Client has a what now??
Posted by Herlander_Carvalho@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 76 comments
Just found out this sub... Having worked for a few years on a ISP Call Center, and later on the backoffice, gave me enough material to write a book. And while the stupidity of clients was unmatched, it was even more frustrating at times, when receiving trouble tickets from the call center, since most of them had little to no knowledge about computers or the internet. This was back in the late 90's and early 2000's... I remember one in particular, that was cryptic to say the least...
"Client can't access the internet, it has one Uma Kit Oshe"
^((this is a close approximation to english btw, I'm not from an english speaking country))
I was puzzled... I read... and re-read the ticket, and could not for the life of me understand what the hell was that. I even showed the ticket to all my co-workers, no one was able to figure it out. I just started rambling about it, and it was only after, I started talking out loud, and asking myself, over and over again, "WHAT THE HELL IS A UMA KIT OSHE???", it finally hit me... The client had one Macintosh. If I had not started saying it out loud, I'm not sure I would ever had figured it out...
SomeGuyInTheUK@reddit
A friend of mine once had an issue, early days of the interwebs. he was dealing with someone at the phone company, to cut a long story short there was an issue with him accessing his email.
He would each time spell it out over the phone, they would say it didnt work, etc etc.
Lets say his same was john doe and his email was john.doe@pacbell.net and he would say my email is john dot doe at ... well to cuta long story he eventually worked out the person at the phone company was typing out JOHNDOTDOEATPACBELLDOTNET
Wendals87@reddit
I worked in an IT service desk for a few years and I remember a colleague was on call for about an hour trying to solve a password issue
They were getting really frustrated and I could overhear them going through every possible troubleshooting step but the users password
When he got the call sorted he told me what happened. She was getting the special characters mixed up
For example if the password was "Scubadriver1!" he would spell it out letter for letter and they would type a comma instead of the exclamation mark.
I dont know if they were confused or just dumb
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
He should have said, "A capital 1" when conveying !.
(It worked for an old friend when she had to explain what an ampersand was.)
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
That reminds me of a customer I once got, helping to setup his mail account on outlook or something:
Me: "Insert your e-mail address, all letter in lower case, please"
Customer: "What about the dots? Are they in lower case too?"
Me: (absolute silence)
Customer: "Oh... right... they don't have uppercase, right?"
Me: (absolute silence)
I think the customer felt I was seething through the phone, with my silence alone...
Ha-Funny-Boy@reddit
As I recall the original QWERTY keyboard on manual typewriters had the comma and period on separate keys that when you shifted to uppercase still typed the comma or period. Check this out:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/American_typewriter_keyboard_layout.svg
oloryn@reddit
This sounds like a good place for Oloryn's First Principle of Troubleshooting:
When something computery seems to be stubbornly refusing to do what it ought to be doing, when you finally figure it out, it's going to be something embarrassingly stupdd.
The (very important) corollary is: When something computery seems to be stubbornly refusing to do what it ought to be doing, you look for something embarrassingly stupide.
If your ego refuses to believe you couldn't have done something stupid, then you've lost before you've even started. Humility is a virtue in tech support and computer programming.
fevered_visions@reddit
Always try the dumb, easy solutions first, just in case they work.
oloryn@reddit
Just don't let it deteriorate into "diagnosis by random guess".
alf666@reddit
I remember overhearing one side of a call involving a customer failing to type in their password correctly.
Due to it helping a lot with navigating accents and regional pronunciation differences, everyone in the call center used the NATO Phonetic Alphabet when giving out password resets verbally. (Yes, we verified ID first.)
Normally, this made things an incredibly simple process, except for this poor bastard who was on the phone with a 1st grade dropout who somehow obtained a law degree.
"Uppercase ... as in ..., lowercase ... as in ..., uppercase Q as in Quebec..."
"No, ma'am, not K as in Kilo, Q as in Quebec."
"Q, as in Quebec."
"Q AS IN QUEBEC!!!!"
"Ma'am, with all due respect, you live and work in Canada."
androshalforc1@reddit
I used to hear a commercial on the radio i can’t recall what the service was for, they always said something like visit savers. Com but would always say that’s savers with a B like Biktor. It was always very clear they were saying Biktor instead of Victor. I always wondered if they graduated from the archer school of phonetics.
MikeSchwab63@reddit
I had to log in to a Netware server and set my password to include a dollar sign. Not sure what translation table it was using, but logging in the first time would fail and the second work, so I stopped using the dollar sign.
apuks@reddit
dollardsignScubadriver1!
