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After AppleLife, After Apple |
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You can only work in a technical service position for a limited amount of time before it loses its luster and shine, and you start to follow. Once you’ve performed a job for several years, you get into the groove and know how it’s done. The knowledge is all there, somewhere, and it becomes routine to just look it up and spit it out on demand. You keep doing this, time and again, and eventually become a fixture: unchanging, unmoving, static. The problems compound when this job involves the general public. Any technical job that involves helping masses of uncensored human beings understand technology will eventually wear the average man down, causing him to go bat-shit crazy and scream at the top of his lungs while trying to take out a swath of them with a surprise barrage of old SCSI cards. The largest catalyst for such violent behavior and general mental breakdown is best described by stating, simply, that most people exist at a significant intellectual delta from that burnt-out husk of a technology worker. This doesn’t have to pose a problem in an ideal world. In an ideal world, common people would be willing to accept advice from anyone capable of delivering it. In this real world, however, half of those that acknowledge that they need such assistance will turn violently against anyone they seek help from with such winning phrases as: “What do you think I am, stupid?” In most of the remaining cases, the user is a support vampire and that simply ruins those willing to try and help as badly as being berated for offering the answer. This behavior is evident in forums, mailing lists, in person, and most especially on the phone with technical support. As a technical support agent, you develop mental calluses that help you move on and through the chaff and treasure the customers that are amiable, acknowledge that they need help, and are happy with the answer they’re given. Genuinely happy. A good number of calls are actually like that and make the job bearable. A similar number are very, very far from it. However, the core reason of why I recently quit my job in AppleCare is that in commodity technical jobs there’s only so far you can go before you arrive at the end of the career path for the masses of technical agents and hit the lid where only five or ten pass upwards. Ever. When you get there, you have two choices for moving ahead: wait for the person in the cushy job you want to leave or die to make room and pray that it’s you among the masses that applied that gets it, or move ahead elsewhere. After waiting for someone to bite it in a freak keyboarding accident for four years, it was time to go with Plan B. So one day, when I had a life outside of the company set up and ready, I walked up to my manager and said: iQuit. Bitchman BeginsI worked in Austin’s AppleCare center for four and a half years as a desperation move after a programming gig decided they’d rather give it a go without me several months earlier and my severance and unemployment checks stopped paying the bills. I’ve used a Mac since I had control over my mousing finger, so performing remedial technical support for Macs was an obvious choice for some quick money. Mac OS X 10.1 had just come out a few months previous, which was the only free upgrade Apple has ever released for Mac OS X as it was mostly an apology to those that bought Mac OS X 10.0. The PowerBook Titanium was the king of the road, until you opened it the 333rd time and the hinge decided it was time to move on in life. There were other Apple products, but I didn’t care because those were the two I was told I supported at the time. The job was remarkably easy, but it had been a long time since I’d done phone support, so I had a lot to learn on the procedural side. They have a shortish training course that they put all new-hires through that taught them how to use iMovie, what an iPod was (the 5GB bricks, at the time), and how to troubleshoot Mac OS 9 (no one was using MOSX). All of that, I really could have done without, personally. I needed to know how to log the calls, answer the phone, setup repairs and all of that. The majority of the class I just browsed the web and goofed off in my own little world, waiting for the tidbits to come up. The instructor tried to test me now and again and I answered every question in far more detail than was sane. She stopped doing that after a while. The first day on the phone was … interesting. I had a period where I listened in with someone and during that time I wound up helping him on calls. When my time came, he wasted no time in getting a book, putting me into the queue, and leaning back. Wherever you are, damn you Billy, you cocky mofo. Yet, I did it, and kept doing it for years. He was right about that, at least. The greatest challenge in technical support is matching the level of the customer. Some folks see windows, menus, and icons while others see their own little world with their own little names. For one fellow, the system still had lines of text. Line one was the menu bar, line two the window’s title, line three the toolbar, and so forth. That was a very interesting night, and oh, it did last into the darkness of the night, that one. It’s hard enough to have to change your dialect of stupid for every person that calls in, but it’s even harder to talk to someone about a PowerBook when you’ve never seen one for more than five minutes, and even that was in a small lab across two walls, a field of cubes, a moat of break rooms and vending machines, and past the Gauntlet Run of Managers, asking why you’re mobile. Oh, I know why they put them there. They’re expensive and easy to steal. It was just quite annoying when you’re talking to someone who can only type numbers and you are unaware that they possess the only Mac that actually has a working number lock key (that, too, was a fun night). On the upside, there was no hardware troubleshooting other than “it’s broken and I’m sending you a box.” At that point, it was more customer troubleshooting. People didn’t like to be without their machine long enough to fix it, but didn’t want to live with it broken, either.
It’s a business critical machine, this portable. So that’s why you don’t have a backup of your data or a spare machine to use in the mean time. It, and all that’s on it, is just that important to you. You can’t run your business without it, and you have no way of replacing it should something happen to it, even temporarily. I understand. Go to hell. Part of it is understandable. Machines cost money, so do backup schemes, and so does that $3 coffee you have every day and that $50K SUV you drive. It’s about priorities in the end, and Americans in general are very confused about priorities (“We’re scared!” → prove George Orwell to be a fortune-teller). If something is important to you, you spend money to make it reliable. If you cannot make it reliable, then you make it redundant. It’s a life lesson more than a computer lesson. Some folks have two cars so that one can be in the shop. Some folks have a spare room outside their home for guests and for staying in should the house need work. Some folks have a backup of their data and another computer to use it on should the primary one fail. All of those folks are prepared. Everyone else will get it in the ass one day and yell at me for their lack of planning. It’s part of the job, I discovered. All told, the job wasn’t really challenging. I found myself coming in to work late, getting in from lunch late, missing breaks, etc. All the classic signs of being completely tired of the job. So I went to my manager and said, “I know servers. How do I get into that team?” A few weeks later there was an opening and I was told to interview. AppleShare AppleCareSo, within the first year I was off supporting PowerBooks (you people are crazy) and into supporting AppleShare IP and Mac OS X Server (you people are crazier). Despite my every attempt at leaving that organization over the course of the next four years, that small group was the endpoint of my career at Apple. This happened for two reasons. The first was that we didn’t support other products at all, thus specializing my skill set in the eyes of hiring managers and making me unattractive for anything else. The second is that it was a good-paying job that required very little active thought. Most problems with ASIP were resolved by pointing people to one of three Knowledge Base articles: 16145, aka. you installed a software update without knowing that ASIP cared; 88023 aka. this is all I was going to do anyway; and 90013 aka. this, too, is all I was going to do. Most problems in ASIP related to a corrupt AppleShare PDS file or a corrupt user database. Everything else pretty much just worked, except Macintosh