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As I sit here pounding away on my Gateway notebook, I'm fondly gazing at my marble collection. They're not just any marbles, they're the marbles I collected while working as a Microsoft support engineer.

Each marble represents a given accomplishment; you received a complimentary letter from a customer, you got a marble. If you managed to break a productivity goal you got another letter. Some marbles were worth just one marble, others represented ten. My marble jar is filled with those bright yellow tens. Before having to retire for medical reasons (I survived a massive stroke) I had earned almost two full jars. It took a long time just to fill one, so I was tickled when I opened my second jar for the first time.

Unfortunately, we didn't get any marbles for putting up with some of our customers. If the truth be told, we deserved medals for some of the more outlandish discussions we had with em.

Take the night that the clock was ticking towards my quitting time of 1900 local. The seconds were counting down. Five, four, threeand the phone rang. I had to take it. After nearly 95 minutes of fighting with the customer, I decided to have him print out the document with which he was having trouble. Let's pause here for a little personal background information

I started playing with computers in the good old days of DOS. That meant that I was accustomed to using keyboard commands and when I finally made the transition to Windows 3.1 (it used a mouse, for crying out loud and a real woman never touched mice!) I continued using the plethora of keyboard shortcuts. Got it? I used the keyboard instead of the ubiquitous mouse because I was more comfortable with them and because callers had to listen more carefully to my requests. So let's get back to our friend

"Okay, John, we're almost there. Press your Control key down and press the letter P."

He replied, "I don't have a P."

"John," said I, "it's on your keyboard."

"What do you mean?"

"The letter P is on your keyboard, press the letter P."

By now I was hungry, tired, and more than slightly ready to crawl through the telephone wire to strangle the guy. Got the picture?

"JOHN, PRESS THE CONTROL KEY AND THEN P ON YOUR KEYBOARD!"

He said that he wanted to talk with my (long gone home) supervisor. When I asked him why, he told me because I had told him to "Pee on his keyboard."

Yes, I realize that many others have claimed to have had it happen to them, but I am really the poor gal to whom it happened. What nobody else knows what happened next. I hung up on the idiot!

Before you get the wrong idea, I loved supporting new users and even the more experienced users. Why? Because everyone had to learn from someone and they might as well have had to learn from me because I made it fun for them and kept them laughing throughout the call.

To me, support is an honorable calling. It is the heart and soul of any company. If more companies realized that support is really a profit center and not a cost center, they'd bring support back to the good old United States and Canada and stop trying to make us believe that foreign-sounding people whose accent could be cut with a dull knife are named Carolyn or Steve.

As for poor John who couldn't find the letter P on his keyboard, I hope he gave up and went back to his chisel and slab of granite; some people are just not intended to use computers.

But the very, very best part of it all is that despite the decade that has passed since I had to retire, I'm still in possession of all my marbles!

Learn more about this author, Beverly Kurtin.
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