Two weeks of half days later Chad pronounced us ready to answer calls and presented each of us with a photocopy of The Mantra and a single pushpin with which to affix it to the wall of our cubicle. He suggested we place it over our phone just to ensure we couldn't miss it. At the time none of us really understood the obsession with The Mantra, nor could we have imagined its power. But the fact that we were given a cube and a phone and were turned loose on troubled customers with little more than four words on a photocopied piece of paper should have been a clue. It was as close as anyone would come to telling us the truth about our job. We were there to take your calls, not solve your problems.

Loni is a great guy. Like me, he keeps track of Ken's more outrageous meltdowns and we compare notes over lunch. We have a good time. I like him. But Loni is a punter. I don't condone it, but I understand. Since hitting the floor we've all learned the sad truth. Actually solving problems is by far the slowest way to handle a call. We've each got 12 minutes from the moment we say hello to find a way to say goodbye, and after two weeks of trying to fix computers he knew nothing about and racking up average call times north of half an hour, Loni decided that if he was going to survive, he was going to have to change his approach. So he became a punter.

A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else.

It's not that Loni isn't smart. In fact, he's wickedly so. He can listen to a person having problems with the mouse and spin a plausible story as to why it is really something the person needs to be discussing with the phone company. He can take a call about a modem and convince the customer that she needs to contact her embassy. He doesn't lack intelligence, just tools. Like the rest of us, all Loni was really taught was The Mantra, and since then he's learned to wield it like a samurai with a sword.

He's not alone. Lots of the techs are punters. And many of those who aren't have adopted some other time-saving strategy to help them dispatch their calls within the allotted time. Karen is part of a growing group called givers. Like punters, they don't really solve any problems, but instead of just asking you to call someone else, givers want you to have a parting gift. They'll listen to your problem and then randomly choose a piece of hardware to send you. Of course it won't solve anything, but givers have discovered that people usually calm down and start agreeing as soon as they think you're sending them something to fix the problem. And by the time they get the new part and discover it has no effect, they'll call back and someone else will have to figure out how to deal with them. Givers are really just punters with style, and they find their tactic very satisfying. Karen and her ilk get to spend all day playing Santa.

Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch. While this can be effective for solving all sorts of software troubles, it's like amputating someone's leg to fix an ingrown toenail. The solution is usually worse than the problem. Most times Ted doesn't actually follow through with his plan. The entire strategy is just a bluff. Most people will balk at the proposition of losing everything and decide they can live with whatever problem they've called to complain about. At the very least they'll decide to hang up, back up their data, and call back -- at which point they'll become someone else's problem.

But some formatters are worse than Ted. They'll help customers get started with the process without ever mentioning that all the data will be lost. Then they'll ask the customer to call back when the operating system finishes reinstalling, at which point the customer usually says something to the effect of, "the last guy was helping me reinstall and the computer seems to be running now, but I can't find my letter from my dead grandmother and baby picture of little Johnnie." Punters and givers will waste your time. Formatters can do much worse.

While I may disagree with their strategies, I can't argue with any of these people's results. Offering a preplanned solution is always faster than listening to the problem and digging around for an answer. As Loni began to master the art of The Mantra his call times improved drastically, ridiculously. He was slowed only when he ran into a problem he actually knew how to solve and felt obligated to abandon his normal strategy and share the solution with the customer. Other than that he was ruthlessly efficient. His average call time dropped from 35 minutes in his first two weeks to just over 5 minutes this week. Even Loni was terrified that somehow they'd catch on, that they'd know he was endlessly kicking customers to the curb only to have them call back again later when the phone company said it wasn't going to fix the mouse. Then one day the call he'd been dreading finally came.

"Loni," his invisible manager said, "I've been studying your stats. Your call time has decreased drastically in recent weeks."

Loni knew it was over. He'd be reprimanded. He'd be fired.

"That's very impressive. Keep up the good work." And so he did.

Those of us who haven't taken up a strategy are still trying to learn how to troubleshoot and repair the computers and our call times are still suffering as a result. Like Loni I've received a call from my manager. He notified me that I need to show some improvement soon or there might be another cube waiting for the next training class. It's clear that people who solve problems don't last long. They either end up quitting, getting fired, or worse, screaming in the aisles like Ken.

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