Manager. Macintosh Manager is the most evil, vile, putrid pile of shit to ever come out of Cupertino, and I’m including OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, and At Ease for Workgroups when I say this. On the one hand, it did everything that administrators wanted it to do, and did it well. On the other, there was no human way to diagnose failure other than running down a list of steps until something worked. There were no indications, no signs from above, no flashy lights, not even ambiguous numeric error codes. It just broke. I got to the point that if someone said Macintosh Manager was busted I’d just say: “Run through 88023 and that’ll fix it. It’s all I’m going to do anyway and you can do it offline. I’ll give you a case incase it doesn’t work.” They didn’t call back on those cases. I checked. The article supports this view, too. There are no indications, just steps. Mac OS X Server added a good deal of confusion into the pot for the folks that had been supporting ASIP all of that time, but it wasn’t terribly much for me since I’d just come from running Solaris- and Linux-based web and mail servers. It had standard Unixy underpinnings and server processes and was easy to understand at that level as a result. The fuzzy areas are just where Apple changed things. Learn those things and Server is just a tame little kitten that happens to randomly vomit on you when you pet it. You live with it because it’s just so damn cute and cuddly. So, it wasn’t terribly hard to just build up and maintain a pool of knowledge and chug along day after day, dealing with the highs and lows in the firestorm of a call center. The highs are honest-to-goodness technical problems where you can get into the system and see what’s gone ill. The lows are the repeat calls or the repeat callers. One fellow has a production server die without a backup server or a backup of his data. Boo hoo. I’ll fix the computer, but you didn’t do your job and I can’t fix that, so I’m sure you’ll yell at me for half an hour about “it’s a Mac, I shouldn’t have to back up” or some nonsense and then slam the phone down. I’ll wait. Another has a very basic phone support contract and demands a bug to be fixed and the binary mailed to him in an hour. Umyeahno. Yet another has done literally everything in the book to solve a problem except those things remotely relevant to the issue at hand. Ahh, shotgun troubleshooting. You forgot your password, resetting the PRAM will not help you. I know, it’s a Mac, and resetting the PRAM is the Vulcan Behavior-Control Grip, but it just ain’t gonna do it this time. The list goes on. Dozens of calls a day for four years. I’d prefer not to multiply that out, really. That would be depressing. And none of this is a critical slight against the people calling in as much as a lament that many of them were getting paid 50% more than what I was and had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Such is the trap of working in technical support. You must be a super-tech to be useful, but there’s so many needed that the budget becomes slim on a per-person basis to get such people. To give you an idea about that, how much would you expect to pay a consultant (one man, not a company) that had even most of the following skills?
That’s a damn fine spread of Macintosh knowledge that you don’t see very often at all. That’s also the range of topics that the higher members of Apple technical support have. There is no specialization. And yet, with all of those skills (and more), we received phone center wages and the regular abuse of people whose jobs we should have. I really don’t mean that lightly. It was a staple of the daily calls to get someone to whom you had to explain what a server was and why they bought one. Or, a variant, why changing the server’s IP address is generally a bad thing, and that would make a DHCP address on the server a very bad thing. I don’t hold anything against those individuals, I just don’t think they should have a job administering a server if those basic concepts aren’t in place. I mean, really, would you trust your company’s servers to someone that had to be told what DNS was? That would be my point. People whose jobs I should have. They were also jobs I didn’t want. Server administration is a whole other animal, to me. It’s face-to-face support with people you’ll see again and again, and you can’t become the bad guy to to many of them or your job is on the line. Technically, it sounds like a good deal. Practically, it’s politics-laden, and I try my best to avoid jobs where there are politics involved in any significant amount because, frankly, I’m an egomaniacal perfectionist asshole and I don’t work well with liberal arts school graduate wussies. I tend to make them cry. It’s not intentional, it’s just that they’re idiots. I didn’t have that problem in AppleCare, though. The majority of the people there suffered the same lot in life that I did. Most everyone worked at a system administration job and got laid off, needed quick work, and Apple was hiring people for the consumer products. We filtered up through the ranks and found ourselves locked in the back room with no career exit. It’s like the roach motel for server guys. That said, it also meant that we all had similar backgrounds and interacted similarly. Politics rarely came up, except for the real politics. When you put that many Libertarians in a room and actually get them to work, they’re bound to talk about their political misconceptions as they go (as I said: asshole). BenniesI can’t talk about the ills of AppleCare and support jobs with talking about the good. I mean, obviously, if things were completely bad I simply would have quit long ago. There are people that appreciate us, and there are good customers that call in a lot that we know by name, or even voice. There are the great stories about people that almost ditched the Mac for the sake of one or two issues and a phone agent got a sudden burst of caring and fixed absolutely everything that person had wrong and won the person over for life (or at least a few years). The absolute best thing you can do for someone at Apple that helps you is to send a note to a manager about the call. Long or short, it doesn’t matter, just ask for an address to send it to. Much like how only people with problems call AppleCare, so all that they get are the problems, managers can get that way with their agents — only the disasters come in. If you like what you see, send in a note and things will go well for the agent. As for environment, well, it’s relaxed. Very relaxed. I remember when I first started at Apple they had a picture in the training class of some guy in flip-flops, shorts, and a tropical shirt in a decorated cube with a goofy grin, the message being: it’s casual. One fellow even went as far as pushing that to the reasonable limit by showing up to work every day for several months in a bathrobe and sandals (and shorts). I don’t recall a word ever being said. I think he actually just gave up because no one said anything. Then there’s the real benefits. Great healthcare, 401k with matching, ESPP, a gym, on-site cafeteria (that’s started to really suck ass in the past six months), and other things really rounded out the package. Holy Quagmire, Batman! It’s Time to Jet!It was a rather kushy job with good benefits, all considered. After some time, though, it started to become very clear that some of those immortal people had worked their way into management as well, and were doing some very stupid things. Over time, the stupidity compounded and, well, things became unpleasant enough for me that I tried to leave several times. The Apple Retail Store opened in Austin during my first career-induced depression and I applied and fought like hell for it. I worked my way to the final interview on that one, only to get passed over for other transfers. I tried hanging around, making my name known, all the fun tricks, but nothing came of it. Time and again I applied as Genius openings came up and got nothing. Well, almost nothing. One day I did, actually, get a call back from them for the job, complete with an offer. This was right around the end of the year and their offer was below my new salary after a respectable raise from a mid-year job change. This was also after they slid the Genius scale back quite a bit, too. Needless to day, more work for less money is something I try to avoid, so I did. I looked into other departments along the way, firing off resumes when things got weird or upsetting, but no one bit. I’d been specialized far too long and wasn’t good for anything else, it would appear. Try as I did to find happiness within Apple, it really didn’t happen. Life Inside AppleCareNow there are some jobs that inspire happiness and stability. Jobs where you can live out your life doing them day after day and not feel the urge to run away from them