Customer Support

As you may have gathered from Facebook, I have gone and got meself a job so that I can feed myself while writing this thesis. It's basically just customer support for an internet start-up company, nothing glamorous. But they wanted me for my Frenchness so perhaps I get classiness points for that. If you go here you can see the kind of thing I do, and even catch a glimpse of a terrible photo of me as it cycles through mugshots of my colleagues and I.

Some things what I have learnt from this job (note: this is just my thoughts from one shift):

• People seem to think punctuation is optional. It isn't.
• Telepathy can be learnt. If I get a message saying, "OMG IM SO CONFUSED HELP ME MY DOMAIN IS MADE OF CHEESE AND THAT CHEESE IS MELTING!!!" I know exactly what they mean and how to fix it.
• Common sense is as rare as pork on a restaurant menu in Jerusalem.
• I have a surprising inventiveness for coming up with ways to say "You are a fucking idiot" politely.
• There are people out there who do not know that one does not write in ALLCAPS to another human being.
• Thr r pipl wat rite liek thiss. In French too.
• People from California actually, like, write like and put, like, question marks at the end of, like, every sentence? And not just Californians, but their voice instantly has a Californian accent in my head when I read it.
• 'Stream of consciousness' has become an acceptable style for correspondence without my noticing.
• If I thought I was useless with technology, I had absolutely no idea.
• The best and most creative sites are always porn.
• People cannot follow simple instructions. Or think for themselves.
• Europeans are just as thick as Americans. Canadians are slightly better, except for the Québecois.
• English-speakers are the most likely to be vulgar.
• The language of Voltaire does not lend itself well to technical terms. 'Largeur de bande' for example is so ungainly compared to 'bandwidth'.
• People think that mentioning 'I plan on upgrading to Premium as soon as I get this fixed' will actually make us care about their problem.
• People see a WYSIWYG Flash editor and go absolutely crazy with the effects and animations. The sheer tackiness has been known to make me cringe.
• Stop putting music on your site that blares out at me and scares me witless when I go and try to fix your problem.
• The people whose sites declare the glory of Jesus Christ our saviour who died for your sins please please please send us money are the most likely to a) be aggressive, b) not have a clue, and c) write like a 3-year-old.
• Lots of Israelis yell at us for not supporting Hebrew and then are very surprised when we tell them exactly how to do it. Or that we've heard of Hebrew.
• When customers are clearly bullshitting I go 'mmhm' like a black American lady to myself without realising it.
• All companies should have a monthly all-you-can-drink-and-eat-on-us gathering in a Tel Aviv bar.
• Multiple exclamation marks are no longer the sign of a diseased mind. They are now merely the sign of a disgruntled consumer.
• When you are the only person who speaks a certain language in a company, you are going to get a lot of emails from random people asking for things to be translated.
• Only one in every 20 emails actually merits being sent. The rest are things that people really should be able to deal with themselves.
• The majority of the answers I send to people are copied and pasted from our help pages, why can't they just go and search on their own?
• People don't need to put 'Help me' at the end of their email. That's more or less what I'm paid to do.
• Nor do I care about all your extenuating circumstances. Give me your email address, your URL, and a clear description of your problem. I'm not going to read your sob story anyway.
• People need to stop opening multiple tickets and repeating the same drivel in all of them. One will do. We'll get to you.
• Don't claim to be so destitute that our upgrade prices (£3 a month) are so extortionately expensive that you'll be forced to live on grass if you have a signature that says 'Sent from my Blackberry'.
• Sometimes I think this should be used as an IQ test. If you are too thick to create a Wix site, you will be shot in the face.

I'm actually not as angry or bitter as it sounds! A little disappointed in the stupidity of our species, but otherwise it's all good. To cheer you up, I present to you Pini. Start at 1 פרק and enjoy. I really hope this is not how Sean will be in the UK. Warning: may only be funny to speakers of Hebrew, who understand the idioms.