Vanth

I was super good at recording the local music radio station to a cassette tape to minimize the DJs chatter. My brother would pay me to catch songs for him. Too bad he had awful taste.

I did tier 1, 2, and eventually some 3 support back in the day for a software company. I liked how they handled it.

Customer called in, reached a live person doing intake. The intake person noted their question and callback number, helping to scope the problem if needed, and entered a ticket into the queue. The intake person gave the caller an expected wait time for a support tech to call back, pointed them to online written help documentation, and ended the call. Then push the ticket to tier 1, 2, 3, or "urgent, need to call NOW" queues. Depending on tier and call volume and time of day, they'd get a callback from a tech anywhere from immediately to the next morning.

Support techs like myself were coached to help over the phone, but also to point out the written materials and encourage their use. I would commonly say, "sure, that's a problem we can fix, go ahead and go to screen x, click on button y, etc. By the way, you're not the only one who had had this question, we even have an entry on this in our support documentation. Let me show you where you it's at so you can get to the fix even faster than a phone call next time".

Having the intake person take numbers, then techs call back later saved customers from having to wait on hold for lengths of time. We had very few cases of irate customers stuck waiting.

My shittiest experiences are the companies that don't do any intake and make all tiers of calls wait on hold in the same queue. Luck of the draw if the tech you end up with is a tier 1 still in training pants or a tier 3 pissed to be walking a customer thru updating their password for the millionth tim.

I just wish I could find an RSS feed of it.

Yeah, this is a super common theme from queer people in small rural and/or religious communities. Online may be the only interaction they have for information and support.

My condolences. Where is this "competition breeds excellence" outcome that capitalism promised me?

Within the past year I shopped around for a new home internet provider. The legacy companies encouraged if not required talking to a human being to find out anything about service availability and rates and then be subject to a hard sales pitch. Appointment availability for the install was 2+ weeks out. The new fiber companies had all the info I could want clearly online, appointments available within 2 days, with minimal fuss. The legacy company humans were also often incorrect about their own product, potentially lying to make a sale.

If they act like a company from the 90s, they aren't going to capture customers who came into adulthood after that.

That's not even touching on the speeds they offer are slower than their competitors for a steeper price.

When my brother's brother-in-law passed, he gave all that to my brother. Both on the high end of tech/self-hosting capabilities. I've come to the conclusion much of it wasn't worth it.

I'll be focusing on ensuring access to financial accounts is passed on cleanly. And I'm working on digitizing all remaining physical photo negatives, then planning how to share all digitally with family while still alive. Since I don't expect any to be interested in maintaining a server after I'm gone, I'm thinking I'll keep it simple and just give everyone an external hard drive with all the photos. It's up to them to do what they want with the drive. A copy to each sibling is increases odds it's survives for a generation.

I'll make project notes and plans available to anyone interested, but no hard feelings if no one is interested. And my music and movies can disappear for all I care. My tastes are pretty mainstream so I'm not thinking about archival value.

Is there a reason to not just use the laptop? It's already bought and paid for. I would just setup it up for maximal ease; get a good keyboard and mouse and side table she's comfortable with, bookmark everything for her, set the TV's default source to the PC, make all the text 200% size or greater so it's easy to read from 3m out.

Not tech related.

Aye. Bookmarking this thread to remind people when I see complaints Lemmy isn't taking off enough except for super technical topics.

I had a college sports team reunion and several teammates asked for a copy of a championship game. I still had the digital file, so posted it in a Dropbox thinking that would be easy enough for people whose hobbies don't involve computers.

Nope, I was spending too much time on tech support so offered flash drives with video files.

Nope, still too much for two teammates so after a phone call to understand what tech they had at home and were comfortable with, I burned them each DVDs.

It didn't get that far, but I was prepared to use my library's digital-to-VHS-to-digital workstation to copy them an old-timey VHS tape if the DVDs didn't work. The library even has a stash of never-unwrapped VHS tapes they'll sell you.

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

I would guess the next set of features "missing" from the Roku app have similar reason then. 1) I use a plugin to search and download subtitles from the browser interface; it would be great to be able to do that from the Roku app too and 2) once subtitles are available, easily adjusting the offset.