3175: Website Task Flowchart

Website Task Flowchart

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Title text: Tired of waiting on hold? Use our website to chat with one of our live agents, who are available to produce words at you 24/7!

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created by a mad explain xkcd user. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This is a flowchart comic. It shows how to do a task on a website.

First, you log in. This is a [usually] simple task, yet can lead to a bad ending. You spend a long time trying to fix it, and if you fail, you end up in the bad ending track.

If you succeed in logging in, or troubleshoot well, you try to do your task. doing the task well would usually be what a flowchart like this would be for, but Randall has made it a single box.

If you fail your task, you spend hours troubleshooting the website. If you succeed with the task or your troubleshooting, you end in the good ending.

Bad ending:

If you fail either troubleshoot, you stop you work and call the website's customer service. They say, "Did you know you could do this all more quickly and easily on our website? just go to WWW. ..." however, you were on the website, and this angers you.

you throw both the laptop on which you were trying your task and the phone with which you called customer service, into the sea, where they either short circuit, or die.

Transcript

This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Doing a task using a company or organization's website:

  Add comment        Create topic (use sparingly)       Refresh 

Discussion

> who are available to produce words at you 24/7!

Is "produce words at you" an AI reference? -- Dtgriscom (talk) 19:40, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

I think it is likely an AI reference. —theusaf (talk) 19:46, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

I tend to agree, but it does say "live agents" earlier so it could also be a reference to live but non-native language speakers in a foreign call center. 47.248.235.170 20:24, 1 December 2025 (UTC)Pat

Real-time bots are live but not alive. 64.114.211.79 21:26, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

I feel like for some certain definition of 'alive' bots could be considered alive. They are (kind of?)sentient, which just means they can think. 'sapient', on the other hand, means that he/she/they is self-aware. While it is generally considered that bots are not live, this may not always be true. Depending on how advanced AI ever get, (most probable answer: not very) they may one day be able to evolve and reproduce. They already perform metabolism and homeostasis (power and fans). They have structure, they are made of computer chips (im not a computer nerd, so this probably isn't accurate). They react to stimuli. Honestly, all that needs to let them be considered 'alive' is for them to be able to make other AI and for those AI to be slightly different, which they kind of already can. Besides being made of metal, there is no real reason to claim that an AI isn't 'alive', that's just what mainstream media claims. --Kirinhatchi (talk) 01:05, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

They're certainly live as in "live TV" and/or a "live electricity socket", as in active/functional/doing-what-they-are-designed-to-do. 78.144.255.82 01:44, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

wow second commenter --LazyTiger0203 (talk) 19:45, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Is Randall just now finding out about this?!? What sequestered Internet space has he been hiding in? I want. Of course it's probably gone now. 205.175.118.2 20:20, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

I have fixed several spelling errors. RadiantRainwing (talk) 02:49, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I would replace the "Throw electronics into sea" step with "As soon as the call is no longer on hold, say the website the hold message suggests is not working". Throwing devices into sea causes e-waste. 2001:4C4E:1C14:9800:F167:89F7:6CCE:353B 08:30, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Who cares about that, when the big problem is still all those Titanics to watch out for? 82.132.237.203 16:25, 2 December 2025 (UTC) ;)

Companies can't seem to understand that literally the only reason people call their customer service line is because *THEY NEED TO TALK TO AN ACTUAL HUMAN BECAUSE THE COMPUTER IS INADIQUATE*!--136.226.7.187 20:26, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

But think of the glorious profits we can make by firing humans who need our jobs to survive! --DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 20:44, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I always try to solve problems myself before calling the helpdesk. This involves applying the most obvious fix, then the next most obvious. When these fail (as I expected), I call.

"Hello, Service Desk, ** speaking, how may I help you?"

"I'm having trouble trying to do *** on your website. But I've already tried the most obvious solutions, so don't bother suggesting them."

"OK. Have you tried #1 *** ?"

"Yes, I said I've tried that."

"What about #2 ***?"

Why do they insist on suggesting solutions that I've already told them don't work? Beechmere (talk) 02:43, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Because you haven't? They may or may not have a script to follow, or actually know their thing, but (unless you've abbreviated your introductory description) they've got a voice at the other end only saying "the most obvious solutions" have been tried. But are these the obvious solutions to the actual expert (or the maybe-'experts' who wrote the support-workflow script), or just have skipped the real First Action Points entirely. They probably have to deal with many misconceptions from every (self-professed) 'technicaly-adept' voice on the end of the line. (Or, if script-led, don't recognise your more homegrown terminology as it relates to what they only know from what they've occasionally had described to them on their on-screen 'expert flowchart'.)

And they've really got to (e.g.) ask whether you've actually plugged the printer in (in times past, Parallel Port; these days, USB or even network cable; unless it's a wireless connectivity of your choiceñ) because all the rest of the checks (and which driver/config redo to use) isn't going to help much if there's no way that the thing that's supposed to be talking can be heard by the thing that's supposed to be listening.

(Notwithstanding the old "yes, it's definitely plugged in!", which can sometimes be resolved by "but have you tried plugging the cable in the other way round?"... Occasionally a bidirectional cable or a symmetrical plug actually works one way round when it won't the other (though I'd suspect cable/connector damage, in such cases, and that's a temporary fix at best), but amazingly it sometimes works(!) with an asymmetric connection (whether D-Sub, USB-pre-C, etc). Because the know-it-all who was adamant that it was plugged in only actually checked when asked to fiddle with it, now plugs it in the 'other' (i.e. one and only) way round and then happily/resentfully accepts that it's started working.)

That said, as a tech-type myself I do groan at being dealt with by people for whom my 'obvious' and tech-grounded explanation of the steps I've tried so far seem to be heard as nothing much far from "one of cross-beam's gone out of skew on treadle!", just because they can't match my words to the equally descriptive words from their script/training/experience, and so we may have to bounce around a few terms to find common ground (ethernet cable or patch cable, etc... you know, RJ45 ends, etc, and if it's a crossover one I'd tell you) to get onto the same (early) page in the troubleshooting handbook.

When I've been the tech-support (internal, only, so not the same kind of anonymous desk-drone as alluded to above), I've been at the receiving end of a wide range of 'incoming expertise', and a wide range of how complicated the error actually was. From the "Fonzi" repair (Repair Manouevre Number One: Hit it! ...works surprisingly often) and the "Roy" (Repair Manouevre Number Two: "Have you tried turning it off and back on again..?") to the truly weird (the reason why one particular line-printer wouldn't print off one particular client's reports on one particular day... we worked out why, but as the problem wouldn't arise the next working day we didn't change the deliberately obtuse thing work, just suggested those printouts could wait a day, and made an internal note in case any other client's work on any future day stopped printing on any other printer due to a similar confluence of issues). Plenty of them were at least partially PEBCAK issues, though some of those users really did pride themselves over having tried "all the obvious fixes", despite being proven otherwise from a thirty-second desk-visit after the five minute talk-through over the phone hadn't gone well at all... 82.132.237.210 15:27, 3 December 2025 (UTC)
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