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I dont post that often, but holy hopped up diety, I have to share this one. This is a combination of Unsupportable and Cursing Out Coworkers, but since it will make more sense to the technical crowd, I'm posting it here.
For those who aren't technical and want to undertstand, a couple of terms:
Kernel - The central core program of an operating system, more or less.
Quorum Drive - The primary hard drive on a clustered machine that keeps configuration information about the cluster. Which node should be active, what resources are allocated, and so on.
I work for Major Software Company. We, like just about everyone else, use outsourcers for front line customer service (the first people a customer talks to), while my team takes priority escalations for the big, expensive support accounts that are experiencing catastrophic outages (all of Mall-Mart's registers just went down, etc). Some of the outsource call centers are in the US, some are outside. Lately we've been made aware that in our case, you get precisely the quality you pay for.
Outsourcer's note that describes the customer's issue indicates that his primary database server has experienced a 'corn' drive failure and refuses to start. We are intimately familiar with some English translation issues and assumed he just misunderstood - after getting the customer on the phone, we clarified that yes, he experienced a QUORUM drive failure. All good - we got him the help he needed. And as we should, we sent a note to our outsource manager about the incident so they could follow up with the guy that took the call and educate him so next time he'd know there obviously isnt such a thing as a 'corn' drive. Irritating, but again, when you're paying the lowest bidder, you can't expect technical geniuses.
It was far, far worse than we imagined.
The response we got a week later confirmed that the manager spoke to the agent in question and that he had indeed misunderstood...but that because he had hard other customers complaining about 'kernel' failures, he really thought the man said 'corn'. My brain stopped for a moment. These are SUPPOSED to be technically literate individuals. We're not asking for people that can debug an error log. We're talking about basic component recognition. Playing Farmville does not mean you really are growing corn somewhere on the frikkin internets. Sigh.
For those who aren't technical and want to undertstand, a couple of terms:
Kernel - The central core program of an operating system, more or less.
Quorum Drive - The primary hard drive on a clustered machine that keeps configuration information about the cluster. Which node should be active, what resources are allocated, and so on.
I work for Major Software Company. We, like just about everyone else, use outsourcers for front line customer service (the first people a customer talks to), while my team takes priority escalations for the big, expensive support accounts that are experiencing catastrophic outages (all of Mall-Mart's registers just went down, etc). Some of the outsource call centers are in the US, some are outside. Lately we've been made aware that in our case, you get precisely the quality you pay for.
Outsourcer's note that describes the customer's issue indicates that his primary database server has experienced a 'corn' drive failure and refuses to start. We are intimately familiar with some English translation issues and assumed he just misunderstood - after getting the customer on the phone, we clarified that yes, he experienced a QUORUM drive failure. All good - we got him the help he needed. And as we should, we sent a note to our outsource manager about the incident so they could follow up with the guy that took the call and educate him so next time he'd know there obviously isnt such a thing as a 'corn' drive. Irritating, but again, when you're paying the lowest bidder, you can't expect technical geniuses.
It was far, far worse than we imagined.
The response we got a week later confirmed that the manager spoke to the agent in question and that he had indeed misunderstood...but that because he had hard other customers complaining about 'kernel' failures, he really thought the man said 'corn'. My brain stopped for a moment. These are SUPPOSED to be technically literate individuals. We're not asking for people that can debug an error log. We're talking about basic component recognition. Playing Farmville does not mean you really are growing corn somewhere on the frikkin internets. Sigh.
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