SomeGuyInTheUK@reddit
The issue here was, it was the support person ata telcom doing this !
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Right, like I said, client stupidity is very common and even "understandable". It feels worse, when it is someone working in the company that does these things. But I can't say I blame them completely. They are poorly paid, and the companies that run the call center are not really looking for expensive labor, and the training is very bad. Many of the supervisors on the call center, when I worked there, were equally bad. The whole structure of this particular sector, of outsourced call centers, are just the worse.
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Oh I had those by the millions... That was just the bread and butter of it, while I was at the call center.
MicesNicely@reddit
Yes.
DRUMS11@reddit
HA. At an internship in college my email address was simply_@.com. I told this to my father over the phone. He later complained that the email he was trying to send me kept bouncing back.
Of course, he was sending email tounderscore@.com.
Diskilla@reddit
That is my daily struggle when giving a password via phone. I am specifically using the aviation alphabet to minimize confusion and always explain this before spelling the password. There are users which can't grasp the concept of something like an aviation alphabet. And I really don't get, how you can think your eight digit password is something like AlphaOscarVictorLowercaseFoxtrottFiveLowercaseZulu!Lima As you might notice, the special characters never were no problem so far. :D
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Oh lord... I swear, sometimes I would be standing all day long yelling and cursing at my workstation whenever I got dumb tickets from the Call Center. My coworkers even joked at me and used to say I had Tourette's, because I would just start yelling bad words at the computer, for no apparent reason.
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
My colleagues all know when I'm coding, because there's a near-constant stream of sotto voce expletives coming from my desk. (In my defence, the ones who've also looked at the platform swear at it, too.)
My boss approves of the quietness. He worries when I'm silent.
boo_jum@reddit
My partner’s company bio at the place he worked when we met said something along the lines of “as one of our lead devs, he can usually be found sitting in a corner with his laptop quietly demanding, ‘why don’t you work??’” 😹
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
Big mood!
agent-squirrel@reddit
Conversely there is one occurence I'm aware of when it's not a constant stream but a single low volume and long expletive...
When you forget the "where" clause:
update table set key=value;
Fuuuuuuckkkkkkkkk
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
My boss actually did this a couple of years ago!
He was playing around on the system that I was building, went to remove a value so that it could be recreated, and purged an entire table. That was a very shame-faced Teams call.
(See also Tom Scott's "Oh, no" moment.)
PSGAnarchy@reddit
The amount of expression you can put into "fuuuuúuuuuccxcccckkkkkkk" is so much more then a string of words.
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
LOL! I can relate to that! And I am a strong advocate that cursing and slang should be used when appropriate. The are part of the language we use, and make it more alive. And nothing can quite express your frustration when you're swearing, much more than just a simple "darn!" ;)
Tasty-Mall8577@reddit
Swear words are the first to return after brain injuries like a stroke. People in constant pain also tend to get more creative with compound swearing. I can spot another ill person on the internet from a mile away!
Skerries@reddit
it's medically proven that swearing helps with pain relief to an extant
GAKDragon@reddit
Mythbusters proven, too!
Puzzleheaded-Joke-97@reddit
Not me. The first thing that came back after I had multiple strokes and siezures was my sense of humor.
I awoke after weeks of delirium and when I tried to communicate with my wife, all I could say was, "Hey, you know what?"
She said, "What?"
I said, "That's what!"
We both knew it wasn't the best joke I ever told, but it successfully communicated that I was still me!
oloryn@reddit
For some of us that's not a natural expression. When I'm having problems on the computer, I either say "Oh, come on!", or I just plain 'Arrrrgggghhhh'. Not particularly because I'm restraining myself, but because that's my natural response.
billyd1183@reddit
The tech wizzards use words of power to make the programs work
HammerOfTheHeretics@reddit
Even though libcurses is essentially obsolete today, I still have and treasure my copy of O'Reilley's book _Programming With Curses_.
visibleunderwater_-1@reddit
The Tourette's claim happened to me too. I was listening to a recorded call by my co-workers with a vendor on configuring our new phone system I wasn't on, and I could hear myself in the background yelling at something., My coworker then said "just ignore that, he has Tourettes"...the funniest thing was the vendor on the call took her completely seriously.
