“You’re my knight in shining armor!”
Posted by SavannahPharaoh@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 36 comments
A lot of posts on this sub are about annoying users, and I have plenty of tales about them. But this is a tale about one of the reasons I love my job.
I was working at a law firm awhile back. It was a very quiet office. But one afternoon I heard someone scream “NO!!!!” Then I heard someone running towards my office.
The user burst in saying she had been working on a document all day, facing a tight deadline. But when she closed out of the doc, she accidentally clicked No instead of Yes when prompted to save her changes.
While I was taking a look, she kept saying things like “I’m so stupid!” But I was quickly able to recover her doc. She was so amazed and relieved.
The next day, I found a handwritten thank-you card and a $25 gift card on my desk. In the card, and ever since, she referred to me as her knight in shining armor.
So even though it was a simple fix for me, it meant everything to her. I love those kinds of issues!
nolookpass432@reddit
Many years ago, I was doing Dial Up tech support for a company that sounds very much like Earthlink. I had a young lady (actually young, maybe 25 or so, not sarcastically young) call in unable to connect. Turns out, she needed a new phone number to dial for her connection. "No problem" I tell her, guiding her through the steps to get to changing the call number. Just before we start changing, she asks me to wait a couple of minutes. Away from the phone I can hear her deep breathing, like a calming exercise. When she comes back on, we begin, and from the beginning, it does not go well. She has trouble entering the number, has to ask for the number multiple times. She just can't seem to get it entered correctly. Eventually she starts crying, almost sobbing. I gently tell her not to worry. Tell her to take her time and I'll make sure we get this handled. After a coupe of minutes she comes back on and tells me that she is recovering from brain surgery, and one of her problems is she has trouble with repeating numbers. Of course the only dial up number we have for her area is all repeating numbers (the pattern is basically 111-2233). By this point my supervisor is listening in as this call has gone way longer than I usually spend on calls, and he is giving me the "wrap it up" sign (mostly because it was messing with my average, which messes with his team's average).
Calmly, I ask her if she needs to take a break, and she says she is exhausted from the surgery/recovery/stress of getting back to a normal routine and that she needs to rest. I offer to call her back when she is ready, and she says she'll probably sleep for a couple of hours. So, I promise to call her back at that time. When I call her back (after a not so great conversation with the supervisor who only cared about call times, not customer satisfaction or first call resolution rates), she sounds much more relaxed and we are able to get her up and running in just a few minutes.
She asks for an email address where she can send a thank you note, insisting on it even after I say it is not necessary. She wrote a glowing email to my supervisor and manager. And a few weeks after that, my supervisor handed me a hand written thank you letter that she mailed to our HR department. I have that letter packed away somewhere, and it is easily the thing that made me the proudest for what we do.
PotatoGoBrrrr@reddit
I've had people react almost like that lol
Similar situations, too. Thank goodness for iterative restore points and document versioning. I've had users pour almost an entire day of work into one spreadsheet and suddenly it won't save back to its file cabinet source and it closes and it seems like their changes are lost.
But no, thankfully a local copy is always stored and the changes can easily be added to the correct sheet again.
Although I did have another person do the same thing with just excel, but their changes never got saved as they worked (it was like 4-5 hours) and when they went to save the document with a new name (and file extension), the save failed and their work went POOF. It was not a good morning for either of us. Thankfully they had all their data sources present and accounted for, so rebuilding the sheet would only take an hour, instead of four.
This is why we take the wins when we can lol
Simplemindedflyaways@reddit
I was sent out to a user's house once - she was the owner of a business that we did work for. She always came off a bit stern on the phone, but was always grateful and easy to work with. I got sent out to her house one day to help set up a laptop, assess an old laptop, and make sure she was fully set up for working remotely. I got to chat with her, pet her dogs, set up her Roku and all of her computer stuff, and then she handed me $30 on my way out. Nice visit.
Stryker_One@reddit
That's almost up there with "The hug heard around the company.".
pidarklab-yrinth@reddit
Once in a while we have a grateful user.
MadRocketScientist74@reddit
I had one who gifted me an 18 year old single malt scotch just because I let him use the lab computers overnight to run his PhD work.
About an hour of work for me to setup the imaging.
PhreeBeer@reddit
I heard that they live with the unicorns.
pidarklab-yrinth@reddit
And the fairies
Langager90@reddit
Even mythical creatures need lawyers.
JaschaE@reddit
Oh god, nobody tell the Nac Mac Feegle they can have a lawyer!
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
In their first iteration, they were lawyers!
JaschaE@reddit
They are specialists for acquisitions
Optimal-Condition803@reddit
GNU Sir Terry.
ShittyPhoneSupport@reddit
Best feedback i ever got from helping someone was "you're a mother fucking jedi"
SavannahPharaoh@reddit (OP)
A Jedi KNIGHT perhaps? 🤔
sysadmin-84499@reddit
*Armour
SavannahPharaoh@reddit (OP)
Ok so this is 🇺🇸vs who? 🇬🇧? 🤣
SmEdD@reddit
One of those countries had knights in shining armour, the other did not. And by that logic, you were a hero or obsolete.
Strazdas1@reddit
Knights in armour were not heroes. They were just rich enough to afford armour. Back then your equipment depended almost entirely on what you could afford for yourself, and stealing fallen enemy gear was common. The best you could expect is the country gives you a spear. Altrough there was one exeption to that and that is the professional swiss mercenaries in very late medieval period. Undefeated until gunpowder weapons took over. Fun fact: early muskets couldnt penetrate armour so armour still won battles.
