Once upon a time, I was a telephone technical support agent for a little company you may have heard of -- International Business Machines. Leaving aside, for the moment, the people who'd call IBM tech support when they actually had a Compaq, Dell, or HP computer, I'd like to describe an incident which occurred while I was part of the Operating Systems group.

Now, keep in mind that the OS group was a level two group -- you weren't supposed to be able to talk to me unless you'd already stumped someone at level one support. All too frequently, however, what really happened was that, if someone didn't want to take the time to talk to a client, or the client was at all agitated, they got dumped on me.

One particular night, I got a call from a lady who had purchased a computer. It wouldn't start up. She didn't have any clear idea of what it was she wanted it to do, she just knew that it wasn't doing it.

After an hour and a half of trouble-shooting, I determined what the problem was. Someone had sold this poor lady a computer without an installed operating system, and told her, "just go down to the software store, and pick up a copy of DOS." (It wasn't that long ago -- I was surprised anyone had told her she could buy DOS at the software store). So she toodled down to the software store, and picked up the only thing she could find that had the word "DOS" on it.

Which turned out to be an anti-virus program. It took me another half hour to explain to the customer what the problem was, what the program she'd purchased actually was, and what she really needed.

Fortunately, call stats for level two groups weren't monitored to the extent that a two hour tech support call was problematical.