Sometimes Tech Support Scripts Do Work

As computer professionals, or even amateur geeks, well know, calling Tech Support can be a nightmare of “Did you plug it in” and “Have you turned it on” and on and on until you finally, after days of plodding through the front line tech’s script, you finally get to talk to someone who understands what an IP address is.

Which is why we generally avoid calling tech support whenever possible and just hit the online forums instead.

Well, once in a while, you need to talk to someone, and this happened to me today.

Several months ago, I bought a Roomba vacuuming robot. You see, I have a big house, with lots of carpeting, and can’t be bothered to vacuum it as much as I should, so when I saw a Roomba on sale for $99, I figured it was worth a shot.

For those of you who do not own a Roomba, let me put it like this: It’s like Tivo. For those of you who don’t have Tivo, let me put it like this: Remember that whole “sliced bread” thing? That’s absolute pants compared to Roomba.

It actually vacuums for you, without you having to do it yourself! Now, I have a very primitive model (4000 series), which means it doesn’t automatically find its charger when it needs it, and it doesn’t have any laser-guided border sensors or anything. It basically ambles around the floor until it hits something, then turns. Very inefficient.

But, even though it takes much longer to do a room than it would for you do it yourself, it does it without you. I just set it loose while I’m working out, or making dinner, or whatever, and give it a nudge if it gets stuck on something. As far as time-savers go, it’s right up there with the microwave oven.

So you can imagine my distress when it started malfunctioning last week.

My poor little circular servant droid would move pitifully in fits and starts for several minutes, and then stop altogether with a sad little beep.

(Sidenote: One of the best things about the design of the Roomba is that it is so easily anthropomorphized. It makes a cute little “doo-doo-de-doo” noise when it starts up, and a sad little “doo-dooo” when it runs out of juice or gets stuck. Makes it very easy to use personal pronouns.)

In case some of you Roomba owners out there are wondering, I clean out it’s brushes and parts after every use, so I didn’t think it was getting clogged with anything.

I didn’t find anything useful on iRobot’s forums, so I went to the last resort – tech support.

I was connected with a nice woman whose name I forget, and after taking all of my information (name, address, phone number, email address, model, serial number, date of purchase, etc.) she asked about the symptoms.

When I explained that my poor little guy was just sputtering around and then giving up altogether, she got really apologetic. Now, I’m all for apologizing when you’re in the wrong, and sympathizing when someone has a problem (especially if it’s with a product that you sell or support), but her apologies sounded very scripted and unnecessary. Just solve my problem and stop apologizing for it, already, mmkay?

The next thing she said was, “Can you get a small phillips screwdriver and remove the side brush?” Being a geek, I do have a varied selection of small screwdrivers at hand at all times (phillips and flat), and so promptly removed the side brush, revealing a small, but non-trivial amount of cat hair and carpet fibers taking up residence in the general vicinity.

I removed as much as I could and put the side brush back on and voila! It works perfectly again.

You know that the whole side-brush thing is the first item on the tech-support script (once they enter a few key symptoms into the computer, I’m sure). And for once, that was the trick.

I don’t think I would have thought to look there, given the behavior of the Roomba – I wouldn’t have thought that the side brush being clogged up with hair would have had much to do with the behavior of the rest of the unit.

Maybe I should look at the source code.