Readit NewsWe're now in a multi year recovery process.
I never want to hear "rhythm of the business" again.
- Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working".
- Having to increasingly go do cable TV disconnects because people were usually in a bad way and I had more than one colleague that had either had a gun pulled on them or straight-up shot and left to die up a pole for most of a day while trying to disconnect cable.
- Having to increasingly go on cable TV installs because people's shitty TVs backfeeding electricity into the cable line meant I was getting zapped at least once a week.
That said, I met a lot of cool people, gave out a lot of free TV/HBO because I didn't care unless the customer was a dick, wrote down a lot of funny stories and ultimately realized that I could go college in spite of dropping out of high school because I happened to install the non-traditional student advisor's cable modem.
My colleagues said they'd see me back at the shop in four years after I graduated with a philosophy degree. Jokes on them, I dropped out after getting a job at Google.
One guy who ran a event ticket operation (selling tickets to events) we installed a T1 for the phone company wouldn't go out unless they could bring a security guard. The same guy once came to our office and waited outside in the parking lot and followed one of my coworkers home demanding that she fix his internet. Her father came out and confronted him and he took off.
Another time someone was mad that his address didn't qualify for DSL because "the man was keeping him down from getting fast internet".
Later in life I worked at the phone company and linemen told me stories about being high on a pole in rough neighborhoods and being accosted by folks on the ground brandishing pistols demanding to know whose phone line they were tapping (they tried to explain that stuff is done remotely but they didn't understand).
I wouldn't know who came first, but it's a feature of JunOS (Juniper) as well: every config apply first applies the config, then waits for confirmation on the terminal where it was ran. If confirmation isn't given within X seconds, it reverts the config change.
A few understand immediately and are good about it. Most have absolutely no idea why I would even be bothered about an unexpected caller asking me for personal information. A few are practically hostile about it.
None, to date, have worked for a company that has a process established for safely establishing identity of the person they're calling. None. Lengthy on-hold queues, a different person with no context, or a process that can't be suspended and resumed so the person answering the phone has no idea why I got a call in the first place.
(Yet I'll frequently get email full of information that wouldn't be given out over the phone, unencrypted, unsigned, and without any verification that the person reading it is really me.)
The organisational change required here is with the callers rather than the callees, and since it's completely about protecting the consumer rather than the vendor, it's a change that's unlikely to happen without regulation.