An Elderly Woman’s Laptop Completely Stopped Working—Until Tech Support Realized What She Cancelled Over the Phone
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Let’s face it: humans might be a miracle of evolution, but we can be pretty foolish too. After all, we’re mistake prone by nature, and with researchers suggesting that we make on average around eighty mistakes every day it’s easy to see why. Sure we might do a lot more things right, but every so often one of those silly mistakes might end up costing us.
And the tech worker in this story is no stranger to seeing customers who have made big mistakes. Whether it was clicking a link in a dodgy email or accidentally uninstalling vital software, they’ve seen it all. But when an elderly lady came into the store with a computer problem she couldn’t figure out, this worker had no idea the rabbit hole he was about to follow.
Read on to find out what happened here.
You cancelled what service?
A few years ago I was working at a computer repair shop and this 80 year old lady came in to get her “email fixed”.
She ran some kind of business and suddenly her Outlook stopped updating, she had a custom domain and everything – so immediately we thought, “oh no she canceled her custom domain”.
We asked her if she canceled her email service. She said no, but she did say she canceled a bill the previous month but did not know what it was for, she thought it was a phone bill or something.
We were pretty sure she canceled her custom domain service, she wasn’t giving us much to work with. But she did have an assistant who basically ran the business from Pennsylvania.
Let’s see how they figured this out.
It took a long time to get them to tell us what is happening with the account. We had to get the account credentials from the assistant.
Turns out the email was set up a long time ago, back in the 90s or something. Long story short, the email provider she used (don’t remember its name) subcontracted out the email hosting service to Intermedia.
Then Intermedia sub-subcontracted Godaddy to do the actual email hosting. So as it turns out, she did cancel her custom domain. We just had to go through three layers of subcontractors to figure out what actually happened.
In the end we got her assistant to buy the domain on Google’s domain service. Then we did the basic configuration and set up her outlook to sync to that.
Yikes! Sometimes tech problems are so convoluted, it must take so much patience and determination to figure them out.
And because this woman’s service was so retro, it took so much extra investigation to figure it out.
Honestly, kudos to the experts who did.
Let’s see what the Reddit community had to say about this.
This person thought this situation could have been a lot worse.
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While others had had other issues with convoluted tech processes.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a burned-out employee who finds a way to ease his stress with an extended daily lunch.
Meanwhile, this person thought this was a lesson in not cancelling random things without knowing what they are.
Genuinely, when you’re an expert in something – whether that’s tech or otherwise – you must have to have so much patience to work in a customer-facing role. Because a lot of customers will think that they know what they’re talking about, but you know that actually, they have no clue at all. But of course you can’t tell them that, because it would be very bad for business – so you humour them, waiting for them to leave to that you can actually get to work in figuring out what is really wrong.
It’s a quality service and something that is worth every penny, because when a tech support guy fixes your computer properly, it will cost you a whole lot less time and stress, compared to frustratedly trying to figure things out for yourself. And if you break something? Well paying a tech guy could actually end up costing you less in the long run!
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