because they’re killing you. Those jobs are very few within a support organization, and that includes AppleCare. The majority of people in the organization are doing some form of tedious grunt work or another. Either grunt work on the phone, or with email or chat, or making those systems work. Once you’ve gone through the birthing period in your job where you learn what to do, it’s one unimpressive day after another with the exact same duties giving you the exact same problems from the customers and the processes. Are you lonely? Work on your own? Hate to make decisions? Rather talk about it than do it? Then why not “HOLD A MEETING” You can get to see other people, And all in work time! “MEETINGS” The Practical Alternative to Work It’s really all some form of grunt work unless you’re in management, and then unless you’re one of those that actually wanted that job, it’s nothing short of meeting hell. In all of my time at Apple, I’ve learned one thing about Apple management: the ones that go to the most meetings win. What they win, I don’t know, but there’s sure as hell some contest they’re having that they’re not letting the grunts in on because over half of the day for every manager I had was taken up in some form of meeting or another. I cannot fathom the level of boring that job must be, especially since I sat in on a few and saw how little got done in an hour. For this very reason, there were mini-posters hung in various cubes around the building of the “Hold a Meeting!” joke (intentionally-bad grammar and all). If my productivity fell to that kind of low for half a day, you can be sure I’d be told there was a problem with that. It would probably be in a meeting. The key jobs to land, the ones where you don’t die a slow inner death, number less than fifty. These are the cushy technical jobs where you actually make some form of a difference; you see issues coming in and gather them together for reporting, and do basic research and testing for them. As new things come out, you get the data first and have to learn it completely. Once you’ve learned it, you use all of that information in supporting it. These people, however, are both quite happy with their jobs and very much immortal. Which isn’t really to say that it’s a bad place to work, outside of those jobs. If I didn’t have something better outside Apple I would have continued ignoring the gaping faults in the processes and kept doing my tedious and unchallenging little jobs. The benefits are the best I’ve ever had, I enjoy spending time around my peers within the group, and the job is really quite easy once you’ve handled all the basic issues. All things considered, AppleCare is a very stable employment, very easy to learn and do on a day-to-day basis, gives unbelievable benefits for that effort, and will eventually add a pervasive, inch-thick layer of I-don’t-give-a-fuck to your thought processes. It’s just how you survive. Really, though, if you want a place to settle into, it’s a good one and I can’t think of one better. Unless you don’t want to settle in. Back to that promotion cap, there. There were other options for me within Apple, sure. I could have gone into technical writing (I have my fair share of Knowledge Base articles under my belt), but that’s a dead-end from day one. I was tempted to go into sales, but I value my soul. There’s the compromise of an Inside Systems Engineer (Inside SE) job within the sales organization, but that job is a quandary. On one side, you need all the knowledge in the world to perform it and answer every wild question a customer will come up with, and have to have a response to every reason given for why a solution is not for him. On the other, you will otherwise never use that knowledge in real life. You will be stagnant unless you get out into the field and use that knowledge on a real installation, but field SEs are one of those “unless they die” positions that you rarely get, unless the company expands, and then there are others on that waiting list for when that happens. Writing, selling, pitching. Outside of moving up technically, that was it for the opportunities that lie ahead for the wise and learned phone jock. Moving up technically came to one of two choices: within Austin, or Move Out There. I had a shot at some jobs Out There that I might have taken up, had they not been in the Valley. I made a better-than-decent wage in Austin. Somehow, I don’t see the value in getting a $20K raise and having a lower standard of living, just to try and move ahead within a company. I don’t love Apple enough to take a personal hit for the desperate chance of moving ahead. The two jobs I could have had were Inside SE and Software QA, and I know a couple of people in QA. QA is yet another wait-for-someone-to-die job and one of them has been at it for several years, waiting. I was tired of waiting. My ego yelled at me that I needed something better for myself than clocking in, being yelled at, clocking out, and doing it again. I needed to dream again. I needed something that wouldn’t stagnate me, trap me, and keep me in a rut. I felt like a pod in The Matrix, just powering the machine. I had to break free. Breaking FreeSo one day a friend of mine comes to me with some news. A family member will give him an undetermined lump of cash to start a business venture. Find a crew and an idea, pitch and refine it, and you’re golden. As my friend said then, it’s really amazing how quickly you can come up with business ideas when someone’s willing to throw money in your face if you get a good one. We went over many plans, from mail servers to spam filter boxes (both overdone), to well-done hosting (thin profit margin), to various kinds of software for the web. Then we realized something, I think. The web is overdone. It’s the new frontier and everyone’s doing something magical for the web and … the core applications on the desktop are stagnating. So we identified a few places that could use some repair, drafted up an assassination plan for the market leaders, and got the cash. Expect to hear more of that soon. Once that was cemented and all the work done, it was a matter of making either the dumbest decision I’ve ever made, or the smartest. Apple is such an incredible place to work, it really is. You’re surrounded by great people and great products. Sometimes you get the inside scoop on a product or issue or feature or whatever, and it really feels nice to know that. (Often, we’re clueless about such things, as JC mentioned in his Rumors at the Bar article at Mac Geekery.) If I want to know if there’s a bug on something, I look. If I want to know how something works, I have places to ask. If I want to test some issues, there’s a lab full of hardware to test it on. If you ignore the whole emotional scarring and limited career bits, it’s a really great little place to be. The issue is ignoring those things. When it was very clear that I’d be a support monkey for at least two more years, it was no longer a decision, but a sad, dirty job that had to be done. About AppleFor all of the specific ills of the groups I’ve been in, I do love the company. I see many, many places for improvement throughout the company, but I have no true hope of real change there. Too many immortal fools are embedded in management positions in key places for any real change to come. Too many “professional managers” are at work trying to make noise for themselves and their own promotions for real, honest change to be effected. There will always be a dead-end in the promotion line for technical workers because of the sheer number of good workers that Apple Austin has working for them. I say this with honesty: my co-workers rock. They know what they’re doing, and most of them deserve far more than what they have. The catch is that it’s very satisfying to just get into a rut and work the same job all day, so they’ll never make the noise needed to get anyone’s attention for promotion paths. There’s something very sedating about getting paid decently for answering phones, and a sedated workforce is a complacent workforce, and a complacent workforce effects no change. So I did, for me. Part of me regrets it, part of me is scared shitless, and part of me wonders why it took so damn long to do it. Do I have faith in the company, living and working inside of it, seeing the dirty laundry and the wild parties? Unequivocally, yes. The proof is in one’s actions, isn’t it? The software company that I’m leaving Apple to work on will be a Mac-only house, like Panic or Omni. There is nothing else I would rather do, and I see a very strong future for Apple in this world and I’m going to put my bread and butter in their hands and code like hell for them on my own. I am no longer an Apple employee, and while part of me regrets that, I’ll always have Apple on the brain and will run this wagon until the horses die, God willing. |
bravo.
WOW.