WayneH_nz@reddit
No. French. You are her knight in shining love.
Femaleopard@reddit
That's "L' amour"
t4nn3dn1nj4@reddit
How did you recover the unsaved document unless iterations of the document were autosaved as drafts within the application folder under AppData or a similar folder for other Operating Systems than Windows? 🤔😲💯
TheBigCheeseUK@reddit
I printed a load of stuff for a user and they got me a box of (like Rum, Baileys etc) as a xmas gift. It was nothing for me to do but getting appreciated meant the world to me.
Chocolate_Bourbon@reddit
I've repeatedly found that users are the most grateful for the simplest things.
Two days ago one of my best customers needed help with a formula. They gave me access to their sheet and the ask was as simple as tying my shoelaces. Out of curiosity I compared what they had currently with what chatgpt would suggest. The result was almost identical. I looked it over and to me it made no sense at all. (I do hope this infatuation with AI only lasts a couple years before we come to our senses.) I spent about 15 minutes coming up with someone that perhaps wasn't ideal, but it did the job, was easy to explain, and was approachable enough for them to edit if them wanted to. Once again I was a spreadsheet wizard with much fanfare.
I compare that experience to something I made a year ago. It took data from multiple sources, standardized it, parsed it, and presented the results via tables, charts, whatever. It had some error checks, alerting, and some other bells and whistles. It definitely wasn't the most complex thing I've ever created, but it did a week of my time to build it all to spec, validate it performed as expected, and it delivered what they wanted. For that I got a "Thanks."
It seems like the more difficult the ask is, the more entitled my patron becomes. Asking for more features, complaining about limitations built in to the tools, etc. A few months ago I worked on something that pissed off my boss. "Dave, you are now building an app. This has become the epitome of scope creep." If my patron had been singing my praises, and the praises of my team, my boss wouldn't have been annoyed. But my patron's attitude had slid from into annoyance and exasperation. It shouldn't be this hard to add just a few more things as he said a few times. So the final specs were scaled back, timeline shortened, and my patron ended up so frustrated I'm not sure they even use what I made. Even though it easily exceeds and then some what they originally requested.
I'm now absolutely convinced the Scotty principle should be applied in all situations in life. And all requests should be submitted in advance in writing. Tomorrow I will make a form for my wife to complete when she wants me to fix something around the house.
iacchi@reddit
I think the point is that the spreadsheet is something they do and something they can relate to - in that moment you're two people using excel, and you show them how to solve their problem, something they can understand. The other stuff is just too much over their head, and you lose the empathy. At that point, they just revert to customer and they become entitled.
JaschaE@reddit
I work in a company building und hosting machine learning servers.
The owners are as deep into it as you'd expect.
Recently there was some discussion in a meeting and a colleague mentioned "what chatty said about it". Meeting got interrupted by the both of them explaining to him how frickin' stupid it was to ask that thing for factual information.
Whole LLM and PlagiarismMachine Industry can't burn soon enough.
aes_gcm@reddit
I quickly learned that the thing needs to be fixed immediately after she says it, not just added to the to-do list of things I gotta silently get done.
Chocolate_Bourbon@reddit
Most of my asks are amorphous. "Help with the reporting for our invoices. Start with Helen. She'll explain what they need." That sort of thing is most of what I work on. That's not something I can deliver right away. Side ventures I can act upon instantly or close to it. I've learned to say no if I don't have the time, but almost always it takes about 30-60 minutes or so and it's done. And that I can almost always make time for.
Although I suppose you are correct. Near instant delivery does seem correlated with gratification. I suppose that's the key factor.
_bahnjee_@reddit
This reminded me…. I once restored a mistakenly-deleted PC from the AD Recycle Bin* and the new hire Tier 1 tech that deleted it brought me a Jack Daniels gift box (5th plus two shot glasses).
tbh, it’s been so long I’m not sure what I did to save his bacon but I surely remember the booze (and I’m not much of a drinker)
Gl33D@reddit
Those calls are both my favourite and least favourite. When you are able to recover their file they will be the happiest and most grateful user you have ever seen but on the flip side when it can't be recovered it feels so awful to tell them the bad news (especially if you have spent a long time attempting to recover it)
zeus204013@reddit
I received user handmade coffe (a yummy Nescafe stirred with some sugar) for being nice and hearing about some crt monitor flicker (yellow flashes). I looked for a different monitor and all was ok. Actually that user was more nice that my boss...
jamenjaw@reddit
I had one user who told me I was the only one allowed to work on his pc. He handled shipping of medical equipment, some very time sensitive. Got him back and running a few times helped with updating the shipping app. And generally, keep his pc running. Didn't get anything from the user considering he was over seas.
Kant_Lavar@reddit
There's definitely advantages to having an on-site job instead of just working a remote phone support desk job. Also as contractors my company is very picky about us getting gifts of any sort.
Anyway, the most I've gotten has been some users asking for my direct line (which doesn't exist).
Geminii27@reddit
Whoever realized, however long ago, that a law firm should absolutely have every autosave option possible enabled for just such a scenario, thank you for your foresight.
afterlife_xx@reddit
There's this VP that started the same time I did. She calls me her lifesaver, angel, gem, etc. all the time because I help her so much, even if it's a small thing like adding an external calendar to her Outlook or changing her lock screen wallpaper. She asked me what my favorite sweet was and when I told her Hershey's cookies and cream bars, she came in the next week with 5 bars wrapped in a bow. She also gave me a Chick-fil-A gift card one other time too lol.
It's nice to feel appreciated.
AmiDeplorabilis@reddit
You came to her emotional rescue...