A customer insisting that I explain the obvious.

Sometimes you have to be very exacting with your instructions when on the phone with someone. Assuming they know which button to double click often leads to 20 minutes of you pounding your head against the desk only to realize that they've been double right clicking the entire time.

Example - One of my guys was on the phone with someone for an hour trying to figure out why their USB port wasn't working only to figure out the caller was plugging the USB drive into the wrong PC.

I worked with an older bloke when I first started my current job, he wasn't my supervisor as such but he was basically training me in a lot of aspects. This guy was not in any way tech savvy. Most of the work is outside work, but to get a specific pump to run, at that stage you needed to do it on the computer. I aske dhow to start the pump, he took me into the office and said "hover the pointer thing over the picture (icon) and then click the mouse button". Sounds easy, right?

Except I could never make it work. It didn't make sense, I know how to use a computer, I know how to use a mouse, but I couldn't turn the pump on. After a week or so of having to get this man to turn it on whenever I needed to use the pump, I eventually made an offhand comment to the boss, saying I was rather bemused about not being able to work it out.

He asked me what I was doing, I told him. He then said "wait - you're using the left mouse button?"
Me "well yeah - if someone says to click the mouse, that's the normal one to use."
Boss "yes I agree. But for this function, it's the right button. I thought he would've told you that. At least now you know."

We discovered that because the other guy had no idea about computers, he assumed the right mouse button was the default one because most people are right-handed, so to him it made sense.

When I did support for TV service, I spent a huge amount of time and frustration with users like this who have no sense that I'm already trying to tell them exactly what to do and they don't need to question it every single time...

Our version of this was simply trying to get someone to make sure their remote was in Sat mode, TV mode, etc. before moving forward (because people are dumb and call for their channels not changing when they're in some other mode).

Every. Fucking. Time. If you say simply "press the 'Sat' button and let me know when you've done that."

"Okay"

"Press the channel up/down and tell me what happens"

"The Sat button is blinking." (Meaning they held it down for 5 seconds and put the remote into programming mode).

Sigh "okay I think we held the button down too long. Please PRESS AND RELEASE the Sat button. It should light up once and stay off..."

"Well why didn't you say that?! How am I supposed to know??"

"It's okay. I will explicitly mention if I need you to hold down any button. Otherwise just press and release them until I ask otherwise..."

Repeat this conversation ad nauseum over thousands of customers until I'm conditioned to just say "press and release" by default 50 times per call...just to head off the inevitable "you didn't say to let it go!!"

Lol! I used to do tech support for gateway computers. There was a command to press any key to continue. After more than one person asked where the any key was, I started saying press the h key to continue. I only once had someone ask why the h key. My response “it’s in the middle of the keyboard@

I'm going to click on the upvote button with the left button.

I also wonder if she is the type to open the CD-ROM tray and thinks it's a built-in cup holder.

Reminds me of my late husband... I had to write out EXACT instructions on how to turn on the computer onto a 3x5 index card. I also had EXACT instructions on how to do anything that he might want to do onto other 3x5 index cards too! He had several of them in his computer desk drawer. The "How To Turn On" card also had a little drawing of the computer tower with an arrow pointing to the on/off button! He used those cards every time he had to do anything on the computer.

Reminds me of a college class I took for Microsoft Office in the 90's. It was six credits so I figured it would be an easy way to pad my transcript.

Unfortunately, the instructor for the course was new and proved to barely know the material. She wouldn't say double-click. She would tell everyone to click-click the icon. It was even weirder for a triple click. Yup, she would say, click-click-click the paragraph in Word.

I wound up teaching the class for her when she discovered I knew more about it than she did.

People seem incapable of following thoughts and reaching a conclusion. I have worked in a place where during downtime we still answered the phones, but advised of the maintenance. People calling from literally all over the world. You tell the customer everything will be final and you can access in two hours. Inevitably some genius asks “what time is that here?” Um, in two hours? I don’t know where you are or what time it is there? Or if I know they are stateside, I’ll say after 3 pm eastern. I get the same question. Um, what time is it there? Ok, central time zone, it’ll be 2 pm. These are adults that have a job or I wouldn’t be speaking to them - we are not public facing.

I once administered the dev/qa lab for a large, expensive, online information service that was making the transition to adding advertisements to its web sites. One of the big changes involved displaying ads on the 404 page. Everybody and their niece had to sign off on this particular change. I received a stupid number of requests for the url to the 404 page. This was particularly frustrating to me as most of these people were otherwise quite intelligent. After going a couple rounds with people wanting to know the exact url for their 404 page I responded by telling them that the url was *http://www-test.yourproduct.com/gimmea404.jsp .

As a sidenote, thanks to the addition of ads, the 404 page routinely generated more revenue than any other page on the service.

I usually find it gets even simpler and their mind blows.

"Now click on next." "You want me to click next?" "Please." "So I should click on next." "Yes." "Nohings happening." "Nothing happened when you clicked next?" "So I should definitely click next?"

Repeat.

Back in the days of floppy disks, a client was having trouble inserting Disk 2 because the instructions did not say to remove Disk 1

I would have asked each time if her mouse orientation was for left or right handed use.

I had a serious problem with my BIOS settings.try as I might, I couldn't get the bios to interrupt the boot process to let me change settings.

My son-in-law pointed out that my USB keyboard couldn't talk to the bios because the usb driver was in Windows.

Basically, "keyboard not found, press any key to continue." I found an older keybord and fixed the bios, no problem.

Effective tech support is all about pschologically empowering the user while putting yourself in their position at the same time. A while back I did some side work for a company that sold fork lift trucks and other specialised lifting and handling machinery. The owner was an older guy who was pretty clueless when it came to technology but to his credit, knew that it was the only way to sustain his business into the future. He also knew everything there was to know about the products he sold, right down to the manufacturer part numbers for nuts and bolts.

