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Imagine working in tech support, and a caller complains so much that you can understand why none of your coworkers would want to help him. What would you do if he refused to take your recommendations on how to solve the problem and just continued to complain and claim that he knows better?

In this story, one tech support worker was in this situation, and he tried to escalate the call. There was only one problem. He needed the caller to provide personal identification for the account first, and the last four digits of the social security number on the account wasn’t good enough.

That shouldn’t have been a problem, but for the caller, it was something else to complain about.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Supervisor meets esclations

I work technical support escalation for an ISP.

Many ISPs in the US employ enhanced error pages on their domain name servers because the general base of technology users are what keeps most of us in TFTS employed.

These pages do exactly what they are designed to do, babysit the residental internet so we don’t get a phone call saying the internet is down every time someone mistypes a website.

For obvious reasons these servers don’t play nice with sites unregistered with them.

Here’s some more context about things that make troubleshooting easier or harder.

The quickest and easiest way to deal with opting out of enhanced error pages is to change the server in the indivual device trying to access the page or by reconfiguring a router to override the ISP assigned one.

Some ISPs provide opt out tools or procedures, but these are hit or miss and often will reset if the IP changes.

Also complicating matters is some work machines are locked down so that even the company IT can’t override it or the customer think routers work by magic.

This tale is not about one of those customers.

OP thinks there are only two options that would explain why the caller is concerned he won’t be able to help him.

$me: Hi this is nik. How may I help?

$cst: You probably aren’t even going to know what I am talking about. I need to to stop the enhanced error messages. Do you even know what they are?

internal sigh. Either this guy has spent the last hour being shuttled between departments for whatever reason or he’s a jerk. The former is a difficult deesclation over something I sometimes can’t help with while the later has no fix.

$me: I’m sorry you are having trouble accessing certain pages from home. Let me pull up your account. Were you given a ticket?

The caller complained for quite awhile.

I get the account pulled up and get an earful about how the guy is working at home, he needed to be taking supervisor calls rather than talking to me, and that we needed to fix our broken system immediately.

After 10 minutes of him insisting that he went to school for this, he wants us to fix it instead of telling him bypasses he already knows, and a comment by me that I could refer him to business if he doesn’t like our residental terms of service which seemed to have gone over his head, I sigh interally.

I rack my brains at which level three might actually bother with this ticket even if just to say we won’t do it instead of letting it sit around for a month.

$me: I can escalate your ticket to a back office team. I can’t give any promises that we will address the issue there. I have already told you the best solution. Before I do, I see you verified with last four on the account (it was his wife’s) can you please tell me the personal identification her account?

But that wasn’t good enough.

$cst: repeats the last four

$me: That is the last four. Because we are requesting a major change to the data on the account and I don’t know how my back office will react, I want to make sure to verify with a stronger form of authentication.

$cst: That is the strongest form of authentication.

$me: I don’t want this to be kicked back for not being verified correctly, can you please tell me the personal identification

The guy argued before actually providing the requested information.

$cst: I work for $competitor (granted one that doesn’t service some areas of his city, and he might work for a different division) and I have never heard of something so ridiculous.

$me: I am just trying to help. FCC regulation requires that before we make certain changes to accounts, we can’t use last four of social to verify.

$cst: I have never heard of such bs and I know you are lying. When I get back to work, I am going to look it up and I am going to prove you wrong. finally states the number listed You are trying to tell me that some random four digit number that I made up is more secure than a number the government has given me?

Yes sir, yes I was.

That caller certainly liked to complain!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person has questions.

It’s funny and not funny at the same time.

Clearly the caller wouldn’t have needed to call if he actually knew what to do.

Another person dealt with similar calls.

I can imagine that it’s really annoying when someone calls for help but claims to be an expert in the subject they’re calling about. It they’re really an expert, why are they calling for help? They should simply be able to solve the problem themselves. If they’re not an expert, let the experts provide advice. That was the point of the call, right?

That was certainly a frustrating phone call!