War Story #4

The other other Alan writes...

This is a war story with a difference, as it didn’t involve some crazy user doing some bat shit crazy thing with their computer. It was simply a call to one of the tech support agents where the user wanted to know the following:

“What is the exact chemical composition of the battery in the Thinkpad 760 XD?” “What are the recommended disposal procedures for said battery?” “Can you tell me what would happen to the battery if it ruptured in a vacuum environment?” “If the battery were to overheat, how volatile would the liquid effluent be?”

I doubt the user could have even gotten the questions out and taken a breath before the agent put them on hold and ran for help. The agent walked over to the second level support area rather than call as per procedure. After a good five minutes of talking, nobody could really answer the questions and worse, we couldn’t figure out what part of the company might actually have those answers.

As with all good tech support strategies we decided a two pronged approach - the agent would get back on with the user and stall for time while the rest of us would frantically hunt down any possible source of information that could help. We told the agent to ask why the user needed such detailed information and if it was a weak answer to push for a callback to buy even more time.

Some twenty minutes later the agent came back over to us with some interesting details on what was going on. It was all a misunderstanding. The user was supposed to call some private support number at IBM and not the public number. Our enterprising young agent did pull a fast one and offer to transfer the user to the number directly. The user provided the number and the agent promptly connected the call, then hit mute and stayed on the line. An American accent answered, the user responded and provided an account code upon request.

The tech on the private number acknowledged that the user was calling from NASA - Blackhawk Technologies Subsidiary. Apparently the shuttle program had 4 of those laptops on each mission - 1 primary and 3 redundant backups just in case. Suddenly the tricky questions all made sense. And eavesdropping can kill curiosity can never be a bad thing, right?