Tech Support

One of the things I do in my new job is help people access the various websites they need to use – we have a Google site for regional information and updates, a national site with various teaching tools and resources, and we use an online education company to provide classes and professional development. The majority of people are able to use these sites without issue, but sometimes people don’t read the instructions about their default username and password, or they change their email address and need to have their accounts updated accordingly, or they straight-up don’t know how to use the internet, at which point they email me for help.

Maybe I’m spoiled because I went to MIT, but I have certain expectations for what a recent college graduate should know about computers and how to troubleshoot them. For example, I think it is a given that if you are emailing a tech support person for help, you should use a variant on the following format:

I am having difficulty accessing X. I go to Y website and enter Z information, and get back error message E. What should I do?

A greeting and a thank you would be nice too, but I’m not picky. And to be fair, most people who email me do use a version of the above. But I also get a non-trivial amount of:

I can’t make the website work!! How do I fix it?!?

First of all, I don’t even know what website they are talking about, since there are at least three possibilities. Maybe more, because for all I know this person is emailing me about their blog or their Pandora account or something. Second of all, I don’t know what it means for a website to “work.” Perhaps this person can’t log in, perhaps they can log in but can’t find the resource they are looking for, or perhaps they aren’t actually connected to the internet and can’t make any website “work.”  I have no idea.

Thus begins a tedious and often frustrating exchange of no less than a dozen emails, in which I attempt to pin down the exact problem as tactfully as possible, while receiving increasingly incoherent and agitated responses. So far I have always been able to solve the problem eventually, although sometimes it involves stepping up from emailing to an actual phone call. There have been multiple instances where the problem was that the person had made up a random username and password for themselves and, without registering them in any way, was surprised that they couldn’t use them to log in. Sigh.