@ Chris Wellons:

Maybe I could send a letter somewhere. You know, just to let the big wigs at Verizon know that their outsourced tech support is using hotmail to communicate with users. Who would I write to though?

@ Andrew Zimmerman:

I think one of the big problems with outsourcing tech support is that you are handing off part of your customer relations to a company that is unaffiliated with you and does not actually care about your customer satisfaction. They mostly care about the metrics by which you measure their performance. For example, they probably don’t care if you lose a customer, as long as they get to mark their ticket as resolved.

I can understand now why when I started tech support a lot of the guys were complaining about outsourcing companies.

Wow, asking you to send information to a personal webmail address is highly unprofessional. I’d also say it’s also a security risk. Detailed information about your computer network has no business being in someone’s private email account. That’s an information leak, making it that much more likely to get into malicious hands.

@ Mart:

I think one or two people are aware of the blog, but I don’t think anyone follows it regularly. Which is actually fine with me because I can write my IT Horror stories without anyone chiming in with “this is not how it happened” or asking me why colorful characters some of my l my previous jobs magically appear in the stories that are supposed to be set in “present time”. Writing about work is tricky that way. I sometimes change and embellish stuff both to make it more interesting, and for obfuscation/deniability. ;)

Hence, the mostly true tag. But yeah, the conversations I had with Verizon were not made up, because you just can’t make that shit up.

@ Victoria:

I already exceeded my mass murder quota for that week so suicide was the only logical choice.

This entire series has been great, but the chanting of the Call Wait Song made me actually laugh out loud. I know how it feels.
My provider’s technical support line has an automated system that asks me if I want to get called back instead of waiting in line. If you select it, it’ll tell you that someone will call you back in the next two days. And it doesn’t give a specific hour – you’re supposed to be on-call for two days.

Holy whatever! This borders on mass murder, not ritual suicide :)

Just out of curiosity, is any of your co-workers a Terminalist?