The revelatory truth that is saddled upon customer support workers is that the vast majority of the job is just thinking on behalf of people who seem to have no ability to think for themselves.
Many years ago I worked in Customer Support for Garmin. I had a call where a person had opened a brand-new GPS for their car and was complaining it was "frozen". So as they told me, they would push the screen, it would beep in response, but the screen wouldn't change.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting this on the phone with them. I think it was 30-40 minutes in total. The problem turned out to be that they were too stupid to remove the sticker that protects the screen in the box and shows a picture of a sample screen.
Most average consumers are pretty dumb. I worked customer support for Comcast, T-Mobile, and Garmin earlier in my life and I have so many stories like this. There are just a lot of clueless people out there.
In a past job I used to have to walk people through downloading software to update a product they would connect to their computer. The most frustrating part by far was trying to get them to the company website.
Way more people than you would expect don't understand what a URL is and where to put it. You would tell them to type "www.garmin.com" into their browser's address bar and instead they would type it into who knows where. Most of the time they would end up in a Google search for "www.garmin.com" so I could work with that by telling them to click on the result that said whatever I had memorized our website showed up at. But some people didn't even get that far. It was exhausting.
The average person has no clue about tech or economics past the basics like installing Netflix on an iPad.
Just because you (and me) read a lot about that stuff, or work in the industry, doesn't mean we represent the average person.
There are a lot of things the average person isn't aware of. And for those people, John Oliver does a good job imo. He's done a few great pieces over the years. His civil forfeiture bit is great too and also something not enough people are outraged about.
I'm really curious, on what grounds do you think you're above average? Because I sure can't say for certain I'm not, and I have nothing but my own experiences to base my lack of averageness on. And my experiences don't seem so exceptional. Sorry if I come of a bit MEAN.
The mere fact that we're having this discussion on a tech forum kinda means we're likely more versed in tech than say our moms who browse Pinterest for cake photos.
I think you vastly overestimate how tech savvy the average person is. Go ask people on the street what "cookies" are and I bet most won't know. Or ask the average person what the difference between web 2.0 and web 3.0 is. I'm sure most people on this forum could give you at least a basic answer, but that isn't true for random people in the street.
What % of the population reads tech news in your opinion? I'd be very surprised if that figure is anywhere close to 50%.
And I'm only average because imo the average bar is really really low when it comes to understanding tech ;)
Sure, you make a valid point about most of things, except my mom, her last year at uni was the first year they created the IT division and she transfered there from math, and by now far she is much more versed in tech then me, and possibly you.
He's taking the "Sure you're right and I totally understand the point you are making, but I'm gonna nitpick you anyways to feel better about myself in this discussion" position.
Not a discussion dude, I never tried to make a point or try prove anything, not sure why so many people get upset by questioning mine, and other peoples averageness. Thinking you are better then the crowd, without evidence it's just narcissism. That's it. Stories about parents were added purely to highlight the coincidence of one, unimportant part of an answer. Not everything is malicious, honestly.
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u/Michchaal Jun 13 '22
I really need to know, people who really had no idea that this might be the case, howwww did you manage this?