This article is from the March 1 1994 _Wall Street Journal_, according
to an e-mail I received today:
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> BEFUDDLED PC USERS FLOOD HELP LINES,
> NO QUESTION SEEMS TO BE TOO BASIC
>
> AUSTIN, Texas
>
> The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn't get her
> new Dell computer to turn on. Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer
> Corp. technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and
> then asked the woman what happened when she pushed the power
> button.
>
> "I've pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing
> happens," the woman replied. "Foot pedal?" the technician
> asked. "Yes," the woman said, "this little white foot pedal
> with the on switch." The "foot pedal," it turned out, was
> the computer's mouse, a hand-operated device that helps to
> control the computer's operations.
>
> Personal-computer makers are discovering that it's still a
> low-tech world out there. While they are finally having
> great success selling PCs to households, they now have to
> deal with people to whom monitors and disk drives are a
> foreign as another language.
>
> "It is rather mystifying to get this nice, beautiful machine
> and not know anything about it," says Ed Shuler, a
> technician who helps field consumer calls at Dell's
> headquarters here. "It's going into unfamiliar territory,"
> adds Gus Kolias, vice president of customer service and
> training for Compaq Computer Corp. "People are looking for a
> comfort level."
>
> Only two years ago, most calls to PC help lines came from
> techies needing help on complex problems. But now, with
> computer sales to homes exploding as new "multimedia"
> functions gain mass appeal, PC makers say that as many as
> 70% of their calls come from rank novices. Partly because of
> the volume of calls, some computer companies have started
> charging help-line users.
>
> The questions are often so basic that they could have been
> answered by opening the manual that comes with every
> machine. One woman called Dell's toll-free line to ask how
> to install batteries in her laptop. When told that the
> directions were on the first page of the manual, says Steve
> Smith, Dell director of technical support, the woman replied
> angrily, "I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and I'm
> not going to read a book."
>
> Indeed, it seems that these buyers rarely refer to a manual
> when a phone is at hand. "If there is a book and a phone and
> they're side by side, the phone wins time after time," says
> Craig McQuilkin, manager of service marketing for AST
> Research, Inc. in Irvine, Calif. "It's a phenomenon of
> people wanting to talk to people."
>
> And do they ever. Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is
> inundated by some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries
> like this one related by technician John Wolf: "A frustrated
> customer called, who said her brand new Contura would not
> work. She said she had unpacked the unit, plugged it in,
> opened it up and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for
> something to happen. When asked what happened when she
> pressed the power switch, she asked, 'What power switch?'"
>
> Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So
> many people have called to ask where the "any" key is when
> "Press Any Key" flashes on the screen that Compaq is
> considering changing the command to "Press Return Key."
>
> Some people can't figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, an AST
> technical support supervisor, says one customer complained
> that her mouse was hard to control with the "dust cover" on.
> The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was
> packaged in. Dell technician Wayne Zieschang says one of his
> customers held the mouse and pointed it at the screen, all
> the while clicking madly. The customer got no response
> because the mouse works only if it's moved over a flat
> surface.
>
> Disk drives are another bugaboo. Compaq technician Brent
> Sullivan says a customer was having trouble reading
> word-processing files from his old diskettes. After
> troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the
> problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with
> the diskette. The customer's response: "I put a label on the
> diskette, roll it into the typewriter..."
>
> At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a
> technician's request that she send in a copy of a defective
> floppy disk. A letter from the customer arrived a few days
> later, along with a Xerox copy of the floppy. And at Dell, a
> technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy
> back in the drive and "close the door." Asking the
> technician to "hold on," the customer put the phone down and
> was heard walking over to shut the door to his room. The
> technician meant the door to his floppy drive.
>
> The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling.
> A Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer
> to fax anything. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the
> technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of
> paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and
> hitting the "send" key.
>
> Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program,
> so Dell technician Gary Rock referred him to the local
> Egghead. "Yeah, I got me a couple of friends," the customer
> replied. When told Egghead was a software store, the man
> said, "Oh! I thought you meant for me to find a couple of
> geeks."
>
> Not realizing how fragile computers can be, some people end
> up damaging parts beyond repair. A Dell customer called to
> complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned
> it, he said, filling up his tub with soap and water and
> soaking his keyboard for a day, and then removing all the
> keys and washing them individually.
>
> Computers make some people paranoid. A Dell technician,
> Morgan Vergara, says he once calmed a man who became enraged
> because "his computer had told him he was bad and an
> invalid." Mr. Vergara patiently explained that the
> computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't
> be taken personally.
>
> These days PC-help technicians increasingly find themselves
> taking on the role of amateur psychologists. Mr. Shuler, the
> Dell technician, who once worked as a psychiatric nurse,
> says he defused a potential domestic fight by soothingly
> talking a man through a computer problem after the man had
> screamed threats at his wife and children in the background.
>
> There are also the lonely hearts who seek out human contact,
> even if it happens to be a computer techie. One man from New
> Hampshire calls Dell every time he experiences a life
> crisis. He gets a technician to walk him through some
> contrived problem with his computer, apparently feeling
> uplifted by the process.
>
> "A lot of people want reassurance," says Mr. Shuler.
> ____________________________________________________________
Notice how ordinary people are figured in its anecdotes, particularly how
they contrast eminently-competent professionals who "understand" both the
machines and their owners. Typical of _WSJ_ journalist's bias towards
professionals, discrepancies between the experts' understandings of
computers and those of "rank" novices' is figured as an idiocy of amateurs
--not by the (more likely) hypothesis that the increasing complexity and
accelerating obsolescence of PCs (which have proven profitable for
computers-as-"consumer electronics"in the U.S.) have produced a new form
of consumer relations to commodities, one worth serious note.
Now look at the construction of the article: the reporter obviously spoke
with customer service technicians from Dell, AST and Compaq. These people
obviously have a vested interest in normalizing their own understandings
of and relations to this new form of "expert" commodity. There's a
cultural studies essay in the analysis of this text (though damn it, I
don't have time to write it right now).
Ah well,
Geoff