"It's a business critical machine, this portable. So that's why you don't have a backup of your data or a spare machine to use in the mean time. It, and all that's on it, is just that important to you. You can't run your business without it, and you have no way of replacing it should something happen to it, even temporarily. I understand. Go to hell."
Typical careless AppleCare right there. This is so going on the blog. How about you go to hell for being so arrogant to say that everybody who owns a computer to do business should have TWO!
"We're sorry that your bathroom broke in your office, sir, you should have rented the office with two."
People who invest thousands of dollars into equipment to run their business should be treated with respect, but instead they have to deal with jerks like you. Even if they had another, it's a huge inconvenience and sometimes heavily time-consuming task to retrieve/reinstall all of the data and get yourself back up and running; especially for novices.
Yes, you should have rented the office with two. Three would be better, and on different connections if at all possible.
As I explained right after that, the incorrect approach is to think that the egg you have in your hand will be whole and good forever and ever. It's going to go bad, or it's going to break. Expect it. Even if you know and love the chicken and the eggs it makes, it's still an egg, and it still breaks.
You can hold yourself as a customer as high as you want and become as indignant as you like about it, but an individual's lack of planning is no one's fault but the individual. That said, there are options to get around it depending on how much you're willing to invest in a solution. Get cozy with a local repair provider and they might give you a loaner machine (it won't be the Apple Retail Store). Perhaps you can become a service provider yourself and fix your own Macs. There are options.
Instead of accepting that most situations could be better handled on both ends, you chose to setup a site to complain about "bad" support experiences and, from what I can guess, blame it all on the support tech.
You are yet another reason I left. Thank you for coming here to demonstrate that I'm not crazy.
I, personally, have many computers. Removing one limits that workflow, but nonetheless it can continue; however, losing a workstation is always a burden. Beyond my occupation, I help clients maintain their equipment, supply general technical support, recover lost data and whatever other variety of computer-fixing needs. I've seen it many times. I guess my tact is slightly different though; instead of flaming my customers on a blog I help them get their issues solved as effectively and efficiently as possible -- happily... genuinely.
You don't seem to have any compassion for the fact that not everyone can be so responsible as a software engineer with their data or hardware. The learning curve is much steeper for those who are older, and many professionals are still foreign to basic system functionality of their Photoshop/Word/PowerPoint workstations.
I'm not trying to villify you. I would think if Apple were hiring people like you to do this line of work, then they are hiring the wrong type of people. That seems to explain a few things.
I love it. Adam posts two paths for dealing with a “business-critical” computer problem:
Didja see that part before you ranted about the most expensive option?Bottom line: if the data is critical to you, then you need to do everything you can afford to do to make it available to you when you need. That doesn’t require one to purchase redundant machines; that’s just the sexy, money-is-no-object, no-brainer solution.
Or, as you seem to do here, one can get mad when someone else points out the failure to plan. It sounds like that person is being an asshole, but honesty often sounds like a lack of tact.
What? Having a backup of your data doesn't do jack shit if you don't have a workstation to use it on.
Just so you know a little about me before you dismiss my comment as you have the others; I'm a former Mac Genius and former AppleCare rep, myself. In my days as an AC rep, I repeatedly won awards for superior customer satisfaction; Apple calls back a subset of customers randomly, asks some satisfaction related questions, and publishes this data (internally) attached to the agent. In both my Mac Genius days and those in AppleCare, my customer service skills earned me the pleasure of leading the Customer Satisfaction leg of the newhire training regime. Before Apple, I was an IT manager for a major, national advertising agency, providing hardware and software desktop support to creatives, budget preperation, purchasing, and planning for a company with roughly 600 seats. After Apple, I am a small business owner. And knowing all of this, you're full of shit.
Computers are the lifeblood of my business. Ideally, I would have liked to have bought a PowerMac G5 to do my data recovery work. I could have, given my bugdet. Knowing that things break, however, I bought two low-end iMacs instead. For the same price, I have redundancy. While things are working, I have two computers to run recoveries on. When things break (and they will), I'll not be shut down. Far, far too many of the customers I dealt with daily at Apple cannot fathom this concept.
As for your toilet analogy... look at it another way. If it's just a toilet in your office, no big deal. If that toilet is the backbone of your business (say, you're providing portapotties to events), then you're the jackass for not accounting for lossage correctly.
This is Basic Business Management 101, here. It's not really up to debate. Successful companies budget for failure. Businesses that do not will fail. I live in a family of entreprenuers. Many have failed. Some have succeeded. The common thread is planning. The companies who planned for the failure of a critical resource have succeeded, bar none, and those that did not have failed.
If you can't afford a backup machine, you've bought too much machine for your primary. Scale back, buy a lesser machine, and use the savings to buy a backup computer. We all want a maxed out rig. If that blows your equipment budget, you're not planning right. And if you're the IT guy who lets a customer blow their budget on one maxed out rig, with no backup for the inevitable failure... then you're a jackass for that, too.
You don't have to have a new rig for your backup. Keep your old computer or buy a used, 3 year old model on eBay that has the bare minimums to do the job. But for the love of all that is righteous and holy, have a backup machine, and don't bitch at anyone but yourself if you fail at this task.
For those that don't understand rhetoric (which seems to be common these days), I worked with Adam indirectly at Apple. He would never literally tell a customer to go to hell. The point here is that Apple's responsibility is to fix the computer within normal channels and that you aren't going to get special treatment just because you throw around the term "business critical." Even if the term _did_ merit special treatment in Apple's systems, _everyone_ says their computer is business critical, so suddenly everyone would have the critical flag, making it meaningless.
If you lose data and you dont backup its no ones fault but your own. I have a Computer set up in Raid 0 and I knew the risks and lost all my stuff, guess what I got an extra drive now just to back stuff up onto. I was smart enough to have all the really important stuff on both my IPod and my Laptop. Not just my Ipod like some people do. Yea lets back up my data on a hard drive I will carry with me, theres no way that it might fall and break or get washed, or the hard drive might fail. I'll never understand people, they just dont think. Well thats my two cents! later!
People who invest thousands of dollars into equipment to run their business should be treated with respect, but instead they have to deal with jerks like you. Even if they had another, it's a huge inconvenience and sometimes heavily time-consuming task to retrieve/reinstall all of the data and get yourself back up and running; especially for novices.
But that's not Support's problem. End users like you who require back up services should either pay for redundancy or hire a recovery service if the data is that precious to you. In corporate jargon your request is 'out of scope of support.' In plain English it's unreasonable.
Adam is dead on when he says that end users in the US [and I will say the EU as well] have their priorities screwed up.
Yeah, I will be blogging this too. As required reading to my 'support constituents' [read friends and family] who rely on my support.
Adam, as someone who started in phone support [for Netcom] and does SQA for a living now, thanks for writing this up.
