Tales from Tech Support.

I swear, I don’t think anything could have ever properly prepared me for working as a Tech Support agent for high-speed Internet customers in the United States. And it’s not that the customers calling are frustrating or unintelligent or anything, it’s just that there are so many different cultures resonating within the borders, and I get a sense of it every day…

With no notice I’ll get calls from anywhere across the country, and hear the full gamut of accents and inflections from nasal New Jersey tones to Texan twangs to full-on foreign voices whatsoever (like thick Jamaican accents). But laying that aside, it is unreal at times some of the expressions that I’ll hear over the phone.

Here are a couple of the common phrases and mispronunciations I’ve encountered so far in the past few weeks of customer service:

Internet Explorer . Innernet Exploder
Mozilla Firefox . Muxilla Foxfire

computer . CPU
modem . router, the box
router . that thing, Linksky
MSN . the butterfly

to powercycle the modem .:
‘cutting’ the power, as in, “y’ant me to cut the power off, an’ cut it back on?”