One Night on the Help Line

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ONE NIGHT ON THE HELP LINE
Friday, September 17, 1999, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Every call, logged and timed.

[ The Log | Hall of Fame & Before You Call ]

My name is Ian Robb. I'm 25, and for three years I've worked the overnight shift on the help line of a dial-up Internet provider here in Columbus, Ohio. I'm not going to say which one. My boss reads the Web too.

People ask me what we do all night. So I kept the log of one ordinary Friday and typed it up, every one of my calls, in order. (Sabrina keeps her own.) I've left out names and phone numbers, and towns are as close as I'll get. Everything else is how it happened.

One thing before you read it. Nobody calls a help line at 1 a.m. because things are going well. My callers are tired and worried and usually feel a little silly for calling, and they shouldn't. Almost everything below is something I did myself the first time. I like these people. This page isn't here to laugh at anybody. It's here because nights on the help line are, honestly, pretty great.

Every ticket gets a resolution code. The official codes are boring, so on nights we use our own:

NIGHT SHIFT RESOLUTION CODES
JKS	Jack swap. Cord in the wrong jack.
*70	Call waiting. Dial *70, first.
CAPS	Caps Lock was on.
SSNV	Screen saver. Not a virus.
WCO	Wrong company. Nice person, though.
GN	Goodnight call.
POOL	All our modems busy. Our fault.
24H	The Internet does not close.
TRSH	It was in Deleted Items.
LINE	Noisy phone line. Out of my hands.
HTML	Not my job, helped anyway.
PWR	Something was turned off.
BIG	Attachment too big.
OTH	Off the hook somewhere in the house.
HOME	Set the home page.
ICON	Icon went missing. Found it.
ZERO	Zero, not the letter O.
THX	Somebody called to say thanks.

THE LOG

22:00 Shift start. Joseph hands off from evenings: Newark number has been busy since 9, and somebody brought donuts but they're gone. Sabrina's on the other phone. Coffee #1, made fresh, because the evening pot has been on the burner since 4.

TICKET 0917-01 22:04 [JKS] 6 min
CALLER	Woman, Delaware County. Brand-new computer, first night.
PROBLEM	"It says there's no dial tone." (Error 680.)
FOUND	Phone cord from the wall was in the jack marked PHONE on the back of the modem instead of the one marked LINE. The two jacks look exactly alike. Everybody does this once.

TICKET 0917-02 22:17 [*70] 9 min
CALLER	Man, Grove City.
PROBLEM	Gets knocked offline every night around this time, always right in the middle of something.
FOUND	Call waiting. His daughter is sixteen and her friends start calling at ten. The beep from a second call knocks the modem right off. Walked him through Dialing Properties and checked the box to dial *70, first. The comma makes the modem wait a second before it dials.

TICKET 0917-03 22:40 [CAPS] 4 min
CALLER	Man, west side. Calling from his kitchen phone.
PROBLEM	Password not accepted (error 691). Typed it eleven times, he says.
FOUND	Caps Lock was on. Passwords care about capital letters. He was very relieved and a little annoyed with his keyboard.

TICKET 0917-04 22:58 [SSNV] 7 min
CALLER	Retired gentleman, Pickaway County.
PROBLEM	Thinks he has a virus. Words keep marching across his screen and won't stop.
FOUND	The Scrolling Marquee screen saver. His grandson set it up on Sunday to say GRANDPA IS THE BEST. Showed him how to change it in Display Properties. He decided to leave it.

23:10 Coffee #2.

TICKET 0917-05 23:15 [WCO] 3 min
CALLER	Young guy, campus area.
PROBLEM	Can't get his America Online to work.
FOUND	He's not our customer; he's AOL's. Told him where to find their number (on the back of the CD) and said to call us if he ever wants to switch. He said, "Wait, who are you?" Good question at 11 p.m.

TICKET 0917-06 23:31 [GN] 9 min
CALLER	Grandma Friday. (Everybody on nights knows her.)
PROBLEM	Wants to be sure her e-mail works before the weekend.
FOUND	It works. It always works now. I sent her a test message, she read it back to me, and then she told me her granddaughter in San Diego is expecting in March and asked if I'm eating right. I said yes. Then she said goodnight. I said goodnight. More about her on the Hall of Fame page.

TICKET 0917-07 23:52 [POOL] 12 min
CALLER	Several callers, Licking County.
PROBLEM	Busy signals when they dial in.
FOUND	Our fault. Every modem on the Newark number was full. Friday nights everybody's home. Told each of them to try again in fifteen minutes or use the Columbus number if it's a local call for them. Logged it for Will to see Monday. This one's on us, not them.

TICKET 0917-08 00:09 [24H] 3 min
CALLER	Man, Worthington. Sounded about seventy.
PROBLEM	"What time does the Internet close?"
FOUND	His wife told him the Internet closes at midnight, so he should come to bed. I did not want to get between a man and his wife. I told him the Internet stays open all night, but most people agree it works best after a good night's sleep. He laughed and said he'd tell her I said so.