Leo of BORG
http://expat-leo.blogspot.com
Bose technical support does data recovery on their Lifestlye wireless music server-things. They also ship out replacement units when the old one breaks; you send back the broken one when you receive the new one. For these reasons and more, Bose is highly regarded by their customers: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060330-6491.html -- and, gasp, that's a home stereo company -- not even close to the level of importance of a company selling workstations "for creative professionals."
Car companies generally tend to give out loaners while they fix a car under warranty because people need them for work -- yet nothing even close to that level of support for a _work_station?
Apple's (not just Apple's) support policies are comparitively poor, industry related or not. It's no wonder why consumers have the reactions described in the article. Miserable customers are miserable vendor representatives somewhere else -- should it all just go full circle, then?
I'm not saying that you are wrong, by any means, but could you please post something that backs up your statement about Bose doing Data-Recovery? The link you provided didn't mention it. Recovery is a very specialized service, often costing $600 or more to simply touch the disk, whether they recover anything or not (drivesavers.com, ontrack.com). One client I had years ago (before apple) had a 1200page manuscript that cost him $7,000 to get back via on-track, simply cuz he had no backup, but it was worth it to him. Either way, he admitted to and paid (literally) for his mistake.
/begin-rant
A car company may provide a loaner (some do, not all, and a lot of the time they charge for it), but they're not going to pre-program the stereo, make sure it has an mp3-player (or even a tape-deck!), 4-doors, power windows, a large enough trunk, a V8, airbags, or any of the other amenities that you may want. Similarly, a computer company would not pre-load all of the apps that you may need cuz they don't know which ones you own.
And this is setting aside all the rest of the legalities which the auto-industry has already nailed out due to decades of existence, but would cost an arm and a leg for a computer company to iron out for all possible legal issues that may pop up. This is the very reason why Apple Stores don't offer loaners, or if they do, they are taking a HUGE legal risk by doing so, not to mention a personal job-risk on the part of the employees that made the offer.
Similarly, EVERY computer company out there has a clause in their EULA that states that the manufacturer of the computer, and the hard drive (which is usually made by another company) are not responsible for your data, on any level.
In regards to "the level of importance of a company...": If you run a moving company, a towing company, or a taxi or limo service, and you only have 10 vehicles, are you going to book all 10 of them at the same time, all of the time? Maybe you will, but if you do so, you are taking a risk, even if you DO perform regular maintenance on them. What if one breaks down? What are you going to do? Sure, you can go out and rent one from another company, but who are you going to blame for your inconvenience? Are you going to blame the manufacturer of the vehicles? Your mechanic? Who? Are you going to blame everyone but yourself for not accounting for the possibility that something might go wrong? If a school-bus broke down, and they didn't have an extra, who's to blame? Other examples from countless other industries could be applied, and in all of them, the answer is the same: It's no one's fault but your own, or at the least Murphy's Law, which you still can't peg on anyone else, so there's no sense in complaining WHEN (not if) it happens, let alone treating anyone else harshly because of it.
And Apple's support policies ARE better than most in the industry, as is shown by the very article you mentioned, and countless others listing Apple #1 in CS for the past 3 (or more? can't remember) years. On a sidenote: why did you even mention that article? You're complaining about Apple while praising Bose, yet the article praises both, so it proves nothing to support your point, and in fact, is a counter-point against your opinion.
And Apple will "ship out a replacement" when your iPod, Airport, mouse, keyboard, and most accessories brake, cuz it's more cost effective to replace the entire unit. Not the case with computers, as any computer-company would tell you.
As for compassion (in your earlier post), in tech support it usually comes down to this: If you treat us with respect and good-attitude, we are likely to do the same, and often go above-and-beyond-the-call to help you. I have done this thousands of times myself. Conversely, if you treat us like shit, do you think we're going to do anything except the bare minimum? THAT is what this blog is about! NOT to flame customers, but instead to VENT about the BAD customers. Note that Adam DID mention the good ones, and I had plenty of each when I worked for Apple. I also quit for many of the same reasons Adam mentioned.
And whether we like it or not, whether it's ideal or not, you are correct: It all DOES go full circle, in one way or another. It's our job and your job and EVERYONE's jobs to try and make it go full circle in a positive direction, instead of a negative one. And if you aren't doing your part.... well -- you get what you put in, and get back what you deserve.
/end-rant.
Bravo on the article, Adam! As a Mac Genius I dealt with everything you mentioned and more. Articles like this help to restore my faith in humanity.
Home Stereo company my a$$.
You'll have to excuse me my French, but Bose isn't your average low-end stereo supplier either. In the EU at least, Bose and Bang & Olufsen, along with NAD and a select few others hold the high-end market segment. This means that you pay quite a lot of money for those systems. This means higher margins, more exclusivity and thus better service.
Sure, if you buy a Bentley, you'll probably get a loaner when you service it. If you however buy a Nissan Micra, I wouldn't be too sure. I drove Saab 9-3's, Audi A4 Quattro and a Renault Laguna (all of which are nice cars), and I have *never* gotten a *free* loaner during *any* service/repair. And these were company cars, so I *did* get red-carpeted in a lot of ways. Just goes to show you don't know what you're talking about.
Same here... Buy an Aiwa or Sonic (cheap Taiwanese shit) DVD-recorder, and see if you get a data recovery service with it. Or even, as Bose does, data moving.
Thank you.
Your own example proves JC's point. It's all about margin and numbers.
"You'll have to excuse me my French, but Bose isn't your average low-end stereo supplier either. In the EU at least, Bose and Bang & Olufsen, along with NAD and a select few others hold the high-end market segment. This means that you pay quite a lot of money for those systems. This means higher margins, more exclusivity and thus better service."
At risk of going way off topic - there's a difference between Bose and Apple.. Apple makes great stuff and sucks at marketing it.. Bose makes terrible stuff and is great at marketing it.. They are about on par with Nuance in the sound quality of their speakers and their related overpricedness/suckerness factor.
People usually generally don't feel like they've just been suckered out of their money with Apple products..
Mostly Apple Care works. I recently have gotten good answers to all except why do iPods on Windows systems not connect except on Firewire.
As for Backup. Well Apple does actually put up dialog boxes telling everyone to back up their data and while not published tells us when you recover back to your refurbed hard drive once a year you can deauthorize all machines.
No matter what a *lot* better than anything except Linux which is a whole new OS Social structure which is still a Technocracy.
I look forward to having a Applecare supported laptop with Dapper Drake support from Apple.
As we know OS-X will be the end of the line since the iPod is the new market paradymn at Apple.
Mostly Apple Care works. I recently have gotten good answers to all except why do iPods on Windows systems not connect except on Firewire.
Uh, all of the currently shipping iPods use USB. Sned?
Interesting indeed. I just happened to stumble across this blog. I am a product support specialist for Bose and have been so for about 3 years now. Not only does Bose offer data recovery on their systems, but it doesn't cost anything extra. The only exception comes in to play with corrupt files that cannot be recovered.
