Open letter to newer (flat panel etc) electronics owners.

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jd1234

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Oct 17, 2011
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I realize that if you are on this web page, you are probably on the more "tecky" side and probably not who this rant is aimed at, but I have no where else to vent it.

When you by a fancy new Plazma TV etc... READ THE DAMN MANUAL and learn what an input is! Educate yourself a bit to understand how this new TV works and what an HDMI cable is (it's not an HDM1 cable by the way). These aren't your TVs from the 70's or 80's with a rotary knobs and 13 channels.

I work for a Satellite sales & service company, we sell/install both Dish and DirecTV and we get multiple calls a day from people that can't figure out their TV. Just because we hooked a Satellite receiver to your TV does not mean you can take absolutely no responsibility to know how your TV works and assume you can just call us to explain it to you (we didn't sell you your TV).

Our office receives multiple calls a day and usually spends 5-30 minutes each helping the customer get back to "Input 5"(or whatever it may be). People that have never bought anything from us will call, it takes a little bit to figure out if they are our customer or not. If we find out they are not, they get mad at us for not wanting to continue helping them for free, and by that point we have usually already wasted 5-10 minutes.

We love our customers and they love us, we have been doing satellite for a long time. Dealing with this day in and out though, makes you want to pull your hair out, or post a rant on a web forum. I chose the latter (my hair is thin enough all ready).

OK, that is all, rant is over.
 
:welcome to SatelliteGuys! I know the feeling (I work in a support role for a Software as a Service app at IBM).

It's amazing to me how some people live in this modern world :)
 
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I realize that if you are on this web page, you are probably on the more "tecky" side and probably not who this rant is aimed at, but I have no where else to vent it.

When you by a fancy new Plazma TV etc... READ THE DAMN MANUAL and learn what an input is! Educate yourself a bit to understand how this new TV works and what an HDMI cable is (it's not an HDM1 cable by the way). These aren't your TVs from the 70's or 80's with a rotary knobs and 13 channels.

I work for a Satellite sales & service company, we sell/install both Dish and DirecTV and we get multiple calls a day from people that can't figure out their TV. Just because we hooked a Satellite receiver to your TV does not mean you can take absolutely no responsibility to know how your TV works and assume you can just call us to explain it to you (we didn't sell you your TV).

Our office receives multiple calls a day and usually spends 5-30 minutes each helping the customer get back to "Input 5"(or whatever it may be). People that have never bought anything from us will call, it takes a little bit to figure out if they are our customer or not. If we find out they are not, they get mad at us for not wanting to continue helping them for free, and by that point we have usually already wasted 5-10 minutes.

We love our customers and they love us, we have been doing satellite for a long time. Dealing with this day in and out though, makes you want to pull your hair out, or post a rant on a web forum. I chose the latter (my hair is thin enough all ready).

OK, that is all, rant is over.

Put a message on the auto-attendant for your phone system. "We are unable to provide support for televisions not purchased through us. Please see your owners manual for more information." Problem solved.
 
When you by a fancy new Plasma TV etc... READ THE DAMN MANUAL and learn what an input is! .

:welcome What's a manual? You can read that? Isn't that just the folded paper bundle that they give you with a new TV that you can tear sheets off until it's the right thickness to level off your TV stand?
 
The ACTUAL problem is there ARE NO DAMN manuals anymore. Just rudimentary Start Up guides and maybe a disc containing one. Problem is, even if there was one, most people would not read it. Until the introduction of the 922, Dish printed fairly comprehensive manuals. Regardless , people would waste time and come here and ask questions that the answers to were likely sitting on their coffee table. It's just a sorry state of reality these days.
 
It's not enough to just read the manual, you have to decipher the broken english in many of them. :)
 
Nothing new, VCR manuals took four pages to explain how to take the antenna wire from the back of the tv connect it to ant in of VCR. Take supplied wire connect one end to ant out of VCR, the other end to the same place you removed the antenna wire from the tv.
People that read the manual couldn't figure it out.
Unless you already know what you're doing the manuals are just about worthless.
 
I realize that if you are on this web page, you are probably on the more "tecky" side and probably not who this rant is aimed at, but I have no where else to vent it.

When you by a fancy new Plazma TV etc... READ THE DAMN MANUAL and learn what an input is! Educate yourself a bit to understand how this new TV works and what an HDMI cable is (it's not an HDM1 cable by the way). These aren't your TVs from the 70's or 80's with a rotary knobs and 13 channels.

I work for a Satellite sales & service company, we sell/install both Dish and DirecTV and we get multiple calls a day from people that can't figure out their TV. Just because we hooked a Satellite receiver to your TV does not mean you can take absolutely no responsibility to know how your TV works and assume you can just call us to explain it to you (we didn't sell you your TV).

