On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 02:06:25 -0500, Silvan
wrote:
Ah, so he was a good one, because he _recognized_ that you knew where
to go. It's the ones who tell you blatantly wrong things that **** me
off. "Reboot and clear your cache." "Um, why exactly?" "Because I
can't go on to the next line in my script until you do that."
Yeah, me too. "OK, I'm rebooting. Beep. There, I'm rebooted. Next
question. Yes, this machine boots very fast. Next question please. It's
a, um, Octegenarian 4000. They're new. Next question please." 
I did tech support for a while. The reason for the script (and the
stupid questions) is to weed out the calls that are just someone who
is trying to print with the printer off or something. I spent a lot of
time on the phone with someone once because their system was running
but the monitor was totally dead. I suspected it was unplugged (you
sometimes just get a feeling from the person you're talking to). He
absolutely *refused* to check to see if it was plugged in "I've been
in this industry for x years and I know how to use these things."
"OK, let's try it on a different outlet to see if it will work there
before I have you ship the monitor back for a replacement." Long
silence while he crawls behind the desk to "unplug" it. Suddenly he
comes back on the line "Never mind." click.
A friend worked support for the local cable company. The "clearing
question" for them was "what time does your VCR show?" If it was
flashing 12:00 you could safely assume they were incapable of
following instructions an you simply terminated the call and
dispatched a service guy.
The point is that there is usually a reason for the stupid questions.
When you deal with a Windows system reboots are a normal part of any
debugging cycle because it is too stupid to forget anything until you
turn the power off. Especially network stuff. I have had to turn off
(power off, not just rebood) every system on my network and bring them
back up again in order to restore communication. Win98 is really bad
that way, but XP does it quite a bit too. I find it is not uncommon to
need to reboot 15-20 times in order to make a network change work.
There is no logical explanation (other than that Microsoft writes
crummy software), but it *does* work a lot of the time. It frustrates
the heck out of me to reboot four times with nothing changing and have
it suddenly work on the fifth, but that's life in the MS world.
Tim Douglass
http://www.DouglassClan.com