Any anachronistic dialogue in Mad Men can be explained simply:

Don Draper was way ahead of his time.

I agree. A cross-platform secure app would address both security concerns & BYOD.

Powershell does have some useful tricks for parsing data into Active Directory and Exchange servers that are hard to match with mere batch files.

FTFA, Heins remarks:

So, he points out that the keyboard users are the demographic with the least growth potential AND the least staying potential, and he thinks that's a positive?

Yes, it was definitely just trolls from /g/ (is "trolls from /g/" a redundancy?), not anyone else, and certainly not me. ;^)

How are Finn and Jake, by the way.

I've had the same thing happen with phone support. The problem originates with the user's lack of computer skills/awareness/knowledge, not the support technology. But, hey, if more users understood computers, a lot more of us would be flipping burgers or pushing mops for a living, so there's that.

I prefer to choose new tools to improve the process. Moving from phone support to live chat support, but ignoring the possible integration of remote access through the live chat system because the phone system didn't do that is just silly.

Mind you, there are a lot of silly support providers out there.

FTFY... I will now go and punch myself a few times to save you the trouble.

Where I'm at, the phone system (VOIP) has reports that are sufficiently detailed to show whether or not an internal call went to voicemail, and how long calls take. This means that we get hammered on the phone response times, no matter how many calls we are trying to field at once.

There is no escape.

Oh yes! I suspect some outfits want to ditch live chat simply because transcripts make it too easy to point out where their "tech" (a.k.a. their script) dropped the ball. You could always record the tech support call, but where I live you have to notify the other parties of the call that you are doing so, and one of the sketchier companies I've dealt with have flat-out refused to continue the call when I tell them that (this despite the "this call may be monitored and recorded for quality assurance purposes" disclaimer that is played to you while you're getting connected to support.) I don't know why they think that helps: nothing like a couple recorded tech support hangups to cut the legs out from under whichever manager went to bat for that vendor (what SLA?), and suddenly the other solution (the one that didn't have a college buddy of the manager working sales) becomes THE solution.

On top of regional accents and my aging ears, I frequently encounter problems with the quality of phone calls. It's either too loud (I shouldn't have to hold the phone a foot away from my ear) or too distorted (from the headset microphone seemingly placed between the cheek and gums).

Also, a lot of headset microphones, while useful for hands-free talking, don't have their noise cancellation properly tuned for the amount of background noise (a.k.a. the rest of the call center's chatter). As a result, what I tell the "analyst" (there's a euphemism for you) is often cut off, which is frequently attributed to "oh, you have a bad microphone/connection". Yeah, it's MY phone, which worked fine for the other dozen calls I've made today.

Temporary file storage was fine, as long as it made it to the server before the user left for the day. Generally it only took one "reminder" morning of realizing that wasn't the same workstation box as one was using yesterday (a.k.a. panic) for the forgetful ones to get on board.

Oh my goodness, yes! There would have been riots otherwise. The moves also gave us the opportunity to catch people with passwords written down. (Something that was a "one warning, then fired" violation.)

It's funny `cause it's true!

That is one of the best ways I've found to encourage reluctant users to store their files on a fileserver. Explicitly telling people that their workstation hard drives are considered expendable and interchangeable does quite a bit to overcome the "but it's MY computer" mindset that persists for some users (even the ones from after the time of nigh-omnipresent LANs). Also, moving workstations from desk to desk as part of "regular computer maintenance" will flush out the remaining laggards (that was one the best things I've ever seen a CIO think up.)