There are 3 systems that allow you to store music on them. The Lifestyle 38, 48 and the 321 GSX. All of which, if break, are eligable for data recovery. If the system is under warranty than the service is free, if it is out of warranty, than the data recovery is no additional charge to the flat repair rate.
I can see why customers have a hard time understanding this. If Bose can porvide this level of support, than customers may think that apple should be able to as well.
People who expect this don’t take into account scale, margin, market, and other factors.
Let’s take the Bose LifeStyle 48. At $3999, how many do you think Bose sells? Anywhere remotely close to how many Macs Apple sells in a quarter? I’d guess not, and by several factors. Apple sells more than a million Macs each quarter. I can’t find any data, but let’s just say for argument that Bose sells half that many LifeStyle 48s, though I’ll bet the real figure is significantly below even that.
If either company has a really, hideously bad quarter, 5% of those will go in for service.
Twelve weeks in a quarter, Apple gets 4166 repairs a week and Bose 2083.
Let’s say the average Apple computer being repaired has an 80GB hard drive. That’s 333,280GB of storage needed each week. A repair takes about a week, so you could probably get away with about that much total over a quarter.
The Bose LifeStyle 48 appears to have approximately 10GB of storage. For the sake of argument, I’ll just use 20GB for the calculation. That’s only 41,660GB needed.
For the hell of it, let’s configure an XServe RAID solution for each dataset.
Or we can look at the labor cost. Let’s pick a nice and round and moderately realistic techician labor rate of $10/hour, and say it takes about 2 hours each.
But let’s also talk about what each company means by “data recovery,” something I’d love to do because I do professional data recovery.
From your description and those found on Bose.com, it sounds like they’re offering a data transfer service. You can correct me if I’m wrong, as I may be, but it sounds like they’ll just move your data from your dead unit to the new one. If your dead unit has a failed circuit board, there’s no data to really be “recovered.” It’s just being moved.
When computer companies talk about “data recovery,” they’re talking about storage media failure wherein the drive needs to go to a clean room, be disassembled, and a magnetometer used to try to interpret data at the block or electron level.
Lets also look at the probable margins on these devices. Apple’s a publicly traded company and their margins are reported regularly in the 10-20% range, significantly higher than other computer manufacturers. Consumer electronics firms like Bose regularly sell products with margins measured in 100s or 1000s of percents. The LifeStyle 48 looks like it probably costs a few hundred dollars to produce. It’s markup is probably around 200%.
At any rate, buying $77k in storage and paying $44k a week in extra wages may seem reasonable when your margin is 200%. When Apple would need to buy $600k in storage and pay $83k in salaries weekly for a product pulling in margins hovering around 10-20%… Not so much.
disclaimer: all of these numbers, except the number of Macs sold in a quarter, were rectally generated. this excercise was purely to show how scale can hurt.
So you're saying the numbers you made up from your ass prove your point?
Well, 100% people agree you suck.*
* This number is made up.
Jeff,
It would appear that you either spent too much time on /. writing trolls and flamebaits, or you haven't got your head screwed on right.
I do not work at Apple. I work at another Palo Alto company with a double name. And with some modification, the story that Adam wrote is a good description of the Life of a Support Tech. And yes, you are the BAD customer. JC's story about margins, numbers and all of these things is highly relevant. Support, however implemented, is a *cost*. Unless you get customers to buy mission critical contracts, at which time it turns into a potentially profitable business model.
This means that in 99% of the cases, any Tech-selling supplier needs to make service work in the face of low margins and high demands from people that want to sit front-row and centre for half a buck.
For the sake of argument, let's say that you are smart enough to view your system and data as mission critical, and you listen to JC, Adam and myself. You can either buy a second one for redundancy and make sure the data is synced between the two, or you can buy a mission critical contract.
How does that work? Well, we first make sure your particular environment is fit to be called Mission Critical. This means a site-prep is done where we make sure that all factors (power, machines, data, backup, whatnot) are redundant enough on their own already. If you don't fit the bill, we won't take the risk.
THEN we offer you an MC contract that costs you an arm and a leg. For that money, we supply you with 24*7 on-call people, well-defined SLA's and all the help in the world, even including all kinds of pro-active activities to actively help you *avoid* screw-ups and failures to begin with.
As you see, this will cost the average Joe way too much money and effort. Usually you'll see large organisations, governments, financial institutions, Telco's and suchlike engaging in such contracts. This being out of your league, I'd say you simply need to land with two feet on the ground and listen to reason.
We cannot do the impossible on no budget. If you want to buy one single machine that you never ever have to back up, that rarely breaks, which comes back to you repaired with any data that was threatened nicely *recovered* (ie Not MOVED like the Bose-example), you should expect to actually *PAY* for that.
I'll ignore the "bad" customer comment and go straight to the meat and potatoes of your post:
I like the Mac OS X operating system, and the hardware. I operate my business on it by choice. Unfortunately Apple does not have any level of professional ("mission-critical contracts") support options, whatsoever (according to the reps); and now that the business is growing I've come to a very tricky decision of either staying with Apple, my favored vendor, or going with another hardware outlet that has support policies more inline with my needs.
There-in lies my problem. The people on the other end of the line who snappishly respond that I'm an idiot for wanting such things exhaust my patience in dealing with said problem -- but I don't blow up at them, at least not until they go on the internet and post a story about how "stupid" we all must be for wanting such things.
I'll also note for a third time that data backup is not my personal issue, it's machine backup. I have a $50 data recovery programs for both Win/Mac that do the trick for all of me and my client's needs. The bigger issue is having to send away a workstation for an indefinite amount of time with zero alternative options is what really can nip a business in the butt.
And for all those who argue: "have a backup computer!" Yeah, sure, great -- as everyone in the successful part of the business world knows, the second you buy a back-up anything it quickly becomes part of the business model. Try renting a moving truck in Boston on September 1st -- oops, you can't -- and if you can and do, and it breaks-down -- oops, you're SOL... and no, Uhaul doesn't give a shit. Does that mean you should have rented two? No, it means Uhaul should give a shit.
We're all human, people. Deadlines and capabilities get pushed, mistakes happen, and it should be up to the guys at top to find solutions, not the guys on the bottom.
Ok, I'm spent here, and it's like arguing with bricks... smart bricks, but bricks all the same.
You’ve done absolutely no research on Apple’s support contracts. Apple has a 24×7 one-day-to-one-hour support contract for anyone willing to buy it. While it’s called Mac OS X Server Support the very first paragraph notes that it covers Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, and heterogeneous networks.
Do you have to pay for it? Yes. Is it expensive? For what you get no. For someone that can’t manage to keep a backup computer around without using it in production, probably.
