https://www.tumblr.com/bumblebeebats/769073005231046656/i-have-to-know-if-sergei-came-back-to-you-and

here's some follow-up!

Long story short, Sergei DID in fact manage to help me solve the backspace key-repeat (yay!!), but could not solve the all-other-key-repeats-broken issue, so we parted ways and he promised to forward the problem to some even HIGHER tier of Apple Management/Design/something-something, who got back to me weeks later and said essentially "Yeah we removed that feature on the M1 macs and later because you are the only person on planet earth who has ever used this function, ever." ¯_(ツ)_/¯

As a support engineer... seriously, interesting problems are rare, and most issues are bullshit. It's wonderful to come across something novel that wasn't caused by either bad config or stupid user tricks.

I bet he says that to everyone and his satisfaction ratings are through the roof

Had a truly weird problem with Namecheap, kinda thing one would think was surely me being stupid. Knew I'd have to fight through 3 levels of tech support to even get heard. Don't remember the issue, but it was clearly on their backend, and how the hell you gonna get a db guy to look?!

It late evening, but Namecheap has text support! (Unlike GoDaddy and others.) Svetlana comes on the chat. I explained the issue as clearly as I could, waited for the inevitable arguments. She was quiet for a minute, "OK. I understand. Please wait."

10 minutes later, it's FIXED! No further discussion, no further questions, just DONE. Amazing tech support experience.

The problem in question:

I’ve been there. You have no idea what it means to us that an escalation was actually done because of the unusual complexity of the issue and not because of missed steps taken by the lower tiers. That’s the entire reason we love that job. Solving complex puzzles that don’t make it into the guide is exhilarating. I just hope they escalated final notes to engineering as per protocol. Lol

When you get to the point that a problem you need to call support on also stumps them.

I once had a problem with my ISP and for some reason they got the guy to call me that usually does all the weird business issues or out of scope business demands. Best support ever, got the issue diagnosed live on the phone with me.

I had a situation where someone plugging in a USB card reader was blue screening their machine. Not exactly a hard fix, but I really enjoyed the crash, and it's a fond memory as the job didn't exist for too long after that. You get your joy where you can.

I've got 2 unique issues. First one was an issue with a bot on discord. Turns out the dev's compiler didn't target armv6 anymore. He fixed that and now I can use the bot again on my pi zero w. He had no idea.

Second one was hosting a SCP:SL server. Turns out the vps provider I was using was blacklisted a long time ago. Had to get that sorted through mod support. It was basically sending a cloudflare request to a headless server.

Did he solve the interesting problem?