Fantasy Help Desk Support

Here's the situation. We had a controlled outage today of our ISP service today that lasted longer than we thought it would. Most customers are understanding about this, if a little frustrated. Other customers, like Barbara Westin (name changed to protect the obnoxious), not so much.

We suspect that Barbara relishes these outages so she can talk down, curse, and belittle our ISP Support Staff. She suspects that our help desk team habitually sever a cable, dump coffee on a switch, or power down servers in order to justify their jobs.

Durring her second call of the outage, we offered to put her on the phone with our director, who voluneteered to speak with her if she got too abusive. This provoked the sardonic response "Will THAT get my internet back up faster?!?"

BEGIN FANTASY RESPONSE!!

"Yes, m'am! You see, on a wall in the Director's Office, there is a large throw switch. That switch is labled 'Barbara Westin's Internet Connection'. Right now, it's in the Off position. We do that from time to time becuase it gets lonely here and wE JuSt LoVe to talk to a woman of your charms, so we need to give you a reason to pick up the phone! My director would be ever so happy to turn it back on for you, but I'm the only one that has the power to transfer you right now. So my question is, what could you say, do, or offer to me that would make it worth my while?"

END FANTASY RESPONSE!!

Thankfully, we handled it better than that. But the odd thing was that about an hour after it wend back on, she called again to complain, not realizing she was back online. This strengthens my theory that she is one of those people who value the act of complaining more than having stuff that works, and thereby leaving her no reason to whine about it.

BONUS IRONY: She does tech support from home for a larger service provider, so one would think she might think better of abusing the staff that are powerless to do anything about it.