Ha-Funny-Boy@reddit
One place I worked had an early onlilne system connected to a large mainframe with users spread all over Southern California. Sometimes the mainframe crashed. Within 10 seconds the computer operator would have his phone ringing. If hs spent time answering the phone, he would never get it up and running again. What he did was look at the lights on the console and tell the caller, The problem is with the "rosap". or "robar" or whatever red light was on. It had nothing to do with the problem.
Later his manager asked him what the errors logged meant. He replied he had no idea, he just said it to get them off the phone.
Ariaerisis@reddit
With those weird words, I immediately thought it must've been some "write what you hear" instead of the actual word. So I was trying to find what word "uma kit oshe" sounded like, but even knowing that, i couldn't find that it was Macintosh before you said it.
Narrow-Dog-7218@reddit
I once had a recruiter contact me. I had all the requested experience apart from “Mullet Pal Hard”. Took me a while but I suggested that he meant Hewlett Packard. I did not pursue the opportunity.
Double_Lingonberry98@reddit
Russian engineers loved to pronounce it Невлёт Раскард.
Skerries@reddit
can we get a Cyrillic to phenetic for this one please
DCBY12@reddit
Nyevlyot paskard
Vk2189@reddit
*Raskard
Epilepsiavieroitus@reddit
Paskard would make sense in Finnish, where paska means shit
DCBY12@reddit
Oopsie. Need to brush up on my cryllic
CheezitsLight@reddit
Ten years ago used Google translator for three hours. Client could not right click an item. This was on voice. Tried "right click fifth item"
Finally switch my pc to Brazilian Portuguese and found the word in the menu so could say to use the actual Portuguese language word in the list. No go.
Hmmm.
Then I realized it was saying "correct click" for "right click".
Had to use "right-click".
.... Use simple words.
Spell correctly.
Eschew obfucation.
Use words from a dictionary.
Use punctuation!
Hyphenate right-click, check-in and all compound numbers between 21 and 99. For example, "thirty-two" or "twenty-one".
Avoid the use of 'it'. Assume 'it' does not exist. I went to the movie in my car with my girl and I liked it.
Use repetition. I went to the movie in my car with my girl and I liked the movie.
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Considering I'm Portuguese that would not affect me LOL. And yes "right" can translate to "correct", but so it does, in English. The thing that made it harder to understand was that in Portuguese "uma" is the article "a", as in "a computer", for example. So while I was considering what was the ticket trying to say, I kept leaving the "uma" word out, and was just questioning what was a "kit oshe", which was supposed to be the object itself. It was only when I read the full sentence out loud with the article included, several times, that I finally understood that the "uma" was actually part of the object "name", and not just an article. Basically, the person that wrote the ticket, just said "Client as a kit oshe".
RandomMagus@reddit
If right and correct weren't synonyms in English it wouldn't attempt to translate it that way into the other language. The computer is making a judgement call on what "right" the English text represents, and in this case it was wrong
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
You missed the point... Correct = Correcto/Correto. Not hard to establish the correlation that they are the same word, with the same root in latin. So if in english you don't use "correct-click", but rather, "right-click", why would you think that "correct-click" would be valid in Portuguese??? I'm sorry but I'm going to say it... DUH!
RandomMagus@reddit
They were writing "right click" (in English), and it was being translated TO correct click (in Portuguese)
They did not write "correct click" in English and then translate it expecting someone in Portuguese to see "right click"
Hence, the ONLY reason there was an issue with the Portuguese translation is that English uses "right" to mean either a direction or a correctness, it DOES NOT matter if this is also true in Portuguese
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Let's assume I know only English. I know that in English what I'm looking to translate to Portuguese is, "Right Click". If I put "Right Click" on a translator, it would translate to, according to the comment, into "Clique Correcto". Surely,
Are you telling me, you could not have deduced that, the word "CORRECTO" is the same as "CORRECT" in English? And that, if it is the same word, they have the same meaning? If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, then Occam's Razor suggests it is a duck. The simplest explanation.
If the answer is yes, you concluded that "CORRECT" and "CORRECTO" are indeed the same word, then, "Clique CORRECTO" is non-sensical in the context of "Right Click" because "CORRECT" means, "to be true" or something that results in the value of "true", not "Left/Right".
Now sure, there might be SOME words, in different languages that might even be the same but mean different things, or vice-versa, but if they look similar or almost identical, they will, most likely, with a degree of certainty close to 100%, have the same meaning.
Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian evolved from Latin, having some Greek components. This is of course due to the expansion of the Roman Empire, who were themselves culturally influenced by the Greeks, causing them to adopt many of the Greek language building blocks, and even beliefs, and you can actually trace how much different a Latin language is from the original Latin, depending on the distance of Rome. Italian, being the closest to the original Latin, then French, then Spanish, then Portuguese.
