Kurt Weiske wrote to Sean Dennis <=-
When I worked for a large home goods retailer back in the 1990s,
Madonna called into their sales line and ordered one of *everything*
from their catalog.
I believe it.
Decades ago, my mother and I worked for Bear Creek Corporation which is the parent company (or was) of Harry and David (harryanddavid.com), a botique food and home goods retailer. They're known for growing Royal Rivera pears which only grow in Medford, Oregon, where H&D is based, and Brazil.
For a short time in the early to mid 90s, right before I joined the Army, my mother and I worked together in the data entry department. My mother worked
in the "VIP entry" department where famous people would send in their orders (this was pre-Web and pre-public Internet) with their real credit card info.
My mom had to sign all sorts of NDAs and stuff. Me, well, I just worked in
the hoi polloi data entry department, banging out orders on a VT102 for eight hours from 3:30 PM to midnight five days a week. Mom rode with me to work as
I was living at home at the time.
I remember her telling me some of the people that put in orders that were tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece. David Letterman comes to mind.
I'll have to ask her about that. She remembers a lot.
My cube-mate was deaf. He could say a few things that he taught himself by holding his hand over his throat and feeling the vibrations (he would have a person with hearing say a word with his fingers over their throat; that is how he taught himself to "speak"). One day, he made a massive screwup on an
order, shot up from his chair, and said in a large, loud voice (without
holding his fingers on his throat) "Oh SHIT!"
We all looked at him and I said, with him looking at me, "Marty, SHUTUP!" He turned beet red and everyone laughed ... not at him or making fun of him, just it was funny that he suddenly just yelled. It broke up the monotony that
night and we did rib him a little that night during our lunch break.
As for customer calls in IT, I have several that are favorites, most of them involving work at Sears TeleServ:
. The old man who got rich off of oil wells on his property that broke his
CD-ROM drive because he thought it was a beerholder. I did send out a new
replacement to be installed but told him to not do that anymore.
. The man who called and wanted Sears to pay his son's legal bills after
getting caught illegally entering a government computer system since he
bought the computer at Sears ...
. The call I personally took from the FBI that was looking for a particular
hard drive that had been replaced by us in a nuclear scientist's personal
home computer who worked at Los Alamos. Seems there was a chance that very
sensitive national security secrets were on that drive. I transferred that
call to my boss, which went to his boss, then to the call center director who
was over 300+ techs. I found out later that the actual hard drive was
located at one of the recycling centers in the US Sears used and the FBI took
possession of that hard drive.
. Lonely people who called that just wanted to talk.
. Women who tried to flirt with me over the phone (that was weird).
. People who called who then told me they knew more than I did. Those people
I enjoyed telling them that they had to "format and restore" as back then,
Microsoft recommended you format your hard drive and reinstall Windows 98
every six months (not many people knew about this)
... I could go on and on and on.
What was really interesting was that one of the head techs there, Jay, ran PODSNet (Pagan and Occult Distribution System), a very active occult-oriented FTN net that some may remember, was a big OS/2 fan. He knew I knew OS/2 also. On the other side of the house, Sears PartsDirect used OS/2 Warp 4 exclusively for their computers.
They bought a big new fancy printer but no one but Jay and I knew how to install it. So Jay talked to TekSystems, my employer at the time, and got me temporarily assigned over to his side of the house to install that printer on 300 computers. I got paid $24 an hour -- remember, this was back in 1998-1999 -- to sit there and install a printer driver.
Took me days. ;)
--Sean
... I used to have an open mind; my brains kept falling out.
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