Marvin, a former field engineer, experienced significant challenges in customer support due to complex manuals before the internet era. Customers frequently struggled with the documentation rather than hardware issues. This led to a rebranding of field engineers to customer engineers, which not only reflected a shift in focus but also resulted in a substantial pay increase for Marvin. He fondly remembers the unique environment and challenges of working with minicomputers and the accompanying clientele.
While the documentation was extremely thorough, it was sometimes difficult to know where to look for any particular piece of information. Things were always correctly cross-referenced but sometimes the process of tracking the flow of any particular function could take you across many of the dozens of manuals.
Most of our calls were not to actually fix the system, but rather to fix the customer who was either unable or unwilling to follow the decidedly challenging documentation to discover how to make things work.
Marvin didn't much care about the change until he realized it wasn't just cosmetic. It came with a substantial pay increase.
I often miss that place. It really was one of the.
#customer-support #minicomputers #technical-documentation #field-engineering #professional-experience
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