[plug] FAQ - alpha release

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Beau Kuiper wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Colin Muller wrote:
> > Beau Kuiper wrote:
> > > iiNet is actually a very confused and strange company. So much so I am actually
> > > suprised anything gets done there. I always dread communicating with them. They
> > > actually use linux a fair bit for their equipment (their cityspan client side
> > > box is a small linux box).
> >
> > Our connection is through iiNet. I haven't needed their help much, but
> > when I have (e.g. to get the name of their NTP server) they've been
> > pretty helpful. I haven't tried any Linux-specific questions on them,
> > though.
> 
> Their support isn't terrible, but they can get very simple things very wrong
> occasionally. It is very frustrating. One example (that is probably still
> there), is that when we were using modems, the script I wrote needed to take
> into count two different sets of texts and types of logins. IInet denied this,
> dispite having miles of chat logs saying otherwise.

In my experience, it depends who you talk to. The people who answer the
phones are, for the most part, complete lemmings (there are exceptions).
They have been taught the Win95 party line, and how to solve the most
common service problems, but that's all they know. However, if you can
convince the person who answers the phone to transfer your call to
someone who knows whats going on, the help gets exponentially better. 

Annoying as this is, keep in mind that the first layer of operators is
there to save the sanity of the "people who know". After all, 95% of the
phone calls to a large commercial ISP help desk will go something like:

Client: "I've got a problem with my login script - You wont let me
connect!"
ISP:    "Have you plugged your PC into the power socket?"
Client: "Oh yeah... forgot about that..."

Russ Magee

-- 
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Russell Keith-Magee
PhD Research Student
School of Computing, Curtin University of Technology
email: keithmag at cs.curtin.edu.au OR russ.magee at computer.org
WWW:   http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~keithmag
Ph: +61 8 9266 2129    FAX +61 8 9266 2819
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If a fool persists in his folly he shall become wise.
		-- William Blake