I worked HP CS in Highschool and during my time there I created a HTML/JS replacement for a unbearably slow tree system that made a 10+ second network call every single question(often 20+ questions and a tree copy was required for notes). Mine was instant.
They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.
At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.
Quasi-related but I did the same thing at RadioShack for inventory. It was a long process of scanning each product, looking at the scanner and manually verifying the price on the tag.
The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.
So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.
Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.
I was running scripts on their PoS (EDIT: point of sale) terminals to hit an internal service. If I were the sysadmin at corporate, people like me would make me nervous too (even though I wasn't doing anything nefarious).
Acronym use here to single being part of an in-group. It is one of the most annoying shift in tech language over the past decade. I partly blame it on all the certification testing that has popped up over that time frame.
It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
You must be young. Do you not think there were similarly acronym infested tech speak in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s? All of those decades also had plenty of certification testing.
This comment is so spot on, it’s also big in military circles, especially over past 15 years. It can even be said that frequent (over) use of acronyms is based in insecurity
If you're not part of their industry, just look up the acronyms instead of getting mad. "Audience" is laughable, they are not posting solely for your entertainment.
And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.
If yours was instant, why would your AHT decline? Shouldn’t you be way faster? On many questions you would have saved over 3mins on network calls alone.
The AHT value indeed went down 3 minutes below the average, which is generally a good thing so long as you are doing everything well still. All outliers get checked and mine was the lowest. I was honest about the tool, including that it was offline. Their supposed policy was no personal tools and as it was during "probation" (first 90 days in Ontario), they could fire without cause, and did, immediately.
As an intern at @bankcompany I decided to go one step further than what my ticket was asking for and decided to implement something that crunched data in a very obvious way. Was nicely asked to revert it, because @bankcompany already had several fulltime employees doing exactly the same thing.
I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions)
I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either need to wait till the next day, or bring it early in the day so that it can be done by the end of the same day.
That store somehow is closed for half of the year for no reason. The next closest store is about 20 minutes of drive away, with the same thing -- arrive early or wait overnight.
Meanwhile, these repairs are straightforward repairs at genius bar that can be done within about an hour, any time of the year.
I had similar experience with laptop repairs. Apple and Intel (NUC lines) were top tier, and I was able to get back my device quickly. Not so for other manufacturers.
Apple devices come with a premium price, but as my life gets more complex, I realize that my time is worth more than the money I save on the hardware.
In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.
At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
American companies seem to increasingly hate their own customers. Add random fees, make products worse and provide terrible support. In a functioning market small competitors would take away the business of the big players but with the lack of monopoly enforcement they just buy their competition. Not sure where this is leading but it's not a good trend.
I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them. People want their problem fixed as quickly as possible, no-one wants to call a call centre.
I have to admit i solve some support cases similarly. If I get questions about what seems to be a trivial thing I tend to wait a while with responding because most of the time it solves itself or the user discovered the plug was unplugged.
To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing
Just curious has anyone ever contacted customer support in the past decade and not gotten the message saying their call volume is high atm and thus the wait will be "longer than average"?
238 comments
They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.
At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.
The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.
So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.
Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.
> understandably
why?
>my AHT flagged me
Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?
It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...
It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.
And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.
> made someone look bad
That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions)
I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either need to wait till the next day, or bring it early in the day so that it can be done by the end of the same day.
That store somehow is closed for half of the year for no reason. The next closest store is about 20 minutes of drive away, with the same thing -- arrive early or wait overnight.
Meanwhile, these repairs are straightforward repairs at genius bar that can be done within about an hour, any time of the year.
I had similar experience with laptop repairs. Apple and Intel (NUC lines) were top tier, and I was able to get back my device quickly. Not so for other manufacturers.
Apple devices come with a premium price, but as my life gets more complex, I realize that my time is worth more than the money I save on the hardware.
At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing