Misunderstanding Technology can be Fun?

[Klueless]

So I’m at a big box store and the sales guy is talking to a couple standing by the wireless router counter.

“How big is your house?”

“Oh, about 1,800 square feet.”

“Let me make it easy for you. Cutting through all the jargon AC simply means Area Covered. This AC1750 will probably work fine in your 1,800 sq. ft. house but you should get the AC1900 to play it safe. Now if you want to add the backyard or garage then you will need this AC3100 to cover the additional area.”

“Oh wow, thank you! We love our patio so we’ll take the 3100.”​

Why weren’t things this simple back when I bought my N66u?

 

[hyelton]

So I’m at a big box store and the sales guy is talking to a couple standing by the wireless router counter.

“How big is your house?”

“Oh, about 1,800 square feet.”

“Let me make it easy for you. Cutting through all the jargon AC simply means Area Covered. This AC1750 will probably work fine but you should get the AC1900 to play it safe. Now if you’ve a backyard patio or front porch you might prefer this AC3100 so you can cover the additional area.”

“Oh wow, thank you! We love our patio so we’ll take the 3100.”​

Why weren’t things this simple back when I bought my N66u?

That sales person would piss me off badly lol. "area covered" that's a new one [emoji23]



Sent from my Z982 using Tapatalk

 

[Klueless]

That sales person would piss me off badly lol. "area covered" that's a new one [emoji23]

It was almost scary; the sales guy was so congenial, so confident, so convincing I actually had second thoughts after I hit "post" ... suppose it was me that was wrong? I was most happy to see your reply : -)

 

[RMerlin]

Good lord, the sheer incompetence sometimes from these salesmen...

A few years ago I went to a The Source (formerly Radio Shack here in Canada, they're now just an overpriced, small-scale version of Best Buy, owned by Bell) to get a network switch - I was on a service call, and the customer's switch had died. The saleswoman had NO idea what a network switch was, as she first showed me... a power bar. Telling her it's a small box in which you plug multiple network cables to put them all on the same network failed to lit any sign of recognition on her face.

After a 2 mins trip to the backstore (presumably to speak with someone who knew what the word Ethernet meant), she came back to tell me that she only had a 5 ports in stock (I needed 8).

I don't expect salesmen (or saleswomen) to be experts in all things, but if you work in a store that sells electronics and computer equipment, I'd expect you to know at least the basic technologies you are selling.

 

[Klueless]

The saleswoman had NO idea what a network switch was, as she first showed me... a power bar

<LOL> Good thing you didn't need a couple CAT6 cables to go with it; you might have gotten a 6" pet collar for a small Cat or a 6' leash?

Waxes both ways I guess. I used to work across the hall from the company's PC Help Line. One of the guys was telling me he got a call from a user complaining his cup holder broke. Huh? Turns out the user thought the CD drive (that pops out) was a cup holder! Guess it worked fine as such until he tried a big gulp ...

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for passing that along. I hadn't heard that before.

Before you guys pile on too much, do you really expect salespeople in big box stores to be product experts? Especially in an area as full of confusing jargon as Wi-Fi? And especially for how little they are paid?

At least the salesperson in RMerlin's case consulted with someone knowledgeable instead of faking it.

 

[Klueless]

... do you really expect salespeople in big box stores to be product experts?

On the flip side I've seen some in tech sales do an awesome job! Only to see the now enlightened customer say, "ok, I can save 5 bucks if I buy over the Internet" and leave :-(

Myself I'm happy to pay a small premium for excellent service.

 

[RMerlin]

Before you guys pile on too much, do you really expect salespeople in big box stores to be product experts? Especially in an area as full of confusing jargon as Wi-Fi? And especially for how little they are paid?

In these large stores, you have salesmen assigned to specific departments. It's ok if he doesn't know which product would offer the best coverage, as I wouldn't expect them to be experts in all their products. But I'd expect them to know the basics (what's the difference between an AC and an N router: speed), and more importantly, not to spill out complete non-sense if they don't know something. Sometimes, the best answer is: "I don't know". Over the years, I've learned not to be afraid to give that answer to a customer if I'm asked something that I really don't know the answer to.

 

[thiggins]

In these large stores, you have salesmen assigned to specific departments.

BestBuy yes. Walmart, probably not.

 

[sfx2000]

Waxes both ways I guess. I used to work across the hall from the company's PC Help Line. One of the guys was telling me he got a call from a user complaining his cup holder broke. Huh? Turns out the user thought the CD drive (that pops out) was a cup holder! Guess it worked fine as such until he tried a big gulp ...

At the previous company - someone had the interesting idea of piping in audio from Customer Care on Friday so that Product Management and Engineering could "listen in" on the calls...

That lasted one day...

 

[Klueless]

At the previous company - someone had the interesting idea of piping in audio from Customer Care on Friday so that Product Management and Engineering could "listen in" on the calls...

That lasted one day...

I would have loved to have been a fly on that wall!

 

[Klueless]

At our small company they "don't allow" Facebook, music, etc. on our computers, networks, etc.

Myself, I don't care but since all we have here is DSL I do watch for untoward traffic patterns. And suddenly, there it was, a large chunk (like 60% if I recall) was being used, pretty much, for the whole day. Whatever it was it was non-stop relentless and I was afraid if others started doing the same thing we'd have no network.

The next morning it started up again and I traced it to a young friend of mine. She was playing Christmas music. She informed me,

"Well my music shouldn't use much network because I had the volume turned down really low."​

(Definitely one of the cutest things I've heard but she was right in that music shouldn't use up much bandwidth. I noticed that the music had accompanying videos playing in high res. Together we set the videos to low res and the network was more than happy.)

Merry Christmas, too soon, Merry Christmas ...

 

[Klueless]

Before you guys pile on too much, do you really expect salespeople in big box stores to be product experts?

Those are kind words from, obviously, a kind young man. While I certainly don't expect experts in the sales world I am very happy when I get someone who is! It's absolutely fun when you go into a store and can have an actual dialogue. What I don't expect is someone who "pretends" (or thinks) they are what they aren't.

When I've already done my research and know what I want I might go to a, say, Walmart. When I need a little help or direction I might go to one of the local "geek shops" or, maybe, a Best Buy.

I had intended this thread to be a fun thread to share amusing stories on. In the larger world "geeks" are often teased or marginalized (until something breaks) so I thought it would be a fun turnabout to have a chuckle or two at their expense : -)

 

[VisionxOrb]

I love these stories, we should have an entire sub forum dedicated to them...always brings a smile to my face.

 

[Klueless]

I love these stories, we should have an entire sub forum dedicated to them...always brings a smile to my face.

<LOL> Thanks, I look forward to your story.

This one isn't necessarily funny but I thought it somewhat amusing. Back in the late eighties / early nineties I worked for a large company. It was back when large companies were transitioning from extended bridged networks to routed subnets and many on the company network team hadn't quite come to fully appreciate the difference between bridges and routers.

We had an amazing installed base of 50,000 PCs back then and, even more amazing, 20,000 of them were Apple Macintoshes. Corporate was hard at work networking the 30,000 PCs. It was before the Internet so they were installing Novell File and Print to give a networked PC some meaning and purpose. The network protocol was Novell IPX.

Corporate chose to ignore the 20,000 Macs because Steve Jobs often took pleasure in ridiculing the Corporate IT world (if anyone is old enough to remember some of the old Apple commercials) and corporate justified doing so because of the bad rep the original release of AppleTalk had garnered.

A few of the Mac guys were at the corner pub (kind of an ad hoc Apple users' group). It was 1989 and Apple had just released an update to AppleTalk (AppleTalk Phase 2) which deployed extended addressing and split horizon broadcast. In our minds it was a new flag to wave and three beers later we had put together a rough draft for implementing AppleTalk (thus Macintosh) city wide.

A couple things happened as we polished and circulated our draft;

1 - The polished draft looked so real management assumed someone had actually approved it!

2 - The Corporate PC / Novell Network team started teasing us, "What's with all the paperwork and network naming / numbering standards? Novell just works, it's just plug and play!" More on this in a moment.​

Anyway in a few short months we had thousands of Macintoshes networked and talking with File Servers, Printers, Mainframes, VAXes, Unix Systems, etc.

But the Novell guys were still teasing us. Their stuff was simply "plug and play". (Huh? "Plug and play" yet they had managed to implement only a few hundred nodes over the past couple years?) So at our next apple laden alcohol users meeting we read up on Novell. Turns out Novell IPX is much like DECnet, TCP/IP and AppleTalk; there ARE network numbers (and name space) to define and manage. In fact each Novell File server also served as an IPX router.

So why was it working? Because for the most part they were stand alone LANs. So what would happen when they started interconnecting all the LANs and CANs? Failure. Disaster.

So it was with the best of intentions we started raising the issue up the flag pole but no one saluted. Finally I released a brief statement of sorts, in the style of Muhammad Ali, rhymes and all, predicting the corporate crash of IPX on such and such a date some three months out. Nothing. I sent out a couple updates using new verse and new rhymes. Still nothing. I then forgot all about it until ...

Until ... a couple corporate suits and security showed up at my Dilbert cube. IPX had crashed (about two days after the day I had "predicted") and they wanted to know what the hell I had done! I was trying to explain but I wasn't getting through. Or maybe I did. They left so I guess they concluded I wasn't bright enough to bring down an entire campus wide network. They weren't wrong.

The next day a real network guru stopped by. We talked for a few minutes and he started laughing. He went to the broken campus and had everything fixed within a hour. Novell sat on a wall, Novell had a great fall and Apple put it all back together again : -)