i’m not saying i except tech support people to be gods. i don’t expect them to know everything about everything. but when i go to a tech support guy at a hosting company with a question, the last thing i expect to get in return is the dude asking me how i figured out what my php config settings were in the first place.
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i mean, maybe the guy just doesn’t know php. maybe he’s more into like, the intricacies of IIS or apache or asp.NET or something. actually what i mean is: i hope php isn’t his normal milieu, because if it is, this hosting company has to rethink its hiring practices. isn’t looking at your php config pretty much a programming basic? you know, along the lines of reading out the values of an array or writing a loop or looking at the source of a webpage? fellow nerds? am i right?
update: the guy admits he’s not a php expert, then proceeds to tell me that his superior says OperationX just flat-out doesn’t work in the way that i said it does. in the way that i KNOW it does, since it works on two other servers at two other completely different hosting companies. the best he can muster is that maybe those other companies are using an older version of php. they’re not, it’s the same, and one of the first things i checked. then he tells me that they don’t support ‘coding issues.’ am i talking to myself here? the EXACT SAME THING works on at least TWO INDEPENDENT SERVERS at TWO DIFFERENT HOSTING COMPANIES.
so thanks for nothing, tech support. guess i’m moving the client to a different hosting company. you do not live up to your company’s name.
you’re completely right. what you must remember, however, is his perspective. he is on “the inside” meaning he doesn’t need to resort to functions like phpinfo() to find the precise configuration details. he’s going to get that information and so much more from his php.ini file. in fact, phpinfo() is pretty much useless aside from initial server configuration. once you start actually building pages it serves very little purpose. sure, it displays everything nicely, but if i have a question about my server configuration i’m going to crack open the php.ini file instead of go create a dummy script just so i can open a browser. too many steps for a real programmer. you have no choice because you don’t have access to the configuration file, but he does and thus would have no reason to actively use it. therefore i think perhaps in this case he can be forgiven. besides, he probably doesn’t expect most support calls to have any understanding of configuration files. i’ll bet all that most of them can muster is “my site isn’t working.”
wow – your post and ian’s comment are almost a foreign language to me – i think i understood about every 5th word (the “and”s, “in”s, “the”s, etc).
it reminds me of a law recently passed in i believe sacramento where they prohibited the use of abreviations in political memos to make state laws more accessible to the public.
yeah, not a “fellow nerd”. but i hope you love me anyway 🙂
they did WHAT? oh wait. for some reason i thought you meant ‘punctuation’. which…sounds nothing like ‘abbreviation’…uh…hm.
i totally used phpinfo() today…
* blushes *