Subject: FW: BEFUDDLED PC USERS FLOOD HELP LINES
Date: Wednesday, April 06, 1994 8:23AM

> Everyone should have a copy of this.  Have fun!!!
>
> ------------------------- Cut Here --------------------------------
> History of the article:
> Title: BEFUDDLED PC USERS FLOOD HELP LINES
> >From the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, March 1, 1994
>
> BEFUDDLED PC USERS FLOOD HELP LINES, AND NO QUESTION SEEMS TO BE TOO
> BASIC
>
> AUSTIN, Texas - The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn't get
> her new Dell computer to turn on.  Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer Corp.
> technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked the
> woman what happened when she pushed the power button.
>
> "I've pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens," the
> woman replied.  "Foot pedal?" the technician asked.  "Yes," the woman
> said, "this little white foot pedal with the on switch."  The "foot
> pedal," it turned out, was the computer's mouse, a hand-operated device
> that helps to control the computer's operation.
>
> Personal-computer makers are discovering that it's still a low-tech
> world out there.  While they are finally having great success selling
> PCs to households, they now have to deal with people to whom monitors
> and disk drives are as foreign as another language.
>
> "It is rather mystifying to get this nice, beautiful machine and not
> know anything about it," says Ed Shuler, a technician who helps field
> consumer calls at Dell's headquarters here.  "It's going into unfamiliar
> territory," adds Gus Kolias, vice president of customer service and
> training for Compaq Computer Corp.  "People are looking for a comfort
> level."
>
> Only two years ago, most calls to PC help lines came from techies
> needing help on complex problems.  But now, with computer sales to homes
> exploding as new "multimedia" functions gain mass appeal, PC makers say
> that as many as 70% of their calls come from rank novices.  Partly
> because of the volume of calls, some computer companies have started
> charging help-line users.
>
> The questions are often so basic that they could have been answered by
> opening the manual that comes with every machine.  One woman called
> Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install batteries in her laptop.
> When told that the directions were on the first page of the manual, says
> Steve Smith, Dell director of technical support, the woman replied
> angrily, "I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and I'm not going to
> read a book."
>
> Indeed, it seems that these buyers rarely refer to a manual when a
> phone is at hand.  "If there is a book and a phone and they're
> side-by-side, the phone wins time after time," says Craig McQuilkin,
> manager of service marketing for AST Research, Inc. in Irvine, Calif.
> "It's a phenomenon of people wanting to talk to people."
>
> And do they ever.  Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is inundated
> by some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one related
> by technician John Wolf: "A frustrated customer called, who said her
> brand new Contura would not work.  She said she had unpacked the unit,
> plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for
> something to happen.  When asked what happened when she pressed the
> power switch, she asked, "What power switch?"
>
> Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users.  So many people
> have called to ask where the "any" key is when "Press Any Key" flashes
> on the screen that Compaq is considering changing the command to "Press
> Return Key."
>
> Some people can't figure out the mouse.  Tamra Eagle, and AST technical
> support supervisor, says one customer complained that her mouse was hard
> to control with the "dust cover" on.  The cover turned out to be the
> plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.  Dell technician Wayne Zieschang
> says one of his customers held the mouse and pointed it at the screen,
> all the while clicking madly.  The customer got no response because the
> mouse works only if it's moved over a flat surface.
>
> Disk drives are another bugaboo.  Compaq technician Brent Sullivan says
> a customer was having trouble reading word-processing files from his old
> diskettes.  After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to
> diagnose the problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with
> the diskette.  The customer's response: "I put a label on the diskette,
> roll it into the typewriter..."
>
> At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a technician's request
> that she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk.  A letter from the
> customer arrived a few days later, along with a Xerox copy of the floppy.
> And at Dell, a technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy
> back in the drive and "close the door."  Asking the technician to "hold
> on," the customer put the phone down and was heard walking over to shut
> the door to his room.  The technician meant the door to his floppy drive.
>
> The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling.  A Dell
> customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything.
> After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the man
> was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor
> screen and hitting the "send" key.
>
> Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program, so Dell
> technician Gary Rock referred him to the local Egghead.  "Yeah, I got me
> a couple friends," the customer replied.  When told Egghead was a
> software store, the man said, "Oh!  I thought you meant for me to find a
> couple of geeks."
>
> Not realizing how fragile computers can be, some people end up damaging
> parts beyond repair.  A Dell customer called to complain that his
> keyboard no longer worked.  He had cleaned it, he said, fulling up his
> tub with soap and water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and then
> removing all the keys and washing them individually.
>
> Computers make some people paranoid.  A Dell technician, Morgan Vergara,
> says he once calmed a man who became enraged because, "his computer had
> told him he was bad and an invalid."  Mr. Vergara patiently explained
> that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" repsonses shouldn't be
> taken personally.
>
> These days PC-help technicians increasingly find themselves taking on
> the role of amateur psychologists.  Mr. Shuler, the dell technician,
> who once whorked as a psychiatric nurse, says he defused a potential
> domestic fight by soothingly talking a man through a computer problem
> after the man had screamed threats at his wife and children in the
> background.
>
> There are also the lonely hearts who seek out human contact, even if it
> happens to be  a computer techie.  One man from New Hampshire calls Dell
> every time he experiences a life crisis.  He gets a technician to walk
> him through some contrived problem with his computer, apparently feeling
> uplifted by the process.
>
> "A lot of people was reassurance," says Mr. Shuler.
>
>
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