Arrrgh!

[simont]

I've just had my first ever PuTTY support call.

That is to say, a literal support call; someone followed the link to my personal web page, noticed that I worked for ARM, looked up the ARM reception phone number, rang it and asked to be put through to me, and after some very nervous attempts to triple-check she was talking to the right person, opened the batting with the traditional line ‘I use PuTTY, and it doesn't work’.

In retrospect that doesn't sound unlikely at all, come to think of it; it's not hard to get in touch with ARM employees, so anyone who really wants to contact me by phone during working hours shouldn't have trouble doing so. (In fact CERT managed it easily enough last year.) So actually I now feel quite surprised that this is the first time that's happened!

I probably need to think of a way to discourage more people from doing this without actually being rude to them. This one was easy enough because she was following up an email query, and in fact Owen had replied to her email half an hour before she rang (so it's sort of fair enough that she hadn't happened to see it yet).

I'm a bit scared, though. It seems PuTTY hasn't run out of ways to take over my life…

Comments

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

"Ah, yes. Telephone support for PuTTY. Well, I do do it, but it's chargeable, and you need to pay in advance, I'm afraid. It's 50 pounds per call. Once your cheque has cleared, I'll be happy to take your support call."

[senji.livejournal.com]

"Alternatively, we accept Banker's Drafts and all major forms of direct bank transfer."

[taimatsu]

What on earth made her think it was all right to do that? Bizarre!

Incidentally, I use PuTTY, and I can't work out how to use the saved sessions feature... I had better fiddle with it some more :)

Could you put on the web page that there is no telephone support available for PuTTY, and anyone who tries will be hung up on?

[simont]

I could put that on the web page, but that doesn't really help, because the problem is the people who can't be bothered to read the web page. I still get a fair amount of mail to my personal address rather than the PuTTY role address, simply because some people click on random links until they find an email address and then send mail to it, and these people are just as likely to see the link marked "Simon Tatham" first as they are to see the one marked "Feedback". They actually don't read the rest of the stuff they're scrolling past at all, as far as I can tell.

So my suspicion is that putting warnings about lack of phone support on the website would be useless at best, because those people who would be daft enough to need the warning would be precisely the people who would skip past it assuming it wasn't important. And it might even be counterproductive, since it might hint that there was a reasonably easy way to contact me by phone to someone who hadn't previously considered trying it...

(Saved sessions section in manual, in case it's helpful :-)