And English, while not a Latin language, evolved with both Latin and Greek components, also because, the Romans were present in Britannia. In fact the name Britannia is a Latin word, the name given by Romans to the island. So it is pretty safe to assume that if a word looks remarkably the same in any of these different languages, it is a very good assumption that, the word has the same meaning. Again, Occam's Razor principle applies:
All these words, have the exact same meaning, in all these languages. I don't even need to check the definitions, because I know that to be true, even if, I barely speak any of the others aside from English and Portuguese. Assuming that ANY of them means the word "RIGHT" within the context of position/direction is quite frankly, absurd!
I'm even willing to bet that if I continue to check more languages that have evolved close together in Europe, but not necessarily of Latin origin, I will continue to be able to identify the same word, which is just, a pattern of letters, and if it's close enough, make the assumption that they have the same meaning. How do you think languages evolve? Words just become words out of thin air? Why do you think that Eastern countries like China, Japan, Korea, have a similar structure and use similar glyphs? While these languages evolved into different paths, and have become quite different, surely you can recognize at least, that they share the same principles and have a common ancestry, even if, you cannot comprehend anything. It's a pattern. Even if I cannot for example, read Chinese, Japanese or Korean, I can still identify, which characters are from which language. Because I am able to recognize the pattern.
Well, same happens with the Latin alphabet, and many words, have been borrowed from one language into another, when the words with that meaning did not existed prior to that. Right now, in this moment in time, because of the US cultural and technological advance is so strong, the inverse is happening. We are borrowing words, and terms that we did not had, from the US. The Internet is a very good example of that. In any country that uses the Latin alphabet, I'm pretty certain that, the Internet is called Internet in every country. And even those words, don't come out of thin air either.
The telephone, was named that way because TELE is the word in Greek that means "over a distance" while PHONE means VOICE (also in Greek). Voice over a distance. How do you think Telephone looks like in all those languages? I'll tell you how it looks, it looks goddamn close, because the word comes from assembling Greek words, which is one of the building blocks in Latin languages.
In fact, if the building blocks are Greek, and not Latin, you have even a wider range in which the word will be the "same" in other European languages. So no matter what, I know all those languages will have a similar word. You can be certain that, any word in English that is from Latin or Greek origin, will be almost the same in Latin languages, with simple variations. You can also immediately recognize some words origins by specific letter combinations: words with CT, TI or AL (and I'm sure many more), are most likely from Latin origin:
Words that have a PH, PS, start with TELE or end in OLOGY or ONOMY are probably Greek:
There are also some words, that are two words of different origin, concatenated, like for example, Television (Greek+Latin). If you want, go on and translate some of those words, and see their meaning, in case you don't believe my assertion that they mean the same thing. For me, it is crystal clear, I don't need to look.
I don't know about you guys but this is base High-School curriculum in here, even if you pick a "specialty" before going to college. This is not "Oh I have a background in dead languages!". No, not in the slightest. So for me, realizing that you cannot recognize these very simple patterns, it is, quite shocking and puzzling. I guess I am blessed with a better education system (?), and if that is the case, that's not really your fault.
I did search though, and at least some people, in the US, are confirming they have learned basic etymology before going to college. So... I don't know. It is basic stuff, that's all I can say. If you want to think that I'm an ass, that's fine, not going to get bothered. All I hope is that at least, you have learned something from my post, if not, I did my best.
RandomMagus@reddit
Hey, let's go back to the original story the other guy told, the one that's actually important for why I posted my first comment
The client he talked to read "correct click" and kept left clicking instead of right clicking, because the translation engine chose to change right into correct and the client didn't immediately fix that into right click from context clues when they read it. Sure, correct click is some nonsense, but it's not unintelligible nonsense, it's just a weird thing to say. Maybe they just assumed it was some kind of formal speech getting messed up from a weird machine translation. No judgement there.
That's the misunderstanding
You wrote a whole lot of words to flex about greek and latin roots when literally none of that matters
This is a story about a client not questioning the expert tech support they were getting even though the words they got were a little weird, and the reason they were weird was because a machine guessed wrong at which translation was the most proper for the context
Which is what my first comment was correcting from what you commented on about the story, because the important context of "why is there a misunderstanding" is "computers can guess wrong about languages". None of the stuff about Portuguese matters AT ALL here, because the misunderstanding happened at the point where the machine parsed the English meaning, not when it created the equivalent meaning in Portuguese
CheezitsLight@reddit
Exactly. Since the Google translator was originally trained on billions of United Nations texts, thidls added other biases.
