I've long since lost count of how many times customer service and even
> technical support people have given me bad information. It's really > pretty sad.
> The telephone, cable, and other high tech companies are hiring lost
> cost people due to the state of the economy over the last few years.
> A number of experienced people have been practically unable to get a
> position during this time. They are told they are 'overqualified'
> when they apply. But, the folks they hire are underqualified. And
> they don't do an adquate job of training the ones they do hire. The
> truth is, these companies don't want to pay for experience right now.
Sad, but true.
Yesterday I helped an elderly woman restore access to her dial-up MSN account. It seems it just stopped connecting one day recently, and she couldn't figure out why.
The MSN support person told her she needed to re-install Windows XP.
It turned out that the real problem was that her dialing sequence had
*70 prepended to disable call-waiting, and she had stopped carrying call-waiting on her service. Dialing *70 just got the standard "Your call cannot be completed as dialed" message.John Meissen snipped-for-privacy@aracnet.com
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: _Thank you_ for doing the right thing and helping that elderly lady get her service restarted. She most likely now thinks of you as a hero for helping her as you did, and I appreciate it also. For those of us who have _some_ understanding and abilities with computers, between the worms, other viruses and spam/scam, these machines are really no longer fun to use. Imagine how people like your elderly friend -- who probably knows much less than many of us -- must feel when their computers are repeatedly attacked. I make no bones about it; the task of getting this Digest out a few times each day is tiring, given my brain aneuerysm. But like the elderly lady you helped, I also have a couple of very good friends (I think of them as my 'tech support staff') who are quite patient with me when I get threatened, as I did this past week with the virus in Internet Explorer. (More than likely it was just the profile which got pretty well trounced.)When I get frantic trying to clear those messes, these guys very patiently walk me through how to repair the damage, etc. PAT]