Why Working in Tech Support Sucks

I do desktop support and new software implementation for a living. As business is slow this year I've mostly been doing desktop support in 2009. I know everyone loves to hate tech support, well guess what everyone--tech support hates you back.

For starters, the work is interrupt-driven. I get to drop whatever I'm doing and help someone go change a printer cartridge. Upon reflection, being interrupted isn't nearly as bad as finding out about a crisis second hand ("No one can save any files on the network? When were you going to tell me?")

One particular thing that bugs me is that the solution to a given problem could be anything from "Reboot and it will go away" to "I'm sorry, no one on the Internet has encountered this before-I have no idea what's wrong. I'm a conscientious person-if someone comes to me with a problem I like to be able to solve it for them. I will gladly sit on hold until Dell or Microsoft or Adobe tech support is available and then let them insult my intelligence by asking whether the keyboard is plugged in if it will resolve an issue, but sometimes all they have to say is that they're not supporting that version of the software anymore. I wonder what other people I work with think of when I tell them things like "did you try rebooting?" or "Well it seems to be working now right? Let me know if it breaks again." Do they think I'm lazy or uninterested in helping them? Incompetent? Or do they understand that sometimes the answer is elusive. This makes me wonder if I really am incompetent and simply unaware of this.

And then there are the users. There's the guy who told me that he couldn't install software from a CD because his computer had a DVD player, the guy who was sure his keyboard was broken because he kept failing to type his password and the guy who keeps blaming Outlook for his lack of productivity (he has too many e-mail messages--this is hardly Outlook's fault.)

I'm really not sure why I felt the need to post all of this. It's well documented elsewhere on the inter-webs--maybe I just need to write about something other than religion for a bit.