And you’re right, it’s up to the guys at the top to make the best decisions. I absolutely agree. You are at the top of your business and you need to make better decisions on how to structure your business so that you have disaster plans. As you’ve so often noted, you feel we’re at the bottom, so I guess that leaves it to you.
Have fun with that.
Jeff, this is going to be a hard pill for you to swallow so I’m going to deliver it two ways. The first is how I would deliver it if I still cared how you felt and the second is how I want to say it right now. Just an exercise, mmkay?
And what you deserve:
This little blog entry has obviously got me a little pissed off. Some of these responses obviously have me even more pissed off. It's no rain cloud over my sun, mind you, but it's enough to provoke me to voice my opinion.
My response to your posts, I feel, are justified -- despite all the tech-support junkies hanging around cheering your name and claiming otherwise. My presence here is tantamount to my intentions elsewhere. My language may be a bit off-color, but so are your insinuations and insults.
It's important to note, however, that beyond what I have posted here you know absolutely nothing about me. Your claim to me being a "bad customer" is based on some hideously deformed analogy comparing my disagreement with current policies to being in the wrong or "bad." Not terribly surprising, a lot of the same people you flame for not being 'in the know' would have the same ignorant point of view, and the old saying goes: "it takes a fool to know a fool." I love how on the internet a dissenting voice is classified as a "whining troll." Such a distinguishing phrase coming from the keyboard of whomever typed it. There's no point in explaining who I may be beyond whatever you've deemed me, or even try to appeal to Your Righteousness that I may actually be a good person with good intentions -- I don't really give a shit.
How I'm a part of the problem and you're a part of the solution is so beyond any fucking normal realm of thought that it astounds me you'd even try to take that tact. You worked for a multi-billion dollar corporation and did nothing but read off a cue-sheet. You backed the corporation's policies as the testament of business itself, without rationalizing or conceiving other methods of support: that's what kept you answering phones instead of making decisions.
If I recall correctly, you're the person who wrote a four page blog article, bitching about customers at your last job and then plastered it on Slashdot and Digg for the world to listen to YOU whine and moan (no, I'm not overlooking the "but on the other hand I really liked [this]" paragraphs). Seriously, get a grip on reality.
You worked for a multi-billion dollar corporation and did nothing but read off a cue-sheet.
No, I worked for a multi-billion dollar corporation and I had nothing more than my head and what little information the customer gives me to figure something out. AppleCare does not use cue cards, decision trees, or other guides. The person you get on the phone is winging it and using their brain to solve the problem.
That you keep jumping to believing the worst just taints everything you say. It’s not worth responding to because it’s just all kinds of wrong.
You obviously haven’t the slightest fucking clue how AppleCare works.
There are no scripts.
There are no cue-cards.
They don’t blindly follow corporate policy to your detriment, in fact a great many see themselves as being your advocate in getting around Apple’s corporate red tape. When Apple’s customer service policy changes for the better, it is almost always the phone agents who identified the need for a change and ganged up on management.
I was in AppleCare at a time of one of the greatest customer service policy fuckups of all time, and you’ve never heard about it, and never experienced it. Phone agents like myself played a direct roll in knifing that baby when we saw just how insane it was. If we blindly toed the corporate line, as you think we do, you haven’t the foggiest notion the world of hurt you would be in when you called AppleCare.
I’ll point out that I don’t glorify AppleCare Agents or Mac Geniuses in any way. Some of the most fucked up human beings I’ve ever known worked in these capacities. I had at least one co-worker with such a reputation that Apple Discussions board members were advising each other to hang up if he answered their call. I worked with a Genius so thoroughly in over his head in the Genius roll that I spent roughly half of my job just cleaning up after him. After he was fired, the 25% reduction in workforce from his departure actually resulted in a net gain for my personal workload.
But most of us are decent saps, knowledgeable in our job, and with a desire to help human beings. I’m sorry if some AppleCare agent scarred you and I’m truly sorry that you can’t grasp the concept of proper capital investment in your company. But your attitude in your posts and the specific arguments you make tell me all I need to know about the kind of customer you are.
You, sir, are a troll and a whiner. You blame Apple and its policies for your lack of planning. As a small business owner myself (of two tech companies, no less!) and a veteran IT director, I know your type. If you can’t keep enough machines around to help yourself through difficulties, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Bose is indeed using the term 'data recovery' innaccurately. They are performing a basic data transfer, which is moving data from a working harddrive, and good files, to a new system. Apple will provide this for $50 with any service, or for FREE with any system purchase. Its certainly nice that Bose includes this TRANSFER service with their product. This is a matter of scale in terms of Apple, or any major computer vendor. I'm not going to speculate on the exact number of Lifestyles uMusic systems Bose has shipped ever, but I'll wager anything that it is comparitively insignificant to the 12,000,000+ products Apple has shipped in the last 4 years with harddrives (to consider the accepted useful lifespan of a computer product). We are most likely comparing about a 5 order of magnitude difference in storage here.
Data is not considered a part of a computer, and is the user's responsibility to maintain and protect. Bose's warranty service agrees with this notion, and will not assist a consumer when their data is damaged or inaccessible. In that case, a Bose, or Apple, or (any company that sells a product that stores data), customer must go to a company like Drive Savers to have their media professionally recovered. This costs on average between $750-2500 depending on the situation.
Don't remember you, but do remember the guy with the bathrobe---I think you were in the other building.
I really think 4 years is about all that you can handle at that place. It is really soul sucking, and the managers are right there to help your sould be sucked.
Anytime there was a manager that actively helped the people under him, they would get the boot, and when the Dell Call center crowd moved in to the place about 2003, the emphasis became less how fast and accurately you can help the customer, to how much can you sell the sucker.
Well said mate. Very similar story to mine, 'cept they had me targeted for a dead end job in the Unix group rather than Servers (I think those groups merged after I was gone, but back then it was all the old AIX network servers and such, pre OS X). So I made a lateral xfer to Sacto when they opened the centre there, since it put me in striking distance to the SFBA. Too many good ex-Apple people in Austin, and I wanted back to Cali anyway. I dunno how you managed 4 years though. At the end of my 2.5 it was more than time to flee. I'm glad I had the opportunity, and I'm glad I escaped.
A friend in Austin lured me back from California with the hope of a job at Apple, where his wife worked in Desktop Support. Although I didn't have a single minute of telephone support under my belt, they offered me 3 weeks of paid training, based on the previous job experience as a programmer for AOL Music and a "Burger King Customer Representative." Bleh. I think I made myself vomit after saying that.
They hired me on as a contractor (eek!) and had a firm "1-year contract" time attached. I so was ecstatic to get a job that paid more than 50% on top of what I was previously being paid that I neglected to realize what "1-year non-extensible contract" meant.
