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When you work in tech support, you get used to dealing with stupid users very quickly.

What would you do if you had a caller who kept reporting that his headset didn’t pick up his voice well even after you replaced it twice?

That is what happened to the IT guy in this story, and after additional troubleshooting, he realized that the problem was with the user, not the headset itself.

Read through the full story to learn exactly what happened.

Three Headsets later…

Back when I first started IT, I was a humble Service Desk tech.

Headset issues can be a hassle.

My company had traveling sales people who got extra special service from us. Typically a bunch of turds, but every now and then, you get a good one.

Anyways, one of them called in. Issues with headset. No one could hear him very well. Did the normal stuff… checks dock settings, charging status, that sort of thing. I wound up sending him a new headset.

The headset is not the problem.

It arrived a week or so later, and it had the same issue! I asked my TL for help, asked a couple other techs, and even called up north for some other techs. None of us could figure it out. So, I decided to order him a completely different model.

This new one arrived, and he called me complaining it still wasn’t working. I troubleshooted a bit more. Surely this isn’t a headset issue by this point. This guy’s doing something.

Let’s get to the bottom of this.

I spend another 10 minutes talking through his setup, phone settings, the lot. Then he makes a comment…

Salesperson: “You know, I was pretty excited about this new headset. The old ones were bulky, but at least I could move the antenna around. This new one is really difficult to move and I can’t seem to get it to stay up.”

Antenna? I thought. What antenna?

Oh my gosh. I can see what is happening here.

Me: “Sir, when you say antenna….what exactly are you talking about?”

SP: “What do you mean? The thing that goes up and down on the old headset. It doesn’t go up and down. Every time I move it up, it doesn’t fit in my ear and it falls.”

Then it dawned on me…

Well, that was simple.

Me: “Sir. That’s not an antenna. That’s the microphone. Move it down.”

Moves it down and there you have it! Its working!

We both have a good chuckle about the whole thing. I tell him I’ll follow up in a couple months to see how it’s going. I do and just so happens to land in December.

Wow, he had been struggling with this for a long time.

We spoke for a few minutes, and he thanked me again. Apparently, the salesperson lost their headset for 6 months or so, found it, and just forgot how to set it up. He’d been toying with it for a another month before calling in.

Turns out, his sales were dipping because clients couldn’t hear him. He’d dropped down a sales tier which never happens to the gold club. His job was on the line. The moment it was fixed, we went back up a sales tier! Which he decided to share with me! Sent me a $1000 Christmas check for saving his job!

That was very generous of him. I can see why he did it, though. He was about to lose his job over something so stupid.

Read through the following comments to see what other people think of it.

Sometimes things are obvious in hindsight.

He does seem like a great guy.

Sometimes it is the simplest things.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a tech support worker who told a manager a computer needed replaced, only to be told no thanks.

This person also has a headset issue story.

At least the user was nice about it.

It was a simple problem, but he couldn’t figure it out for months. Why did it take them so long to figure it out, though?