Tech Support

Unless you are a confirmed Luddite or living in a cave in an aboriginal state of being, there is a better than even chance you have had an encounter with Tech Support at a consumer electronics company. With the introduction of AI in almost every device--even if it is only for the sake of marketing hype--encounters with one's stove, or refrigerator will soon be next. We can be assured they can and will cease working at some point necessitating a phone call, or worse yet, an online chat with tech support. With this in mind a few pointers seem worth mentioning to help navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of the dreaded help desk.

To state the obvious, the relationship between consumers and their devices is fraught. We depend on them far too much and when they do not work as expected what should be a minor inconvenience can quickly escalate to existential angst. Some, whose names will not be mentioned, believe electronic devices are minor deities possessed of a malign intent to frustrate human beings, while others simply suspect that their toaster hates them. Arthur C. Clarke, scientist and science fiction author, wrote that any reasonably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and that is how some people see it.

In the heightened emotional state we find ourselves when something we depend upon ceases to function we turn to someone, anyone who can quickly and easily fix the problem. Unfortunately the first encounter we are most likely to have will be with someone who is neither a native speaker nor possesses any real knowledge about the device we own. They are following a series of scripts written by more experienced technicians that step the user through basic troubleshooting. In some instances this works--the issue is simple and solved by following the steps they recommend. But in many cases one might as well consult an aboriginal shaman for all the good it does.

Companies employ overseas employees as first responders because they are far less less costly than skilled and trained technicians, and scripted troubleshooting winnows down the number of more complex cases. Difficult cases get escalated to a next level support person and if you are lucky they will engage in a question and answer exercise and ask you to conduct a series of tests designed to uncover what's wrong. They may even use software to log in to your device so they can see what you see and take over the troubleshooting steps themselves. This is especially helpful when the end user, you or me, are not technically inclined.

The inspiration for this post came from a recent engagement with tech support on behalf of my significant other, whose iPad suddenly ceased to send and receive email for no obvious reason. This was no easy thing to resolve, in part because her email address was not a simple Gmail or Yahoo account. Rather than go through the painful process of migrating to a consumer email account when she retired she kept her former business account and that adds several layers of complexity and more than one possible source of trouble. Sigh.

I will spare you the gory details, but report that tech support was no help whatsoever. As is so often the case when more than one vendor's software or hardware are involved the finger pointing begins almost immediately. Tech support throws their hands in the air and declares that you, the user, are the real cause because for some absurd reason you expected everyone to play nice together. In my case the help desk absolved themselves almost immediately and suggested that only Apple could fix the problem. Despite this abdication of responsibility I stumbled on the solution and was able to restore the iPad along with the peaceful calm of the day. The encounter got me thinking about our human habits in a larger context and that is what I really wanted to write about.

Every day we encounter obstacles. Things go wrong--devices stop working, we are stymied by someone or something that vexes us and creates seemingly insurmountable challenges to our peace of mind. And when we find ourselves in trouble we so often turn to others, someone or something that can solve it for us. It isn't a bad thing to look for support. We will all need it at some point and humans are hard wired for mutuality. But the question remains do we need that support every time and in every case? Have we become too dependent on the agency of third parties at the cost of our own?

Now please bear in mind I am not talking about supplications to our maker in times of great distress, or reliance on professionals to help us in legal or medical straits, and certainly not plumbers, but regarding everyday matters, things we can and should be able to address on our own, we seem to fall apart. There is something to be said for self reliance, however, and even if we are not always equipped with the skills or experience to tackle some challenges common sense and simple logic go a long way in troubleshooting our own lives.

Sometimes we should take the same approach that tech support does, start with some basic questions. What's going wrong, when did it start, and did we do anything immediately before that may have been the cause? If we can define the problem we have taken the first step to solving it. The next question is why. Obvious or not when things go off the rails it isn't voodoo but something changed. If we can find a proximate cause we can proceed to ask ourselves the most important question. Is there anything within our control we can do to remedy it? Before we reach out to ask for help we should at least consider the possibility that human error played a role. Asking for help is not the same as throwing our hands in the air and saying fix it, it is fact finding.

Having been on both sides of the help desk, let me share an insight. Finding the cause of a problem and fixing it is rarely just about technical knowledge. More often than not it is simply detective work--following a path of yes or no questions, employing simple logic to identify possible causes and then testing likely solutions. This morning's issue turned out to have nothing to do with the software provided by Apple or the email vendor. As I said, I stumbled across the cause in the course of testing. Technical or not, anyone who was just asking simple questions as I did eventually would have found the answer if they just had the patience to persist.

There is an old joke about a user that called tech support because her computer was not working. In the course of reviewing a few basic questions the tech support person asked her to make sure the computer was plugged in. She replied that she would first need to get a flashlight as all the lights had gone out. And there you have it.

Perhaps we humans have just become too reliant on others to fix our things and our lives. Maybe we give up too readily in the knowledge that we have an alternative. We may indict politicians, employers, acquaintances or even manufacturers for the ills of the world--and certainly that is true some of the time. But we are agents of our own undoing as well. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived". Perhaps we'd all be better off if we tried first to learn what life had to teach us before we turned to the help desk to fix it.