Not to be confused with 'The cheque is in the mail.'

Don't make our crack crew of techies come there to 'help.'

[Here we go again. #2]

[Now its rejecting me for too many comments in too short a period of time. EL, we do this only because we love you.]

As a techie (but, not *your* techie), may I translate "we're working on it?"

This is an all-purpose phrase that, like all-purpose flour, kind of works for everything, but not optimally. It can mean all or none of these;

1) We're googling madly for a solution.

2) If old school geek, we're searching the e-mail list archives and asking our broad network of brother geeks on IRC.

3) We pray it will go away if we hold you off long enough because; a) we have no clue and/or b) we don't think there really is a problem.

4)We are madly reading the documentation, which appears to be a word for word translation from either Lao or Klingon, and has an index written in Latvian.

5)Your issue is very important to us. We will give it all the attention it deserves. After the 4,583 issues ahead of you in line.

6) We've passed the issue along to the vendor's tech support, and they are now looping through steps 1-5.

7) When was the last time you brought us homemade cookies, anyway? Or even a box of munchkins?

(Disclaimer - neither your geeks nor me actually do any of these, being competent, knowledgeable geeks.)

Gah! I forgot to put in 3.5 - You couldn't possibly understand what is really the issue, so I'm simplifying it to the point of insulting your intelligence.

3) We pray it will go away if we hold you off long enough because; a) we have no clue and/or b) we don't think there really is a problem.

Lissa, great post!
3 and 3.5 so nails it. As a former tech support person myself, I laughed out loud at your responses. 3 and 3.5 are priceless.

If a particularly troublesome issue arose, we'd get together and come up with a consenus BS answer to keep the users at bay. After all, that is what tech support is, to keep the users at bay?

If this doesn't read quite correctly, this reply box is acting weird.

At my last job, the running joke (with the users) was that sunspots were causing any given problem. They'd call, and ask about sunspot activity if their printers were acting up or something.

I've also worked at places where the sunspot joke was common.

In defense of phone tech support people, often they have to be more veterinarian than doctor, as the patient is unable to describe the symptoms.

This actually occurred at a place where I worked back in the 1980's:

Tech support: "What does it say on your screen?"
Customer: "Nothing."
Tech support: "Are you sure?"
Customer: "Yes."
Tech support: "Do you see the blinking cursor?"
Customer: "Yes."
Tech support: "What does it say right above that?"
Customer: "It says blah-blah-blah..."

Computer users are worse than animals, because they lie. I remember people calling with a problem and lying about what they did all the time. They even lied about what was on their screen. It's a cliché, but a common solution to their "problem" was often to plug the machine into the eletrical outlet or turn it on.

I keep a plastic "magic wand" at my desk for computer emergencies. Works better than a call to tech support sometimes. Going for coffee also helps.

Dahlink, we had a magic wand at my last job. It has a meaty scene in a video my co-workers made for a retirement present.

(No, I'm not in it.)

Great video, Lissa! LMAO! I personally subscribe to the turn it off and turn it on again school of tech repair.

I think it's important for electronics to take time to reconsider its attitude....

Here I was blaming my decision to finally begin posting as the reason for the crashiness of the blog this week (the sudden shift of the Earth on its axis).

Amazing how many of us have magic wands at our desks. Mine is pink, with all the Disney "Princesses" pictured, and it lights up and makes a pretty "Magic Wand" sound with the proper wave-with-wrist-snap technique. Whenever someone asks me for something which is impossible (almost always), I can whip it out and say perkily, "Why, SURE, I can get that done for you...JUST let me WAVE my MAGIC WAND!!!!" Life is good when you have a pink Disney Princess Magic Wand!!!