Comment Re:Electric Shock (Score 2, Interesting) 951
Why do they lie!??!?
As a tech support agent, this is a question I ask myself every day.
If a customer says, "My internet is broken," the very first thing I ask is "what error message do you see?" 9/10 times I can fix the issue based on the error message alone, without knowing anything else. But, if instead they throw some random words at me like "it says it doesn't work," then I ask them to reproduce the error. If they can't do that then it's time to shotgun troubleshoot, and I know it's going to be a long, painful phone call.
The people who act like reading error messages is unnecessary, bothersome, or uninformative are the same ones who for some reason lie about everything. "Reboot your computer please," (one second later...) "Ok it's rebooted." Sigh.
I wish error messages on computers were more like tv set top box errors. They stay on the screen, saying blandly, "Error 14" (for example) and so customers do tend to let us know what the error number is, because there's no way around that screen. I get the error message, look it up, and a few minutes later the issue is resolved. I say take the information about what's actually going on out of the hands of the user, since they don't care anyway, they just want it fixed. Any informed user who wants to know what "Error 14" is just needs to (gasp!) look it up on our website, and then they can fix it on their own if they so choose.