Callmongers
Did my time in a callcentre handling up to 7 different brands/companies. Quite often i'd forget to check the telephone display and answer with the wrong company name. Never got any proper training, and my computer knowledge was mostly about playing duke nukem.
Out of my many hats and welcome prompts, I did sales/support for an OCR software which came bundled with scanners, of course it was the "lite" edition. People had to call us to be able to register and use the software and our job was to upsell the full, pro version for almost 300 quid. Given that the scanner itself was just about 80£ it wasn't an easy job. The bonus we got for selling the pro version was around 80p, so we weren't really trying to sell it.
For many people the installation of the drivers/software went wrong and they had to call us 5 times to re-register the damn thing again. So, once I had the same guy 3 or 4 times within an hour, he was desperately late on a project involving thousands of paper pages and really needed the full version to complete his job, saying he would get fired if he didn't have it done by the end of the week.
He didn't have the money for the full version, and as he was sort of friendly I hinted a visit on "warez" sites for a full version (it was in early 1998-no torrents, mule or even kazaa in those days!).
I also took calls for Symantec/Norton. 1 hour later the same guy calls the number saying some bastard in a call centre pointed him to a site where he caught several viruses and his computer was dying. Not being very good with those virus things I told him to back everything up on his zip drive until he could talk to a proper techie. Now i've learned that backing up an infected drive on a clean zip disc isn't a good idea.
I also took calls for iomega zip drives. Glad he never recognized my voice.
(Bertie, Thu 3 Sep 2009, 13:55, Reply)