Tech support. I was with a broadband company that beams microwave internet to rural customers. Their only other options were dial-up (in 2019~) or much more expensive satellite. The company was inflating its network stats by buying up small regional ISPs and claiming their users/infrastructure as its own. This resulted in patchwork hardware across the entire country. Some towers I could access with our normal software. Some required downloading proprietary software, others were from the 1990s and could only take command line interactions. With any hardware that wasn’t ours, it was usually cheaper to disconnect the area than to service it.
So meemaw calls in because she hasn’t been able to read her far-right facebook conspiracies for the day. She hasn’t spoken to her children in decades so I’m the first human contact she’s had in a while. I pull up her system and it’s from 2001. Nothing works with my interface and I can’t tell if the tower is malfunctioning or if its radio transmitter or her radio receiver is or if there’s a tree somewhere in the 15km~ distance between the two. The last maintenance entry was five years ago and there are under a dozen people connected to it so the company won’t invest further. My call centre’s QA team is listening in on the conversation for up to ten minutes. I’d have to string the boomer along for those ten minutes, listening to all the insane shit they have to say about minorities, while pretending there is any hope of their service returning. Then after I knew QA wasn’t listening I’d quickly explain the situation, urge them to go with any other option, and end the call before my time metrics were fucked up by trying to help them.
All the while I’d be looking at their internet speeds and fixating on the broadband gap. It took them days to download what I can in ten minutes. Our service was the best they could get and the company existed to deprive them of access to data.
Tech support. I was with a broadband company that beams microwave internet to rural customers. Their only other options were dial-up (in 2019~) or much more expensive satellite. The company was inflating its network stats by buying up small regional ISPs and claiming their users/infrastructure as its own. This resulted in patchwork hardware across the entire country. Some towers I could access with our normal software. Some required downloading proprietary software, others were from the 1990s and could only take command line interactions. With any hardware that wasn’t ours, it was usually cheaper to disconnect the area than to service it.
So meemaw calls in because she hasn’t been able to read her far-right facebook conspiracies for the day. She hasn’t spoken to her children in decades so I’m the first human contact she’s had in a while. I pull up her system and it’s from 2001. Nothing works with my interface and I can’t tell if the tower is malfunctioning or if its radio transmitter or her radio receiver is or if there’s a tree somewhere in the 15km~ distance between the two. The last maintenance entry was five years ago and there are under a dozen people connected to it so the company won’t invest further. My call centre’s QA team is listening in on the conversation for up to ten minutes. I’d have to string the boomer along for those ten minutes, listening to all the insane shit they have to say about minorities, while pretending there is any hope of their service returning. Then after I knew QA wasn’t listening I’d quickly explain the situation, urge them to go with any other option, and end the call before my time metrics were fucked up by trying to help them.
All the while I’d be looking at their internet speeds and fixating on the broadband gap. It took them days to download what I can in ten minutes. Our service was the best they could get and the company existed to deprive them of access to data.