I always considered myself fortunate that I fell into a career that I enjoyed and found fulfilling. I hadn’t intended to pursue training and development as it just sort of happened. I did other jobs over my life. Some successfully and others not so much.
I realized recently that there’s one job that I don’t think I would be good doing. It’s the role of Support Wizard at Vanishing Inc. These are the people who answer questions about products, respond to problems, and try to help people. The latter – responding to problems and helping people – aren’t the challenging aspects of the job. It’s the responding to questions especially those posted on the product pages.
If you spend any time reading the product pages, you’ll notice that the questions tend to be answered in the product description or on the demonstration video. The questioner hasn’t read or watched the video carefully or at all. Friends I know who worked in tech support would often say that they wanted to tell others to read the manual. I’m sure that the Support Wizards want to say “read the description and watch the video.”
Other questions are just fishing for more information about the method, clearly uninformed or trolling. These are the ones that would push me into channeling Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. It’s these questions that cause me to hang up my Wizard’s hat. It’s also the reason I have to admire these people. I hope Andi treats them well.
