Operators of user support services of large technology companies answered the call Stories that no one in their right mind would believe. One of those anecdotes appeared on the blog of Raymond Chen, the veteran Microsoft engineer turned unofficial historian of the company from his blog ‘Old is new‘
Chen recounts how, during a support call, someone who apparently needed to know how to get Java applets up and running got drunk at the end of the call and claimed Talk to Bill Gates himself. Don’t hang up, what’s the problem?
The problem with a musician’s fan website without music
The anecdote told by Raymond Chen features a retired Microsoft veteran as the protagonist. That colleague joined the support line for Microsoft FrontPage, an HTML editing tool that most veterans of the space will remember as part of Office in the late 90s and early 2000s.
One day, the veteran engineer had to answer a call from a man who, according to what he was told, had created a website for fans of the musician Van Halen. On the page, I inserted a java applet (a plug-in) to play the music, but it didn’t work.
Such plugins were inserted discretely into the frontpage, so in fact This was not a frontpage bug But about applet programming, but the technician wanted to help him anyway. “But how drunk this man was!” Veteran operator withdraws.
Chen said the clinking of ice in the glass was “definitely there” and that the man on the other end of the phone showed more obvious signs of intoxication as the consultation progressed.
A plugin is condemned for not working
The FrontPage applet required a plugin in the browser, and that plugin was a common avenue for cyber attacks, so Oracle announced its retirement in 2016. By then, many browsers had stopped supporting them for decades. So, even if the plugin is configured correctly, If the browser doesn’t support it, little can be done.
Nevertheless, the dedicated operator was still determined to try to help his drunken interlocutor. As the situation developed, the user’s drunkenness increased.
Van Halen in concert
According to Chen, there came a point where the customer yelled at the operator, “You’re not even a real Van Halen fan!”, along with other hijackers. The technician warned him that he would hang if the insults continued. Given the veteran’s firm stance, the user pulled out a card from his sleeve that he didn’t expect: “I want to talk to Gates!”
Today, no one imagines calling Apple technical service and being referred to John Turnus to help solve a technical problem. However, this was the 90s and it wasn’t crazy to ask.
Bill Gates was the CEO of Microsoft until 2000, but in the 90s, the support department used a strategy Get rid of the most aggressive users: Call Gates personally.
It was clearly a trick. Gates had more important things to focus on than helping an obsolete applet play Van Halen’s music, especially when he set the law to break up Microsoft to comply with antitrust laws.
During those years, Microsoft’s support department referred the most persistent users to an internal number. There other operators from the same department responded As if they were Bill Gates’ office. His job was to inform the caller that Bill Gates was not available at the time, but that if the caller left a message with his contact information, it would be delivered to Gates.
Colleagues wrote the message and returned it with a note saying the call had been answered by “Bill Gates’ office.” In a few days, someone will call the user saying something like, “Bill Gates asked me to contact you to follow up on your previous issue.” The user was left with the satisfaction of knowing that, somehow, Bill Gates noted his problem.
Chen doesn’t know what happened to this client, but what he is sure of is that Bill Gates never received any of these messages. Nothing is known about the applet either.
In Xataka | Bill Gates liked to step on the accelerator, so he bought a slow, brown diesel Mercedes without a radio.
Picture | Flickr (European Parliament), Wikimedia Commons.
