First Tech Support Question To Ask

Posted: 3:14 pm
May 30, 2006
Beta
7 Comments

Are you experiencing this problem on a beta or pre-release program?

One of the particularly unpleasant parts of my job as an ISP/ASP is the fact that since about 1996 every problem my clients experience is my fault, until I can prove otherwise. The tradeoff is to tell them that there is nothing wrong with the systems and that there is nothing more you can do for them as you cannot replicate the problematic behavior. This is not great customer service and practically impossible to say to a long time or VIP customer. One such case woke me up today:

Vlad,
 
There is something wrong with webmail.
 
It kicks you out after 10 seconds and you have to re-login.
 
Also, I set my reply address to sean@domain.com and the e-mail messages arrive with only sean@domain as the reply address.
 
Please let me know when it is fixed so I can let people know.
 
Thanks
Now just looking at this I know its not my fault, if it was, there would be several thousand messages in my Inbox because I can’t even fart without a few hundred people noticing that I dropped the ball. But I humor him, login with my profile, his profile, two browsers, no problems. Perhaps just a stale session? Either way, restart the web service and fire off a response to try again – nothing wrong over here.
 
Vlad,
 
I guess the problem lies with me at MMMM.  What could be causing me to be disconnected from webmail so quickly from inside MMM?
 
When I connect from the outside my session is not terminated like it is from inside MMM.
 
Thanks
When in doubt, blame ISA. Or CRM. Or any other enterprise crappleware that is easilly misconfigured by anybody that didn’t actually write the code on their own in Bangalore or Bangladesh. But I humor him again: try another web browser? Try dumping your cookies, files, etc. Try rebooting? I know this one is looping right back to me and I’m all ready to wrap my head in a towel and start beheading the next response… where is it, come on, any second now:

Vlad,

Perhaps its an IE 7 issue.

I’ll just wait to see if the next beta version fixes things.

Thanks

Oh you mot*%#%*%*&@!*% son of a $%($$ co#$ su@*#%, fu%*$$ you and your piece of @#%* Internet Explorer 7 beta testing.  Now do I start the beheading process first or do I send an invoice to my buddy Steve for letting people blame IE7 problems on me? I’ve said it before, I will say it again – Do not beta test on production networks and if you do have suicidal tendancies please keep them to yourself and to your own applications and blow up your own network. Don’t install it on the production network and then blame someone else because third party can’t write a decent browser.

Otherwise you’ll just waste my time, piss me off, and likely get yourself fired when you nuke a production network. And yes, you bet I’ll take 70 virgins over debugging Internet Explorer 7, any day.

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