Sunday, March 6, 2011

Old Men and Internet security

Member calls up
Needs assistance installing antivirus.

I get this 70 odd year old man on the line who's norton subscription just ran out. He heard we offer free anti virus. So as the call goes on Im trying to get this old guy to navigate though our site to the download link. Normally this is how it works

Me: "go to web page XXXXYYYY.com"
Member: "ok"
Me: "do you see a download link?"
Member: "yes"
Me: "click it"

However this time it was more like this

Me: "go to web page XXXXYYYY.com"
Member: "Im going to use capitals, ok?"
Me: "what ever works, are you on the site yet?"
Member: "no"
Me: "..."
Member: "ok, I think im there, is it an blue web page with size 12 times new roman font? it has a section with contact info, Im going to read it *reads contact info out loud*"
Me: "... ok, do you see the download link"
Member: "I see terms of service *reads me entire terms of service*, i see system requirements *reads entire system requirements*, I also so a section on FAQ let me read the entire thing..."

SO basically every time i asked this guy a question he responded by giving me ever single piece of information he could possible give me, even if it had nothing to do with what we were doing. Like if i ran into this guy at a subway and if i asked if he was eating a ham sandwich, instead of giving me a simple "yes" or "no" he would read me the nutritional information of every component in his sandwich.

After an hour and a half of instructions I finally got the old antivirus uninstalled and the new one up. Right now it's 5:51pm, about 9 minutes before the end of my 9 hour shift, at this point he mentions he owns 3 other computers one of which is a mac. I almost strangled myself with my phone cord, there was no way I was going to listen to this guy's irrelevant yet very detailed descriptions of stuff i dont care about until like 9pm. Granted i didn't actually mind helping this guy, i knew what to do and he wasn't yelling at me. Right now I'm considering "accidentally knocking my phone off my desk" in the hope we might get disconnected. Luckily the guy seemed to be confident enough to try the others by himself.

Holy close call batman! I probably would of cried if I would of had to see that to the end.

No comments:

Post a Comment