I just came back from a very, very, short client visit – and I feel bad about it. Not because I couldn’t solve the problem that he called about (I did). I feel bad because I could not arrange to get to see him for more than a day and a half, and the problem identification and resolution took less than one minute. To make matters worse, he had spent most of the day waiting for a Time Warner Cable technician to come to fix the problem with his modem, after having spent almost one hour on the phone with their technical support the day before. The issue he was experiencing: no Internet connectivity.
My client called me on Tuesday, right after the July 4th holiday weekend, and said that he could not connect to the Internet. He’s a businessperson who works out of his home office, and I know that getting his email and the attached documents is extremely important to him. He told me that he thought the problem started sometime on Sunday evening, but that he waited until after the holiday to call me.
He said that the lights on the modem were not all lit, and asked if that could be the problem. I told him that it sounded like a bad modem. I also explained that I was booked with appointments for the entire day, but that if he had the patience, he should call Time Warner Cable to see if the problem was on their end. He was willing to do that.
During a brief follow-up phone call later in the day, he told me that he spent almost an hour on the phone with a support representative, who after exhausting her script, told him that she would dispatch a technician the following day. Good for him, right? No, not really – the appointment could not be narrowed down to anything other than between 9 am and 7 pm. My client was going to be a captive in his office with nothing to do but wait.