At AppleCare, I started out in Portables Support -- sat next to a Speed freak (prescribed for his Adult Acute Attention Deficit Disorder) and an over-worked, under-paid, over-henpecked Control freak.... (Derrick and Mark, I still love you guys!) "Portables" was fun, for half of a year, until the company decided that I was too good to fire and sucked in sales too much to keep on the phones. So, they stuck me in Vantive Issues Support.
Vantive was AppleCare's CRM -- it was 90% old, 74% slow, 99% dysfunctional, and 133% concentrated urine, sweat, and tears, distilled from the years of agony, malice, and loathe from the AppleCare representatives -- however, it worked just enough to keep the place afloat and operational.
I had illusions of benevolence about the company and the management -- I thought for certain that they cared as much about all their employees, contractors and fully-"badged", alike -- I was sorely mistaken. They said I was offered 3 changes to get "badged," but never took up the offer. I call shenanigans.
Getting moved to the Vantive Issues team removed me from the normal "hiring pool," or so they told me. My only chance for getting hired was to the same group that Adam worked for: The Enterprise Support group, which was effectively Tier 3. I tried my damnedest to get hired by Apple, instead of working as a contractor... especially since I realized that I only had a few months left at the position.
Rolling-in the PeopleSoft 8 CRM over the top of Vantive was my final task before ultimately getting told "sorry, but we don't need ya." Jokes on them, though -- I claimed unemployment on their dime.
I don't know what I was thinking when I thought Apple was unlike the other companies in terms of compassion -- they're just like everyone else. They have to pay for their board members' private jets, $350 Million California houses, Bugati Veyrons, and Porsche SUVs somehow... it's usually out of the suffering of the dead-end-job-ridden ex-programmer technical support staff.
The place that I'm at is no different, but I'm not complaining -- they actually realized I could program and now they're extorting me for my skills on the cheap.
There are a few things I would like to confirm about AppleCare Austin, in closing:
The "Casual" atmosphere is a hoax. The real atmosphere is strictly "California/Austin Conservative" with a dash of "show up to work, on-time and not naked" spliced in here and there.
The so-called "Arrogant" technical support mentality has a valid, understandable rime and reason. "Us" calling "Them" idiots for not backing up their data on a business-critical system previous to an unrecoverable failure isn't the representative's fault -- it's absolutely the fault of the ignorant moron who didn't back up his/her data properly... and claiming "overwhelming costs" prohibiting sufficient backup facility or redundancy is an outright lie -- these are Macintosh systems, for cripes sake... an XServe costs three times as much as a similarly-equipped Taiwanese-designed system with the Intel version of MacOS X installed. Places that buy Macs have more money than brains, which is witnessed by the incompetence of the ignoramuses that call in to AppleCare technical support and claim that they "can't be without" their Mac, since "it's business-critical!"
The guy who wore a bathrobe was actually complained about by a co-worker and his manager told him to "dress-up a little or find another job." Ah, the iPraise system worked wonders to clear up confusion about your neighbor's B.O. funk in an anonymous, quasi-non-confrontational manner.
Would I work at Apple again? Hell yes. Would I work at AppleCare again? Hell no. Not unless it's a cushy managerial job.
I resent the implication that sombody made about Bose being high-end. They are at best, the upper end of low-end. No highs no lows, must be Bose.
You should check out www.krellonline.com or www.marklevinson.com
Bose as high end.. Luckily we can't be to ashamed of that comment, at least you didn't accuse yourselves of being audiophiles.
Great article, it reminds quite of bit of why I stopped drinking so much once I didn't have to say "Hi, thanks for calling Apple Technical Support. My name is $agent, may I have your name and phone number starting with the area code please?" every single time I picked up the phone.
I used to work in Portables support for a miserable short stint of time until I was able to jump over to FileMaker technical support for the majority of my tenure working for the Mac cult. Dealing with pissed off customers is absolutely frustrating day in and day out. You get the "pseudo-experts" who call in rambling about how so and so worked different in version A and how exactly they want it fixed by 4:30 pm. The bad callers range all the way to the unreasonable rantings of self righteous techno-nazis who've drank the Apple Kool-Aid so deeply that their entire life hinges on whether or not they can listen to their crappy indie rock on their iPods. It's a wonder that some burnt out tech hasn't gone on a rampage and started hunting down customers. We have your address and know where to find you, keep that in mind before you go apeshit on the phone.
I found it amusing when people would call in and ask for help and then promptly refused it when I supplied it to them. That happened at FM way more than Apple. People get testy about their data. And when after troubleshooting for hours and trying every trick in the kbase a couple undocumented ones, you tell them that the only two options are to start all over or send the file in and pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the *chance* that it might be recovered. You have to expect incoherent psycho-babble and empty threats, and insuations about your birthrite and sexual predilictions.
But guess what? As soon as you're off the phone, I couldn't give a shit about your data or your problems. If your entire life, job, or bonus is dependant on that computer or datbase, then treat it as such. This is what seperates the true professionals from the name-dropping, buzzword flinging charlatans. CD's are cheap, and everyone and their brother has an iPod these days (well, not me).
98% of all the people I ever talked to on the phone during those years were nice, reasonable people. It's only the 2% that were complete jerks that I'd gladly push down a flight of stairs. The real kick to that was I had the chance to meet some of those people face to face at DevCon one year and they were as nice as could be. Some people confuse the calling tech support with a license to be rude, unreasonable, and expect everything under the sun. Those people aren't worth the time, and as soon as I clock out for the day, I take off my tech support mask and go home.
To the gentleman who's being railed on about his criticisms about technical support, please buy a Dell. And brush up on your Hindi. Thank you, come again!
As an Apple employee who has done the gamut of technical support, and who also helped run a Mac–centric consulting company, I can assure you, everything Adam said is bang on.
I would like to add one thing, even though it sounds like I am toting the corporate line.
If you have data, mail, etc., that you need and can’t function without, do yourself a favour and buy .Mac. You get online email, enough space to store your files (and you can buy more), you can sync your addresses, calendars, bookmarks, and other things online. You can even set up an automatic backup that runs in the background.
If you have a business critical machine, get .Mac and get ProCare. ProCare gives you 24–hour turn-around-time for service. I understand that not every business can afford two machines, especially if one doesn’t get used as much. Save yourself a lot of aggrivation and get .Mac and ProCare.
pretty good article; interesting to see thoughts that I had once had, in passsing, in print. The real issue here I think is career path for people. Finished Goods RAM and data migration folks should get to eventually become iPod people then become MGs. Good MGs should then become Business or Enterprise SEs. As it stands now, all that is done – for bad and for good- is to mainly harvest SEs from the Windows world and somtimes some Solaris peoples. I think this is unfortunate b/c it takes the True Believers out of the loop and does not, say, allow them to eventually get to know the care and feeding that Xsan still needs on a daily basis.
Working for Apple is quite different from working to other places. I never had the opportunity to work here but I really do want to. My sister on the other hand did. She told me so many stories that led me to believe that the people working for Apple are people indeed.
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