I just remembered another tip. "Use one thought in a sentence". In Russian this became "Use one thought in a prison" . So the correct input to use in my guide became "Use one thought in a phrase" .
TracyMinOB@reddit
Ok. I'm in accounting. I'm fairly computer literate. But WTH is Uma Kit Oshe?
DarkJarris@reddit
Macintosh "ma kit oshe"
Skerries@reddit
ah I would pronounce oshe as it sounds and not osh
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
I was unsure how to "translate" it, because in the original ticket I received it was "quitoche". I'm assuming that most english ppl read that as "Ocke", while in portuguese, "Ch" reads almost the same as "Sh" =)
fevered_visions@reddit
I dunno, anybody who's heard of brioche might get it.
DiodeInc@reddit
Macintosh, in Portuguese or something. U (it's a Portuguese article) Ma (no n) ci (no n again) t osh
If that makes sense lol
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
This is almost accurate, like I said, this was slightly changed to make a bit more sense in english. The ticket said "Cliente tem uma quitoche". The accurate translation would be "Client has a quitoche". But in this case, "Uma" (feminine article) is the same as "a", and without the "ma" it would make no sense to understand the full "Macintosh"
DiodeInc@reddit
That makes sense
lord_teaspoon@reddit
My guess at an English phrase that might be transcribed like that was "new Macintosh" with the leading 'n' getting lost.
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
The N from Macintosh got lost yes, this was a case of broken telephone, and the operator, had no clue what a Macintosh was, so he just winged it, and typed the word as it sounded to him.
FFFortissimo@reddit
Also nice.
A person having problems with Windows to connect.
Asking to click the right mouse button.
Mouse only has one button.
Ah, do you use a Macintosh.
No, Windows.
We couldn't get in to the configpanel, we couldn't get anything started with the right mouse button.
After a long long time.. I'm running boot camp does that have to do anything with this problem?
scyllafren@reddit
My favourite total stupidity was: a "colleague" (nepo-kid, with IT uni degree) was calling me on the internal phone to ask for password for a computer. I said it's "alpha space beta". He asked back: "Should I type in space, or press space?" . The bonus, that the two word beside space was valid words in our native language, so the "space" was obviously the key. :D
alf666@reddit
If the context is passphrases (e.g. CorrectHorseBatteryStaple), then it's perfectly logical to ask you said "space" as another word in the passphrase, or if it's the space key on the keyboard and he missed an important memo regarding passphrase formatting (e.g. "CorrectSpaceHorse" vs "Correct Horse").
scyllafren@reddit
The two main part are: He was an "IT" person, and "space" is english word, but the two other word weren't english, so it was obvious, that "space" wasn't part of the password as word, but as key. Combining these two questions his uni degree. Well, even his basic IT understanding.
To show, here's an another story, same person.
We bought several computers in parts. This was 25 years ago, so IDE HDD's and cables were common. We gave one computer to him to assemble. The motherboard was a pretty ASUS one, box included IDE cable, with logo, as "easier unplug" Example.
We noticed too late... He tore off those... That was a perfect facepalm moment.
The_Weapon_1009@reddit
My sister had an email address at a university first.lastname_ad_@university.nl
Hot-Win2571@reddit
"ad"?
Umm.. That actually is "at".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
SharkieHaj@reddit
we're speaking about the great nederlanse taal
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Well, I'm assuming different countries say it differently. In portuguese, we call it an "arroba"
Herlander_Carvalho@reddit (OP)
Typical LOL
unkilbeeg@reddit
In the early 90s, a client request we provide a biscuit with his data once we finished the job. We normally provided it on 9-track tape. This request came through our dispatch service.
It took quite a while before I figured out he was asking for a diskette.
Skerries@reddit
that's how the fig rolls
MikeSchwab63@reddit
Here is a poem to practice with.
https://www.graceguts.com/poems-by-others/candidate-for-a-pullet-surprise
JuanPabloVassermiler@reddit
I feel like "a Macintosh" makes way more sense in this case.
Rev-Damar@reddit
Had a call one time where the customer’s password wasn’t working, he was typing ‘O’ instead of’0’.
Dranask@reddit
What about blah@abc.co.uk. Blah@abcdotcodotuk.
You really can’t make it up.