How to be a female technician

And making it a woman’s job

“Hello, IT Solutions, how may I help?” — my usual greeting to customers.

When I first started my job, I can perfectly understand that our customer base are familiar with certain voices and may want their requests performing a) without questions b) quickly c) accurately, and apparently and least understandably d) not by a female

So when I greeted the customer, I began getting the response “Hi, can you put me through to support?” — all under the assumption that I was the new company receptionist and all because of my gender. Needless to say, it took me a few months before speaking regularly to certain customers that they started to trust that I could do my job, but I did see a clear pattern emerging of which customers would actually speak to me… I found that the female customers were least likely to want me to deal with their technical problems than the men.

As time went on, I became more and more persistent with the women. Once customer was so pissed with me that she requested that I was removed from taking calls from their account; this was something that had never been requested before — and all because she didn’t think I knew how to do my job and because I am a woman. This is not a request that I took likely and went out of my way to ignore. I figured (and still do), that if my job is worth doing by men then it is most certainly worth doing by women.

I am now a year or so down the line and all customers it would seem value me as a key member of the technical team. Albeit, I am a first/second line troubleshooting fanatic but I now get my kicks out of a) showing the difficult customers that I am capable of completing their requests and b) showing the men that I work with that I am more than capable of working on the team. The customer that requested that I was removed from her account is now happy for me to work on her technical problems and I am my receiving daily compliments from all customers on doing my job.