Our office receives multiple calls a day and usually spends 5-30 minutes each helping the customer get back to "Input 5"(or whatever it may be). People that have never bought anything from us will call, it takes a little bit to figure out if they are our customer or not. If we find out they are not, they get mad at us for not wanting to continue helping them for free, and by that point we have usually already wasted 5-10 minutes.

We love our customers and they love us, we have been doing satellite for a long time. Dealing with this day in and out though, makes you want to pull your hair out, or post a rant on a web forum. I chose the latter (my hair is thin enough all ready).

OK, that is all, rant is over.

I work for Dish, and I wholly support this message. Also, when a customer gets a new TV, they need to understand, if they install it at a TV2 location (or with coax at a TV1 location where applicable) what a CHANNEL SCAN is and how to do it. The TV owner's manual goes over that, I am sure. Dish cannot help you figure out your LG or Vizio TV because you don't read the manual.

Dish also gets a lot of calls from older folks asking how to hook up a DVD player to their TV. None of that is Dish equipment, and while we have an idea, why would you call Dish to ask about hooking a Magnavox DVD player to a Sanyo TV? Yet they'll get mad if a Dish agent says we can't help.

Many of these same folks, if we do work to fix it, scream bloody murder if they have to pay $15 for a tech to fix what they messed up. Elderly folks who chronically have a black/blue/snowy screen due to the wrong input are often the angriest, most confused, and most hard-headed about it. They will actively blame Dish for "messing up" their TV.

I'd really want to encourage folks like that to sit in front of the TV (once repaired), tune to channel 101, and sit there, and watch for a few hours. May learn something.
 
Oh please. I work in tech support for a company. We recently (Monday) had to go through the mandatory password change (every quarter). We had people...
1) Change their passwords, then immediately forget what they changed their password to.
2) Try to change their password, get an error message and say "it's not accepting my old password", when the error message plainly says "old password not valid or new password doesn't meet requirements"
3) Someone try to login, complain they can't (it must be broken) and it turns out the CAPS LOCK button is on

Just in general...
1) People who don't know what a spreadsheet is (although they use one)
2) People who complain they don't get sound from their computer and it turns out they kicked the power supply loose from the socket

?
 
Boy that sounds familiar and I completely agree. I mostly work out on the road, so I don't have to deal with it too much, but when I come into the office, I can see it in my bosses eye, when he has had a lot of these calls, or particularly bad ones.


Oh please. I work in tech support for a company. We recently (Monday) had to go through the mandatory password change (every quarter). We had people...
1) Change their passwords, then immediately forget what they changed their password to.
2) Try to change their password, get an error message and say "it's not accepting my old password", when the error message plainly says "old password not valid or new password doesn't meet requirements"
3) Someone try to login, complain they can't (it must be broken) and it turns out the CAPS LOCK button is on

Just in general...
1) People who don't know what a spreadsheet is (although they use one)
2) People who complain they don't get sound from their computer and it turns out they kicked the power supply loose from the socket

?

I think you are missing jd1234s main point. You work tech support and all those issues are caused by the company you work for and the people calling you are your customers/employees. Your job is to deal with those problems. It is not our job to educate people on how their TV works, let alone spend 30 minutes telling them how to push a button...
 
Boy that sounds familiar and I completely agree. I mostly work out on the road, so I don't have to deal with it too much, but when I come into the office, I can see it in my bosses eye, when he has had a lot of these calls, or particularly bad ones.

I think you are missing jd1234s main point. You work tech support and all those issues are caused by the company you work for and the people calling you are your customers/employees. Your job is to deal with those problems. It is not our job to educate people on how their TV works, let alone spend 30 minutes telling them how to push a button...
I think you missed my point. People are stupid.
 
No matter how lazy I get (and I can be pretty lazy), I can't be that stupid. :D
 
The one that most irritates me is when a customer calls and says their TV says "No Signal" and automatically blame the Dish.

Now if you want to hear something dumb, I have a server running Windows Server 2003 at the office. I can't get into this server for like 3 months from the work station, but didn't bother me because I was still able to access my files in a shared network drive.

So last Friday it turns out I need to get into it from the work station its connected to. So after like an hour screwing around with this thing, I realize a mouse chewed through the USB keyboard cable. So throw away the keyboard, and get a new one.

Still can't get in.

So I decide to pull the hard drive and pay $60 for a password cracker program thinking someone changed the password on me which happened with another server a few weeks back.

I run the password cracker, and its the same password as I had before...

Another hour goes by, and I decide maybe I need to type in "Administrator" in all lower case.

Turns out the "A" button was broken on the new keyboard, as my password has an "A" in it.

Now I feel like a fool spending like 6 hours screwing with my server, cracking the password when 2 keyboards where bad.
 
The one that most irritates me is when a customer calls and says their TV says "No Signal" and automatically blame the Dish.

Ya, that drives me nuts as well, they see the word "signal" and assume it has to be related to the satellite signal....
 
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