Alvina’s Question: How can I order prints to my closest Walmart?

Jade: Well, I’m sorry I wouldn’t be able to help you with that, as we are Walmart’s competitors

Alvina has ended the chat.

And darn. I was going to tell her she could order to one of our many locations instead but she left to quickly.

And sadly, we get a lot of people thinking we are Walmart. I have no idea why.

Maybe people just can’t read?

I’ve recently moved home after being away at college for 4 years. And I realize some things never change. My mother is still hopelessly addicted to Reality TV. I hadn’t watched any of that crap in 4 years, so last night while I was working on the computer I was surprised to find my mother watching Survivor followed by The Apprentice.

I kept turning around and heckling my mom for watching such crappy TV all night. Towards the end of The Apprentice a commercial came on for The Donald’s Blog. My mother turns to me and says “Now if you see me looking at “The Donald’s Blog” you will know I have lost it and Reality TV has gone to far.”

I reply “No Mom, I’d be ecstatic if you could even find “The Donald’s Blog.”

We had a good laugh until my mom asked “So how do I find it?”

sheila has initiated chat. Question is: How do I send photos?

sheila: Hello.

Melissa: have you installed the uploader?

sheila: I see,

sheila: seY

sheila: !sdrawkcbba s’ti egasssem a uoy dnes ot mees t’nac I seY

Melissa: I see that. Log out and come back in

sheila: FFID HCET GNIVAH M’i

Visitor sheila has ended the chat.

“No Shit” was my co-worker’s response.

Sorry for not posting more Support Humor. I’ve been promoted to an Associate Account Manager so don’t work as closely with customers but more with our clients photographers and photofinishers.

At an Account Manager meeting the other day we were talking about the decline or success of certain accounts. One manager noticed that an account in Barbados was signing up a lot of new customers and was one of the top leaders in the “new user sign-up” category.  As everyone was marveling at the success another manager spoke up.  “Well of course they are doing well, but it will have to peak out…cause well it is an island….you know Barbados…island…”  It was such a obvious comment that the whole room busted out laughing.

But with Account Management brings out the more frightening IT issues.  When working in customer support you are prepaired to deal with the 80 year old grandma who is using their first digital camera.  You are prepaid for mistakes and stupid questions. But as a Marketing business major and recent graduate, some of the questions our clients ask is downright frightening.

I had a dealer who had been with us for a few years call up and say:

Dealer: “Well I was just wondering, when do you pay me for credit card orders?”

Me: “We don’t collect funds for you.  You need to log in and grab the CC data and process it yourself on your CC terminal in-store.”

Dealer: “Uh oh…..how do I do that?”

I explain how to do it, then look up which orders hadn’t been collected. In 4 years he had orders totaling 2000 dollars which he hadn’t collected funds on.  I can’t wait to hear of those customers 4 years ago just now getting charged on those orders, if the cards are even still active.

You’ve got to wonder, how the hell are you still doing business?

Cleri: Hi, I’m from Brazil and I need a help.
Jade: Hello how can I help you?
Cleri: i’m sorry for the question, but i need to make a local call in canada and i don’t know if i need to use 1 first ou directly the area code.(sorry abou the question)
Jade: Err…sorry the site you are on “lacanada” is in La Canada, California USA, and this Live Help is in Colorado, USA, I have no idea about calling to Canada.
Cleri: could you help me?
Jade
Nor am I able to help you as I am just technical support for the photo ordering website that [website removed] for photo ordering, not phone help sorry.
Visitor cleri has ended the chat.

We get some strange questions on “Live Help”. Someone once asked me how to make a special liquor drink, another person get really upset about the price of milk, someone asked us for driving dirctions to the nearest McDonalds, another person came and started talking in Egyptian and went off about infidels (once we translated it), another person just ranted about how all the Indians were taking the IT jobs, and then didn’t believe we were American, and one person kept assuming that the “Live Help” agents were a robot even though we kept saying “No we are not a robot”…”Well that is what the robot would say.”, etc.

Probably the strangest was when someone came in and told us he was Special Agent Anderson, looking for information about a supposed terrorist sympathizer taking photos of military bases. I thought it was a joke before we called our VP to take it, and it turns out that he really did work for the military and homeland security, but the bad guy had never used our service so we had no information.

Sorry 007 we are American.

Dave’s Question: Do stores process 35mm film in one hour?

Jade: You will want to call your local store to see what the service times are for in-store products. You can find the phone number for a local store by going to “Locations” at the top of the page. I, the technical support for the website, only know information about products that can be ordered online, and thus do not know the answer to your question. Sorry.

Dave: Who says thus?

