Just Venting

[SavagePenguin]

Pardon my venting.
I just want to say that I love the hold button on my phone.

I just got off the phone. I started talking to a lady who claims "my Internet person told me to remove all the modems from my computer." She had been on the phone with her ISP for over an hour and they had her try dozens of things to her modem. This last request had her baffled, so she called out shop. (If I ever have a stroke it's nice to know that I can find work at an ISP help line.)
After a few minutes I figured out it was impossible to talk to her. She didn't know what a modem was. She was afraid to double-click on things. In a matter of minutes she pawned me off to her 15 year old son who "knows a lot about computers."
I talked to him for awhile. He seemed to get through the preliminary stuff OK. There was no modem in the device manager and I couldn't get their computer to auto detect the one they had.
After trying several more things, and spending twenty or-so minutes on the call, I played a hunch and asked him if there was a modem physically in the machine.
He said no.
I asked him if he physically took the modem out of the machine.
He said yes.
"Let me put you on hold for a minute, ok?"
"Sure."
I put him on hold and, "AAAAAAAAAGH!"

So I check my email, complain some more, and pick his line back up.
I told him to put the modem back into the machine. We'd need that to continue.
He said he didn't know how.
To told him it was pretty simple. He just needed to screw it back in where he unscrewed it before.
"Oh, I never unscrewed anything. I just took it out in Windows."
"Let me put you on hold again."

A minute or so later I had him turn the machine back on, had him do another hardware search, and of course found nothing.
I told him to bring it into the shop.

Ends up there was no modem in the machine. The mother had three dollars less than the fee to put in a new modem, so we cut her a special deal on labor.

I smiled the whole time. Again... I love the hold button!

[tregee]

The hold button? My choice is the mute button.

Them: Blah Blah Blah
Me: Mute
Me: What the hell is wrong with this F'in idiot
Me: Unmute
Them: Blah Blah Blah

See what I mean