Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk, that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on their remote and losing their STB input setting, People needing to reboot their router, flushing DNS settings / winsock reset. These might have been the majority of cases.

View on HN

other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand how the rest of those are blockers.

I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.

Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Even if 99.9% of Comcast customers are pretty good with technology, and only 1 in 1000 customers are illiterate enough that they have trouble selecting the correct input on their TV... with 32 million customers, that means you might get tens of thousands of calls about it.

But really, internet (and digital TV) services are pervasive enough that they are no longer just for technologically inclined and resourceful people. All aspects of society are now using the internet, even the homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.

I once spent half an hour on the phone with a dialup customer who couldn't get connected. Fortunately, they fixed their own problem - they had been entering the "letter zero" instead of the "number zero" (their words.)

Took another call from an irate dialup customer who demanded a refund - he didn't know he needed a computer to use the internet -- and had driven himself mad dialing up our modem bank with his telephone and waiting for the training tones to subside so he could begin to navigate the internet as he imagined it to work: press 1 for email, 2 for news, 3 for weather...

Despite the proliferation of smart phones and greater prevalence of home networks, I don't think the situation has changed much for a segment of the population once you get down to troubleshooting why something isn't working. The skills and the willingness to just try to fix the problem aren't there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com