He said to me, "I wish I knew more about computers." I said to him, "I know dick about forklifts. You're an expert. Computers are just big programmable calculators." And that set the tone for a good working relationship with tolerance for understandable incompetence on both sides.

I worked an office job and dual monitors were just becoming a thing at this particular customer service location. I knew how to identify and switch the screens around through the computer settings fairly easily as I had helped some of my coworkers set theirs up. One morning I came to work and “Amy” had just requested a second display but she was having a hard time because the screen that was physically on the right side was displaying the left side information and the mouse wasn’t scrolling between them correctly (in order to get to the left display you would have move the cursor to the right side of the right screen.)

They asked if I could assist

So I asked if I could sit and mess with the settings, but both Amy and our manager who was there trying to help with no avail both said in unison “we tried all that already!”

They asked for my help but then kind of aggressively weren’t letting me help.

So I grabbed the monitor on the left and physically placed it on the right and I walked away.

Problem solved.

I’m a leftie with buttons switched…..

Nintendo help line..an hour trying to help... "ok let's start at beginning, turn the TV off and on again " "oh the TV has to be on ? "

True story

I had a coworker once who normally worked on PCs, but she was going to have to fill in on this other project for a while, and for whatever reason, she needed to come over and do it on a Mac part of the day, as that's how it'd been done (don't ask about the whole PC/Mac situation we used to have). She couldn't freaking deal with Macs at all. I had to write down instructions for her on tasks like how to print. Click [whatever] > click Print > click OK, etc. I had to do it for a few things. There was no question of her ever remembering it after being told a few times--it had to be a set of written steps, and she read off the steps every time.

She was unhappy about having to fill in and do this, but I commend her for being straight-up about the fact she didn't get Macs and never would...she didn't make a scene or anything. She knew her limitations.

Bad memories are surfacing with this story… I performed the same job at a local ISP and it never failed. Once I had taught the difference between right and left clicking, the customer would always ask which one. That and rebooting a computer. 75 percent of the time the computer still said exactly what it did on the screen. I had to explain that turning the monitor off did not restart the computer.

May I kindly suggest a crosspost to r/talesfromtechsupport for you? This fits 100%

I had a call one time where the clown would scream at me if I used technical terms...like 'click on the button'. "I'm too old! I don't understand these technical terms!" The only thing he would allow was 'mash on the button'... and I finally had enough after about five minutes of that, and told him I wasn't using baby talk anymore.

I mean, if she hadn’t used a computer since the early 90s I can give it to her. I remember it telling you to click on the red or green mouse button.

The fear of messing up was strong with this lady. Fear is a crippling thing.

I was once helping a junior Technical Author, he wrote “Press the Start Button and quickly remove finger”

I ran through his instructions with him and at the appropriate moment produced a long sharp kitchen knife and said “Is this OK?”

I once tried to explain to my mum how to copy a file on an old dos machine.

Asked her to type at the prompt: copy space file.doc space a:

I got copyspacefiledotdocspacea:

You may now end the call … by pressing the disconnect icon on your phone … with your right middle finger.

Ohhhhh the old dial up. I miss that sound. 😂

I'd be tempted to spice it up and make it sound like she was about to use a different button and then say left again. "I need you to double-click that file, except this time you're going to click the left mouse button."

This is why my brothers couldn't teach my mother how to use her computer. They assumed she knew the basics. I wondered how they thought somebody who'd never worked in an office or had one before was supposed to pick that stuff up. I taught her every step, from turning it on to checking her email, and wrote it all down for her. A lot of people did not grow up with affordable PCs and laptops, so they just never learned the language that seems like basic intelligence to you. But by all means, call them stup*d. That's what Europeans call Americans who can't speak anything but English.

"And this time..."

\2 second pause**

"...that's right!..."

\2 second pause**

"...you guessed it!..."

\2 second pause**

"...the left mouse button."

Had a similar experience. A group of people negoiated a group business contract with the ISP I worked at to support all their members as the members of thr group were now going to have computers and access the internet. This meant we had first time conumer computer users contacting the business tech support team. My colleagues hated them. These customers had little to no experience with computers and assisting them in configuring their modems was a challenge for most staff.

I loved them. They would only do exactly what you told them. I could give them very specific instructions and they would just follow them. They never skipped ahead thinking they new what was coming next. They never got frustrated at a troubleshooting step. They just did it. You did have to get very specific though.

What’s obvious to someone who does it every day isn’t always obvious to someone who doesn’t

Short, Simple, Satisfying.

They will. I PROMISE YOU...THEY WILL.

I remember one call where I asked them to click on start, then run and in the box type “command” and click ok.

They paused and then asked “was that command or command” but they pronounced them like “com-and” and “com-arned” if that makes sense, like with a long and short ‘a’. I think my brain did a short reboot.

Once I was doing a "hazard perception" test (for driving) on a computer. You had to watch a video from the POV of a car driving and double-click whenever you saw a potential driving hazard. The woman next to me kept getting all sorts of error messages come up. After a few minutes we worked out that she thought "double-click" meant push both mouse buttons at once!

Sounds like there was some sort of disconnect between the chair and the keyboard. Or perhaps an ID-10-T error.

Somewhere in there you should have instructed her to change the mouse clicks to the right button and started using that.

Sounds like the customers who used to call me at AOL lol

Btw, mouse settings could be changed so that the right button was the double-click button.

“Where’s the “Any” key? 🤦‍♂️

Would they have to explain it with the left mouse button or the right one?

You, my friend, have much, much more patience than I would have, so, 🫡