Getting past ignorant Customer Support

Everyone has called some sort of Call Center needing some sort of assistance with your ISP(possibly due to an outage). I figured out a very cleaver way to jump past the first ‘tier’ or two of Customer Service Representatives.

I don’t recommend doing this every time you need help, but only when it is serious and you need to talk to someone that knows what they are talking about.

So I was having issues with my internet, some sites weren’t loading all the way. They would load the first half then stop and continue ‘looping’ not loading the rest.

I have a new Dell 1420 Ubuntu Laptop, so when I called my ISP and they asked me to click the start button(to get to the command prompt) I couldn’t. I thought it would be interesting to tell them I am using Ubuntu and wait to see what happens. . .instead of just opening up the terminal and tell them I am at the ‘command prompt’.

When I told Comcast I was Ubuntu I heard a pause. She asks ‘You aren’t using Windows or a Mac?’ and I reply with ‘No, I am using the KDE graphical interface on Ubuntu Linux.’. I hear another long pause and hear ‘One moment please.’. About 2 minutes later I am on the phone with her Supervisor. He knows what he is talking about. . .not reading from a book and asks what the issue is. I quickly explain and tell him a few of the hops that my traceroutes stick and loop at.

He thanks me for reporting the issue and tells me he will open a ticket to get the issue fixed. I was on the phone with the supervisor much less than I was with the woman. All I could tell the woman was that I was using linux. . .I was able to tell the man the issue, my IP address, and specific hops that my traces were looping on.

So what an interesting result to my ’social experiment’. I am not sure how many if I went past one, two, or three ‘tiers’ to get to someone that knew something. No matter, I now know what to say when calling Comcast with cable internet issues.

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