Feb 11,

So guys since last Tuesday i have been taking calls and each one has an interesting story behind it. I talked to an Indian malayali software engineer working with SAP, a Russian and a whole lot of other interesting characters. Right now in the 450-minute call time for a day we are supposed to average about 15 calls but till date my highest has been 13. On an average a call lasts for about half an hour and once it took me a cool two and a half hour.

Some of the guys are real comp illiterates. But one thing thats great about these guys is that they are amazingly patient. At times when we make mistakes some of the guys even go on to the extent of reassuring us. Every now and then we end up with some very hilarious. I'll share some of them with you guys.

Once a very irate customer called up and told the tech on phone that she wants to talk to his supervisor. The poor fellow calmed her down and listened to problem on hand. The lady in question had received a message on the screen asking her to "Press any key to continue". And she was angry because she did not find an "Any" key on her keyboard.

We guys are rated on various parameters. One of them is called the FTR or the First Time Resolution. This measures how successful you have been in solving the cust's problem. According to the rules if the cust calls back for the same issue within 2 days of the call the techie gets a 0 FTR for the call in question.

So the guys try to see to it that the custs don't call back in the next two days. Once it so happened that a techie messed up the system while troubleshooting. To save his ass he came up with an ingenious solution. He told the cust that the comp had a virus and it will take two days to cure and in the two days anyone touching the comp will get infected. So pls wait for two days and then call back.

Even I faced a very interesting case. The fellow was a Russian who did not know English and to my unfamiliarity with Russian added to the problem. He had some problem with the video card and I wanted to run some dos based diagnostics. I forgot the name of the file so I asked him to use the DIR command. The fellow after following my instructions told me that he got a message which said "Bad command or file". By chance I asked what did he type in. He replied BIR. I tried to correct him and told him that it "D as in Delta" IR. He replied B for Belta, now what is Belta. Finally I gave up and asked him to send us an email.

There are hundreds of similar instances and I will tell about them next time we meet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Data Science 101 by Puneet Garg, Head of Data Science, Carousell

Image
On Friday, I heard Puneet Garg , the new Head of Data Science at Carousell give a very passionate AI 101 talk at the GA Data Science immersive program that I am part of. Puneet had spent 13 years at Microsoft before joining Carousell, and has over a decade of AI experience. He was part of the Bing team, where he worked on cutting edge technologies like Natural Language for Cortana, Speech Recognition and Language Translation for Indian languages, Human like Chat bots (Ruuh) for India etc. Talking about Data Science, he felt that a Data Scientist's key job is to e xtract insights and identify predictive models from large volumes of data. And in this job, Machine Learning is a key tool in the Data Scientist's arsenal. He used the following graphic to beautifully explain the difference between AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Image Source He highlighted how the Artificial Intelligence algorithms had been in existence for a long time, but they were infeasible...
Read more

The Incredible Padma Aunty!!

Image
The day before yesterday I spend more than 2 hours, totally mesmerized by the memorial service of Padma Vikraman Nayar , organized by the Singapore Malayali Association (SMA) . I have met her only once, a few years ago, but the eulogies removed any sense of unfamiliarity about her. Padma Aunty as she was popularly called was more of a background person and the extent of eulogies was disproportionate to any of the formal positions, she held within the SMA committee. And most surprisingly, all but one of the speakers on stage were males, mostly past SMA Presidents, a reflection of the authority she commanded during her life. At a personal level, I really struggle with the Malayalam Language and often felt that I was more of a Delhite than a Malayali. Despite this rather distant view, I have been amazed at the SMA’s annual Onam Village celebrations. The scale and extent of the program is astonishing, with at least a few thousand people attending. I always wondered about the incred...
Read more

Senti side of me

Hi Guys, In the last few months I had a chat with some of you guys. And all of a sudden I realised that I dont have anything to talk about. Rahul and Shilpi called up most in this period and often I just did not know what to say and the forced conversation lasted for not more than a few minutes. Then the mails from regulars like Rahul(Both), Anit and Rohit have actually dried up. It used to be such a pleasure getting a mail from these guys. But somehow today all I see in my inbox is a few fwds and mailers which I very happily block. Now let me admit that Bhanu, Anit and Shuchi have been nice enough to send some thought provoking fwds. But I would be more pleased to get hold of a mail addressed to me. So i thought of asking some of you about how it felt getting my mails. The first reaction was of course that it is painfully long and boring. The second category of people actually said that they did not mind getting these boring strings of ascii characters. I also got some intere...
Read more