Jade: I do

Dave: Kinda oldschool

Jade: I think it is nifty Should be more brought back in style

Dave: Nifty is a good word too

Jade: Thanks

Dave: I like you Jade

Jade: Thanks Dave, I like you too

Dave: You are good people. Have a good one

Jade: Thanks. You too. Have a lovely night.

Dave ends chat.

I’m oldschool and yet only 21 years old.

Damn.

Apple unveiled their new lap top design “MacBook Air” yesterday. A super thin and light computer .76″-.16″ thick and weighs right about 3 pounds. Pegged as a computer for the ultra mobile person, this computer relies heavily on wireless.

How heavily? This computer doesn’t come with a optical drive.  To install programs one must first install the special “Remote Disk” software on another Mac, and then you put the disk you wish to install on that computer, and then the files will wirelessly install on your MacBook Air. But with an 80GB, I assume flash, HD and only 1, yes 1 USB port this “Airy” computer leaves something to be desired for.

I can see how some mobile people who are frequently leaving and returning to a physical computer could have use of this Air, such as presentations for meetings and students.  But for those of us who do a lot of computing, have a lot of programs, or edit large projects, not having a CD/DVD drive will be very frustrating.

And the kicker? The price: $1799. For a computer that needs to also have a companion computer and back up “Time Capsule” for storage space and don’t forget to throw in a USB Squid since this computer has only 1 port, it is way too much money.  Similar ultra light and wireless focused computers using the “Cloud Computing” format are priced $299-499.

Is this a computer or just a large iTouch?

Just stumbled upon a new website “The Quote Database” at bash.org.

The premise is that users submit snip-its of chat conversations that range from hilarious to deep thinking.

One of the first ones that caught my eye is this one:

<us98> hi
<us98> I’ve windows 98 installed on my computer
<Sygrke> ok
<us98> now i have a problem
<Sygrke> you repeat yourself dude

 

I can’t tell if this is profound or just hilariously true.

Only wish the website had tags or categories. Looking through 20,000+ postings to find the funny tech related ones isn’t worth it at this time. But love the concept, hope it will continue.

I’ll leave you with this last one:

<anamexis> oh man
<anamexis> I was opening a coke, right
–> Beefpile (~mbeefpile@cloaked.wi.rr.com) has joined #themacmind
<anamexis> and it exploded
<anamexis> ALMOST all over my keyboard
<anamexis> but I got it away just in time
<– Beefpile has quit (sick fuckers)
<anamexis> :<

Enjoy!

Working for a company that deals with photos is interesting.  You get to see some amazing photographer’s work, the armature travel photographer that managed to get great shots, snap shots, family portraits, drunken photos from facebook, crappy photos people want 48×60s of but can’t have, and even some porn, artistic nudes, as well as the one day we had a celebrity needing help to order family Christmas photos.

Must customers know that when they come in to tech support that we will more than likely end up logging into their account to see why things are “messed up”. (In 99% of cases things are fine on our end, it is just a cookie issue on their end but we can only check this by logging into the account.)  But some people freak out when they realize we can see their photos. (Case in point, the celebrity that realized we could see the family photos deleted them shortly afterwards. Not like anyone would do anything with them, it was just more of a conversational piece at work. “You know who came into help today? Yes it was really him! With his family Christmas photos! I couldn’t believe it!”)

But tonight’s email from, we’ll say Wilbur was pretty funny, well at least to me.

Wilbur’s Question:

“When signing up for an account I was only prompted to enter my first name.  When I picked my photos up at the store they had both my first and last name, WHERE DID YOU GET THIS INFORMATION?”

Lets see Wilbur, you gave it to us.  Kind of hard to have a pay-at-store order if we have no idea who is supposed to pick it up.  If you are scared of big brother seeing your images online I’m sure you’d be freaked if the store accidentally gave your order to someone else, now wouldn’t you? So thus, a name helps.

If the machines don’t take over, the tech support agents surely will.

Try fixing your computer without us! Muahaha

So I just graduated college and am temporarily living with my parents again. To lessen the severe annoyance of this situation I finally switched them from dial up to high speed wireless.

Now they have never known anything other than dial up, so it took a while to explain that the wireless would always be on, no need to “dial in”.  Then I had to explain that since there were no wires, the laptop was now mobile.

Once my mother got the drift she put on a movie and brought the lap top to the couch.  I was in the room and then suddenly you hear loud music and my mother screams and runs away from the computer. Turns out the volume was all the way up and she had never seen a youtube.com video before and it scared her. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.

The following day she was surfing the internet and then came running up to me.  “The computer wants me to flash it!” She said very concerned.  Again I started laughing and installed Adobe Flash for her.  She was still concerened hours later that allowing the computer to “Flash” was a bad thing.

Welcome to the internet mom.