TICKET 0917-09 00:40 [TRSH] 11 min
CALLER	Woman, Hilliard.
PROBLEM	All her e-mail is gone. Three years of letters from her sister.
FOUND	Not gone. Her whole Inbox folder had been dragged into the Deleted Items folder, probably by accident with the mouse. Dragged it back out. She cried a little. So, a little, did I.

TICKET 0917-10 01:05 [LINE] 14 min
CALLER	College student, Delaware.
PROBLEM	Paid for a 56K modem, only ever connects at 28.8 or so.
FOUND	Tested. His line is long and noisy; he's a long way out from the phone company's office in an old farmhouse he shares with three other guys. The new 56K modems need a clean line to get anywhere near full speed. Nothing I can do from here. Told him to try unplugging every other phone in the house and see if it gets better.

TICKET 0917-11 01:31 [HTML] 5 min
CALLER	Teenage boy. (Didn't give a town. Sounded fifteen.)
PROBLEM	How do you put a background picture on your home page?
FOUND	Not technically a help line question. Told him about the BACKGROUND part of the BODY tag anyway, since it was a slow minute. Also told him to go to bed.

TICKET 0917-12 01:52 [PWR] 6 min
CALLER	Woman, Reynoldsburg.
PROBLEM	"Modem is not responding."
FOUND	External modem, power switch on the back was off. The cat sleeps on top of the modem because it's warm and she'd turned it off so it wouldn't get too hot under him. Agreed with her that the cat comes first, but the modem has to be on to work. He's moving to the radiator.

02:15 Coffee #3. Sabrina on break. Microwave popcorn, extra butter.

02:21 Last call for a while.

02:40 The 3 a.m. lull starts early. Both phones quiet. Sabrina is reading a library book about the Titanic. I'm reading the new modem manual, which is worse.

03:00 Calls in the last 39 minutes: 0. Fixed the stapler that's been jammed since Tuesday.

03:15 Still 0. Watered Will's plant, which nobody waters. Considered coffee #4.

03:30 Still 0. Had coffee #4.

TICKET 0917-13 03:38 [BIG] 15 min
CALLER	Nurse, just home from a hospital night shift.
PROBLEM	Tried to send a scanned picture to her son in the Army in Germany. It's been "sending" for an hour.
FOUND	The picture was saved at a huge size, more than three megabytes, which takes forever over a modem and might bounce off his mailbox anyway. Showed her how to scan it again smaller. It went in two minutes. It was her son's dog.

TICKET 0917-14 04:05 [OTH] 6 min
CALLER	Man, Gahanna.
PROBLEM	Was online fine earlier, now error 680, no dial tone.
FOUND	Asked him to pick up the phone. No dial tone there either. Asked him to check the other phones in the house. His son's phone was off the hook under the bed.

04:30 Coffee #5. The bottom of the pot. Don't tell Will.

TICKET 0917-15 04:41 [HOME] 7 min
CALLER	Farmer, Madison County. Up for the day already.
PROBLEM	Wants the weather and the grain markets to come up first thing when he starts his browser.
FOUND	Went to the page he wanted, then Tools, Internet Options, Home page, Use Current. Now it's there every morning. He asked if I wanted to know what corn closed at yesterday. I said sure. I don't remember what he said, but he was happy about it.

TICKET 0917-16 05:10 [ICON] 5 min
CALLER	Grandmother, Westerville. Babysitting.
PROBLEM	"The Internet is gone off my computer."
FOUND	Her three-year-old granddaughter "cleaned up" the desktop last night. The shortcut that dials us was in the Recycle Bin. Opened the Recycle Bin, picked it, chose Restore. Back where it was.

TICKET 0917-17 05:35 [ZERO] 4 min
CALLER	Man, Upper Arlington.
PROBLEM	Username not accepted, error 691 again.
FOUND	His username has a zero in it and he's been typing the letter O. They look the same in that font. They really do.

TICKET 0917-18 05:52 [THX] 2 min
CALLER	Woman, Marion.
PROBLEM	Nothing wrong.
FOUND	She called to say thank you for last week, when somebody on nights spent an hour getting her set up so she could e-mail her brother in Arizona. She wanted us to know he wrote back. I told her I'd pass it on to whoever it was. (It was me. I didn't tell her.)

06:00 Shift end. Mark in for mornings. Handed off the Newark busy signals and the last of the popcorn. Totals: 22 tickets (18 mine, 4 Sabrina's), 5 coffees, 1 bag popcorn, 1 stapler repaired, 0 viruses. Drove home in the dark. It gets darker every week now.

That's a pretty normal Friday. Some nights are busier, some are quieter, and once in a while one ends up on the Hall of Fame. Before you call us, or whoever your provider is, take a look at the Before You Call checklist. It might save you the call. If not, we're up.

CALLS TAKEN ON THIS PAGE:

(since February 1998, when this was just the Hall of Fame)

Write to the night desk: [email protected]
I answer between calls.

Last updated: Sunday, September 19, 1999