Re: Oh, this is so microsoftish ...

>>>>> "Mladen" == Mladen Gogala <mgogala_at_adelphia.net> writes:

 Mladen> On Sat, 24 May 2003 14:54:32 +0200, Sybrand Bakker wrote:
>>
>>
>> I can. They seem to have moved to India. There will be a day when
>> they simply dump the Dutch support group and have everything
>> answered by cover your ass trained monkeys from India.

 Mladen> Do I detect a little bit of racism here? I'm a Croatian
 Mladen> working in the US and some of the Indians working with me are
 Mladen> top notch. I really mind when some small-minded a*hole calls
 Mladen> them monkeys. Who are monkeys? Is everybody with slightly
 Mladen> different skin a monkey? How about hair and eye colors?  Do
 Mladen> you have religious preferences as well?

>> I will regret that day. In order to allow for those trained
>> monkeys to deal with your support issues, they now have livechat
>> facilities and facilities to take over your client
>> PC. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... Frankly, when you have one instance
>> running MTS with explicit ports, and you have second instance with
>> the same explicit ports (because you forgot to change them) and
>> the second instance is *taking over* the ports, so the enduser
>> connects to instance A and gets connected to instance B, I have to
>> consider that a serious *bug*. The trained monkey on the other end
>> of the line didn't, because you can allocate a port only once.

 Mladen> Well, with your kind of attitude, I wouldn't be surprised if
 Mladen> you ran into a little bit of resistance. After all, you don't
 Mladen> strike me as the nicest human being on this planet and that
 Mladen> probably doesn't serve you well when you want to elicit
 Mladen> help. It does serve you right, though.

>> He also addressed me with my surname only. A truly nasty
>> experience.

 Mladen> There is such thing as a different culture, you know. They
 Mladen> might have different conventions during a conversation. That
 Mladen> is still not enough to brand them as "monkeys".  Using your
 Mladen> last name only was probably not meant as an insult to your
 Mladen> majesty. After all, he was just a monkey, wasn't he?

 Mladen> -- Mladen Gogala Software is like sex, it is better when it  Mladen> is free. Linus Torvalds

Mladen, I think you may have mis-understood Sybrand's statements. When he refers to trained monkeys, I don't believe he means to make a racial slur - his reference is more related to the old "Pay peanuts, get monkeys" saying - that is, people who can perform some basic tasks, but have no real mental understanding of what they are doing or the system they are supporting.

I had this happen with a non-oracle support problem a while back. I had exhausted all avenues for determineing the problem and as a last resort rang support. The support person refused to address my problem until we had gone through this preset list of questions they were told to ask all callers requesting support. I tried to indicate I had done all the obvious checks, indicated the symptoms had nothing related to the questions they were asking, but they still insisted on going through them. After 20 minutes of pointless questions and answers, the support person informed me that they had no idea what the problem was an they would have to escalate it to their support technicians. After 20 minutes of talking to this guy (who was Indian, but spoke very good english), we sort of got to know each other a bit. He admitted to me in the end he had only used the software during a 3 week training session he did before starting in the job and that they had a type of expert system they were forced to use. this system provided questions which they asked and entered a yes/no or 1 .. 10 response based on my reply. Each reply would move to a new sub-set of questions and eventually, in my case, resulted in a screen which informed the operator they had to pass the problem on to *real* technicians.

While this process is nothing new and I can understand it to some extent - you really want to avoid spending wages on top level technicians answering basic questions, the real problem came when I rang back a couple of days later after not getting a response. this time, due to it being late I guess, the number was routed to another call centre in a different country with someone whose english was very difficult to understand and who could not understand that I was calling back regarding a previous support request. It seems my support ticket number had not been propogated to the other call centres database and they had no record of it.

In the end, I passed the problem onto my supervisor who passed it onto the chief IT officer who contacted the company directly and demanded support, which we then got. In the above two examples of support, I would classify both the support people I got as trained monkeys - this has nothing to do with race - it is to do with the level of training and understanding of the systems they are providing support for.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
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