Editing 806: Tech Support
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==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | [[Cueball]] runs into some problems with his network connection and contacts his Internet service provider's (ISP's) tech support for help. The customer service agent (represented by [[Hairy]]) is not very helpful, giving clearly pre-scripted advice that has nothing to do with Cueball's problem. Cueball gives up and asks to speak to an engineer, i.e. someone more knowledgeable about the technology and suggest to Hairy what to look for. Noticing a woman with black ponytail who has the stuffed {{w|Tux_(mascot)|Tux}} penguin on her desk and a poster of a bearded dude with swords (a reference to | + | [[Cueball]] runs into some problems with his network connection and contacts his Internet service provider's (ISP's) tech support for help. The customer service agent (represented by [[Hairy]]) is not very helpful, giving clearly pre-scripted advice that has nothing to do with Cueball's problem. Cueball gives up and asks to speak to an engineer, i.e. someone more knowledgeable about the technology and suggest to Hairy what to look for. Noticing a woman with black ponytail who has the stuffed {{w|Tux_(mascot)|Tux}} penguin on her desk and a poster of a bearded dude with swords (a reference to {{w|Richard Stallman}} particularly as he stands in [[345: 1337: Part 5]], and a reference to [[225: Open Source]]) he tells Cueball about her and Cueball recognizes the signs of a {{w|GNU}}/{{w|Linux}} geek and asks to talk to her. Hairy transfers him over to the engineer, who immediately recognizes the problem and fixes it. Then she tells him of a secret word (shibboleet - see below) which, if he speaks on the phone, will transfer him to a tech-savvy person able to help him, something installed already back in the 1990's by the geeks of that time. Cueball is elated but then at this point Cueball wakes up and unfortunately discovers the incident to be just a dream. |
− | + | Poor customer and technical support is a common complaint of many ISPs. Many ISPs {{w|outsourcing|outsource}} their support staff to foreign countries to reduce costs, and/or they delegate first-tier support to workers with little or no training. Typically, these workers are given general scripts that prompt the customer to try common troubleshooting steps, such as restarting the computer, without any specific knowledge of the customer's complaint. While these scripts may help resolve problems for the average customer, a representative using such a script is usually unprepared to assist someone who has a more advanced problem. Furthermore, these scripts generally assume that the problem is on the customer's end and do not acknowledge problems that occur within the ISP, such as server or line problems. | |
− | Cueball | + | Customers like Cueball in this comic often find it frustrating to deal with representatives reading from scripts. As [[Randall]] mentions in the title text, this frustration is magnified when the representative refuses to move on to the next step until the customer has performed the previous one, whether or not it necessary or helpful. In cases like this, it's often necessary to request an escalation to a higher "tier" of support, or to speak to a supervisor who presumably has more knowledge and/or influence, though even that can sometimes be a painful process. Thus, it is easy to see why Cueball would be elated to discover a way to automatically connect with the most helpful technical support representatives whenever he has a problem, and thus also why he get really disappointed when he realizes it was just a dream (dreams being a [[:Category:Dreams|recurring theme]] in xkcd). |
− | Cueball is running {{w|Haiku (operating system)|Haiku}}, an {{w|open source}} operating system | + | Cueball is running {{w|Haiku (operating system)|Haiku}}, an {{w|open source}} operating system which is still in a state of active development, being in an alpha release at the publishing of the comic and in beta since 2018. While low-level tech support operators are given scripts which are predicated on the assumption that many computer problems are actually caused by the actions of clueless end users (as, in fact, they are), it's exceedingly unlikely most of these first-tier operators would have even heard of Haiku, not to mention that their scripts' assumptions would never apply to the sort of person who would be using an experimental OS as opposed to {{w|Windows}}, for instance. |
− | "Shibboleet" is a portmanteau of "shibboleth" and "leet". A "{{w|shibboleth}}" means any word, custom, or other signifier which is used by members of a group to recognize other members or those who are "in the know" about something. Its use originates in the Hebrew Bible, where the precise pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Gileadites from Ephramites. {{w|Leet}} (based on the word "elite") refers to "leet-speak", a practice of character substitution and abbreviation common across the Internet (or "teh 1n73rn3t", as you would say in leet). Thus, "shibboleet" is a shibboleth used to identify someone whose computer-knowledge is "elite." Leet is again in leet written as 1337 so again a reference back to the [[:Category:1337|1337 comic series]] including the comic mentioned above with Stallman | + | "Shibboleet" is a portmanteau of "shibboleth" and "leet". A "{{w|shibboleth}}" means any word, custom, or other signifier which is used by members of a group to recognize other members or those who are "in the know" about something. Its use originates in the Hebrew Bible, where the precise pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Gileadites from Ephramites. {{w|Leet}} (based on the word "elite") refers to "leet-speak", a practice of character substitution and abbreviation common across the Internet (or "teh 1n73rn3t", as you would say in leet). Thus, "shibboleet" is a shibboleth used to identify someone whose computer-knowledge is "elite." Leet is again in leet written as 1337 so again a reference back to the [[:Category:1337|1337 comic series]] including the comic mentioned above with Stallman. |
− | + | Randall mentioned in the title text that this had happened to him recently, and is possibly the reason for this comic. | |
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== |