the environment for producing such quality was sorely lacking.) As such we always had the not-Apple tools to use. I got good at using them, but they always required a lot of effort. Now I’m retired and can do as I please. And my pleasure is to use Apple products. They are usually intuitive, easy to use, and automatically kept updated. Unlike other vendors they don’t change the “look and feel” of a product so often as to make you feel stupid. If they add features, they don’t break other features in order to add something new.
Thanks for the opportunity to jump on the Apple bandwagon. No, I’m not getting paid for this endorsement.
When I first got a computer, back around 2004, I got a Microsoft product, because everyone else I knew had one. In time, I kept getting viruses. I had a friend who could get rid of them, but they kept coming back.
I got rid of the Microsoft PC and tower. Now I am strictly an Apple user. Never had a problem. Never looked back.
Once upon a time, my employer suggested that for my new position I buy any computer I wanted. I bought an Apple computer. At the time, Microsoft was pushing the lie (among others) that there was no way to run a mixed computer network, that is to say, Windows and Macs on the same network. Somebody — maybe a Microsoft employee, but more likely one of their local shills — went behind my back and told my supervisor that my computer was incompatible with the network, and though that was false, I was ordered to dump my Mac and get a Windows rig. Another lie being pushed at the time was that the new version of Windows, called Windows NT (said to stand for New Technology, but said by some to stand for “Nice Try!”), would not cause severe fragmentation of the hard drive. Even I, who knew almost nothing, knew that that was baloney, and as soon as it was implemented throughout the company, everybody had to run out and buy third-party software to defrag our hard drives, because Windows NT could not do it. Those are just two examples of how BG got so rich — by cheating and lying. Now that I’m retired, there are nothing but Macs in the house. One of my sons went the same way, the other to Windows, so we can only get computer advice from one them now…