Cannot connect after upgrading Firefox, a story
I’m going to take a break from talking about Firebug (which is awesome) this afternoon to relay an interesting experience I had. Something a little out-of-the-ordinary that was kind of fun and can hopefully be useful to others should they find themselves in the same situation.
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m sitting at my desk, a cup of cold coffee in front of me as I’m trying to get caught up on this week’s Firebug discussion group. I’ve got a back-log of feeds, issues and newsgroup posts that have been piling up that I wanted to pare down today. I’d been doing some extension development this week and those things on my reading list had been getting a little out-of-hand.
So this was the mind-set I was in when my office phone rang. The number was listed as an unrecognized cell phone so I answered in my “office voice”, adjusting the time-zone for California.
“Good morning, Rob Campbell speaking”.
A man replied on the other end saying, “uh, hello. I was looking for customer support but couldn’t find anything on Mozilla.org’s website. So I started dialing…”.
Whoah. This was probably the last thing I was expecting. I thought it might be someone on the Firebug team, or a developer or another mozillian asking me to do something to a machine somewhere, but this was so entirely off my path of comfort that I wobbled for a second before getting a grip. It’s not like the usual questions I get about “How do I do this in Firefox?” from friends and family.
“Did you try our support web-site?” I asked tentatively, trying to work out in my head where that was exactly.
“I…”, he started, “… don’t know where that is?”
“Oh, it’s at sumo.mozilla.org,” I started. The acronym SUMO is ingrained in my head from hearing it discussed in irc, on the web and around the water cooler and realized that what I’d just said was wrong, when deb, who could hear this conversation from down the hall messaged me with, “support”. “No, it’s support.mozilla.org”, I offered. “.com,” she corrected. “.com,” I corrected. Then repeated the whole thing as I could hear this poor fellow trying to get all this into his address bar. “support.mozilla.com!”
(update: I should point out that I had my browser open and was staring at it the whole time I was on the phone. I was even aware that going to the Help menu and selecting “Firefox Help” would have taken me to the support page, but, you know, brains…)
There, I did it! I’d sent him to the place that would help him. Problem solved. It was that easy.
“I don’t see my problem here,” the user was still experiencing a state of confusion. (for the record, this is not how I refer to people who have problems. “User” seems like a fairly dehumanizing term and when you’re talking to somebody real, you don’t really think of them that way. I’m using the term here as a placeholder. A symbol for the disembodied voice on the other end of the line)
“oh, ah,” I answered helpfully. At this point, I’m starting to think that maybe I’m not the right person to be conducting this experiment in helping Firefox users and have joined #sumo in irc.mozilla.org. I’m typing things in there like, “omg! halp! >_<”.
While waiting for someone to hold my hand, I reverted to my age-old training of trying to troubleshoot the issue, I asked the voice on the other end of the line, “what is the problem you’re having?”
“I updated Firefox from 2 to 3 and now can’t use the internet,” he replied.
This, to me, sounds like a fairly disastrous problem. I’m thinking corrupted update. Disk failure. Ethernet cable’s unplugged and any number of other things. “Did you try to download a full version from the Mozilla website,” I ask tentatively.
“Yes, I did and installed over it. I can’t open web-pages though”. This confirmed a couple of things: 1) He’s still got internet access via Internet Explorer (I’m assuming he’s a Windows user) and 2) his computer is plugged in and turned on. This also, is tech support canon that I learned back in my days selling audio equipment before there was such a thing as “INTERNET”.
At this point, sanity kicked in and I decided to get help from the professionals who are actually used to dealing with people who are having problems. I asked for the user’s name and contact info as politely as I could, then a couple of other questions like, what operating system are you using? Do you connect through a proxy? You’re in the US? and jotted these down. I then had a chat with David Tenser (djst) and Marien Zwart (mzz) in the #sumo channel about how best to proceed.
Unsurprisingly, djst immediately suggested the SUMO page with the answers: Cannot connect after upgrading Firefox. mzz suggested it could be “an uninstalled Norton” with a link to Symantec’s Norton Removal Tool. I bundled these suggestions into a reply email and sent it along, hoping it would help this user and solve the problem.
So, the important part of this story is: If you get a call or an email or someone asks you for a user-support type of question, send them to http://support.mozilla.com and ask them to search there first. Or, if you know the answer, feel free to help them out. Just be aware that there are people dedicating time and energy to helping users. We want to make sure http://support.mozilla.com is the one-stop shop for user assistance.
I should probably get back to my inbox now…
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