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Just had to deal with this caller about half an hour ago.
For the record, I HATE calls where I have to show first-time users how to do what it is they need to do. Or at least hate them when the caller is the Village Idiot.
No lie, when I answered this guy's call, he said up front, "Just to warn you, I'm pretty much the village idiot." I figure to myself that the guy's just exaggerating.
Alas.
Here's what VI wanted to do. He's a contractor, and had some documents that he was sending from his company email account to his client email account. However, the client has two types of networks-- secure and nonsecure-- and users thusly have an email account on both. Outside email goes to the nonsecure one, and there are a couple of applications/services available for sending mail or files up from the nonsecure to the secure network.
VI needed help in using one of those applications (let's call it SecureSendApp or SSA), though he didn't know that's what he needed to use.
So I tell him first to open Outlook, so we can find the email he sent to himself from outside. Except he's looking in Internet Explorer. I tell him to open Outlook again, but he opens Office instead. Finally, he gets Outlook open-- and I cringe, half-expecting to have to walk the guy through configuring his mail profile-- but it opens without incident. Hey presto, there's the documents he sent to himself.
So now I tell him to open up his web browser and click on the link on the client homepage sidebar for SSA, and to launch it from the web. Except he's now registering for it for the first time, so we have to wait for the registration code to get sent to his secure email. Eventually, we get the files sent up, he opens SSA on the secure network, hey presto, there's the files.
It took longer than twenty minutes to get this taken care of, and by the end of those twenty minutes, I was groaning to myself, because he really was the Village Idiot.
For the record, I HATE calls where I have to show first-time users how to do what it is they need to do. Or at least hate them when the caller is the Village Idiot.
No lie, when I answered this guy's call, he said up front, "Just to warn you, I'm pretty much the village idiot." I figure to myself that the guy's just exaggerating.
Alas.
Here's what VI wanted to do. He's a contractor, and had some documents that he was sending from his company email account to his client email account. However, the client has two types of networks-- secure and nonsecure-- and users thusly have an email account on both. Outside email goes to the nonsecure one, and there are a couple of applications/services available for sending mail or files up from the nonsecure to the secure network.
VI needed help in using one of those applications (let's call it SecureSendApp or SSA), though he didn't know that's what he needed to use.
So I tell him first to open Outlook, so we can find the email he sent to himself from outside. Except he's looking in Internet Explorer. I tell him to open Outlook again, but he opens Office instead. Finally, he gets Outlook open-- and I cringe, half-expecting to have to walk the guy through configuring his mail profile-- but it opens without incident. Hey presto, there's the documents he sent to himself.
So now I tell him to open up his web browser and click on the link on the client homepage sidebar for SSA, and to launch it from the web. Except he's now registering for it for the first time, so we have to wait for the registration code to get sent to his secure email. Eventually, we get the files sent up, he opens SSA on the secure network, hey presto, there's the files.
It took longer than twenty minutes to get this taken care of, and by the end of those twenty minutes, I was groaning to myself, because he really was the Village Idiot.
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