Working for an ISP

by slave_job_tech

I recently lost my job in technical support at Vidéotron, a local Québec ISP that has made a big contract with Comcast for their Helix project, which includes control of domotics in your house, a TV remote with an integrated microphone (sic!), and a "smart" router/modem in the same box.

The techs are not trained for it yet, and it comes into market in March...

I've read on Techdirt that Comcast previously had spied on their users (and probably continues to do so).  So basically, Vidéotron is becoming more and more like Big Brother.

Just imagine giving possible control of your domotic devices to your ISP!  And we all know that it's never a question of "Will they do so?" but of "Can they do so?"  (Just mix that with some "anti-terrorist" bullshit laws and a dictator coming into power with a SWAT team waiting for the lights to go off...)

As a simple Level One tech, I could change the password to your @videotron.ca email address, your customer account, and your video decoder.

I could know the history of your calls on your cell phone, but not the content of your Internet habits.  (They can obtain this if police come with a court warrant, but in about 90 percent of the cases, they fail to recover the data - if what my trainers told me was true.)  I could also reset your modem so you would lose your Internet connection for about two minutes.  I could send a Profile Five to your TV decoder, which is also a recorder, so you would lose all of your recorded TV programs.  When we complete a demand for a tech, the form always asks if the customer has a security system at home (if they have a problem with the phone modem, some actions of the tech can activate it accidentally).  I don't know if they store the info or not.  The website of the ISP doesn't have a single SSL certificate, and some things (like the speed test) require that you download a Flash player to use it.

They also asked you to solve the clients' problems in nine minutes or less, to have post-call poll ratings of "Very Satisfying" or "Wow" (what a dumb answer for a poll!), and to have a low rate of 24-hour or seven-day callbacks (even if sometimes customers needed to call back to finish resolving their problem or just to thank you).  They also applied dumb company policies and expected us to explain them to the customers, like the CRTC's rule of not using more than the half of your service for three months in a row on a "partner" network or you would be blocked from service for one complete month (that you still needed to pay for).

So you may understand why I'm not that sad about losing the job.

The different departments in the company are in competition because everyone wants to transfer clients to other departments to win some time for their statistics.

Workers from Morocco and Egypt often change their names to match those that our grandparents had in order to be more accepted and to receive less racist comments.  (I love Québec in a nationalist way, but I'm not a racist and have no hate for immigrants or foreigners, so I find it sad that those workers have an additional layer of shit while they work.)  I know that lots of Indians in call centers do the same with their American customers.

I remembered hearing a small girl saying "O.K. Google" after I made the Internet work again.

I had a client being charged for more than $1000 of porn in less than two days on his TV decoder.

I had clients thinking that the free "Service de Sécurité Vidéotron" ( Vidéotron's, security service) - an anti-virus, would really be sufficient to secure their Windows 7, 8, or 10 computers.

Lots of other techs were, frankly, incompetent (I was often of the same mind as the customers about the job previously done), especially those on the road, who called me sometimes for problems which I had the habit of completing for them.  (They are "subcontractors," but still.)

For Vidéotron's, all techs supposedly have the same knowledge, which you know is false if you ever worked as a tech.

I got my networking course diploma back in 2018, and resolved the problem of a client who had a problem with his Samsung 7500 Smart TV.  The mysterious situation was that since he switched to Vidéotron's from Bell, his Wi-Fi connection stopped working.  The DHCP gave him no IP, but when the client changed to the manual settings, an IP appeared!  It was like trying to divide by zero!  The client finally read me something from the configuration page.  I told him to deactivate this setting and then the connection finally worked.  His TV was set as an access point, so it tried to connect to itself!  But those evaluating me (I told them the story while I was in a meeting) whined about it because if the client called back, he would have found that all techs were not the same, and that would have trashed the company's corporate message and image!  Even Level Two techs told me that they would have placed the support limit to that problem and that they would have referred the client to Samsung's technical support!  What a shame!

On the walls of the call center room, they had written: "# Integrity."

Like I told another tech, in Bash, what comes after the "#" is what's excluded from the program.

My post-call polls were pretty good, about 87 percent to 93 percent "Very Satisfied" and 30 percent to 33 percent "Wow" ratings.  But I took too much time to make the calls because I was "too kind" with clients!

What a weird concept for someone who had already studied as a social worker with delinquents.  It gives you a good idea of the respect given by the high directors to the customers who pay for their services!  If you sell shit to your customers, like the old T66 or the newest X8 TV decoders, don't expect all problems to be solved in nine minutes or less!

So if anybody here wants to work in a call center for an ISP, think twice.

Think about your mental health and your happiness - or prepare to be a soulless robot.