As you may or may not be aware I work in the fast paced I.T. world. I am a systems administrator for a regional electronic document management company. Prior to that I spent 7 years in Legal IT hell. All in all just under 9 years as a technology professional.
Believe me when I tell you this profession has plenty to rant about. In fact you will no doubt see many IT related rants from me.
You know, I don't know who first thought it would be a good idea to outsource technical support for major companies over seas but I think I speak not only for myself but each and every one of my peers when I say I'd like to drag his nuts over a cheese grater. As a systems administrator one of the most painful tasks I have to endure is to occasionally call for technical support on one of my servers or backup library or worst of all Microsoft. When you call the big M and not only for support but for the love of GOD "product activation" you always get someone from India or Pakistan or some other 3rd world, 3rd rate country, who will answer with the thickest of accent's and tell you their name is Mary or Bob. Bullshit! You know what I say to them when they tell me that? I tell them my name is Ganmoush Patel.
Now I have problems with this type of outsourcing on many levels.
- 1st and foremost is that while I understand the decision for these companies to outsource is/was to save money and I also get that a portion of these savings do get passed along to the customer. That's all fine and good but we end up paying for it anyway because it takes 10 times as long to fix a problem working with these nit wits. In addition to the language/accent barrier, most of these tech support analysts (and I use the term very loosely) are freaking morons and are usually reading out of a knowledge base of some sort or they work off of some kind of script/checklist. GOD forbid you interrupt them to explain to them that you ARE a professional, this is NOT the first time you've had the problem, and you actually have already done your due diligence with respect to troubleshooting this before calling. Because believe me calling is only thought of as a last resort. I will wear out keyboards doing google searches before I give in and call tech support.
- 2nd these are great low paying jobs that can go to American workers. Granted your average Walmart employee probably will get paid more but their job is probably harder. With an extensive knowledge base, a little training, and good phone skills any idiot can do this job and we certainly have plenty of idiots here in America the difference is, in most cases, I can at least understand most Americans.
- 3rd there are actually degrees of stupidity! While I can't say I've talked to the dumbest people on Earth. I'm pretty sure they're related to some of the people I've dealt with. I'll give you an example. One product I needed support for was call back only and that's because the cheap ass law firm I used to work for would only purchase that level of support. Anyway, so I call in and leave my name and number and I'm told by some automated piece of shit that I will receive a call back in approximately 1 hour. Meanwhile I end up fixing the problem myself. I go back to my desk and at almost 1 hour to the second I get my call back. Now when I answer my phone I usually just answer with my name. Kind of let's people know who they called. So I answer with my name, clear and concise, and the guy asks if he could speak to me. Ok so maybe my american accent is a little to thick for him so I speak slower and tell him that he has me. He insists he has a wrong number and hangs up. 30 seconds later he calls back. This time I answer with the name of the firm and he asks for me. I inform him that as fate would have it I went out at lunch time and got hit by a bus and could someone else help him. I promptly hung up on him and never heard from him again.
Now, it's not all bad. Occasionally I will stumble upon the rare occurrence of getting someone that actually speaks English as a first language and my problem gets resolved pretty quickly. Rarer still, and I want to stress this is the rarest of the rare. One time in nine years, thousands of support calls and got someone from the 3rd world who was helpful, knowledgeable and who I could actually understand, I actually got someone from Indonesia once who not only spoke English well but was helpful. I wanted to recommend her for medal. One other time I was supporting a dictation solution for the law firm I worked for and the software was written in Australia and was supported there too. The great part about that was that they spoke English very well. The not so great part was they didn't have a 24 hour help desk which meant some pretty odd times for me to call support. Fortunately they wrote a decent product and the need to call for support was minimal.
The moral of the story is you can't hope to luck into good support, we need to bring it back home. So talk to your congressmen when they come knocking at your door. Don't just nod and say thanks. Express your concerns to them. Tell them to offer tax breaks to companies that keep these jobs here. Explain to them that they will get that money back in income tax from the American jobs that it creates. Remember our legislators are not much brighter than these 3rd world tech support people but at least they speak English. Bullshit is only their second language.
Thank you for reading and GOD Bless America.
