Onsite Customer issue

Check this out..

A Customer called me up asking if I can come out and take a drive out of his old system, and put it in his new one, and transfer the data. I explain the different between programs, and data, and what I can do, etc. Also tell him my hourly fee.

Go onsite, and the new unit is a CPQ Presario, old unit is a CPQ Prolina. No problem. The Prolina has a 4gb drive, formatted with Max Blast (bypassing the BIOS limits). They dont' have the disk that came with it either.

They only have AOL, so it takes a while, but I get Max Blast, load it to a floppy, and isntall the drive, and get both showing up without formatting either.

At this point it is a matter of drag and drop. This whole process tho took over 3 hours, and they call me out to the hall for a sec to ask me a question. I walk out there.
They lock the door to the computer room, and say I was unable to complete the task in the time aloted, and will not be paid for the time I have been here.

take them to small claims court

Did you get your tools back?

I've got 3 clients right now that I will be taking to court. Together, they owe me a little over 6 grand for systems and work performed. One is a lawyer, one a mortgage company, and one a chain of day care schools. The lawyer just ignores my bills, the mortgage company and day care have each sent letters acknowledging services received but stating they decided the work perfomed just wasn't that important to them after all. Go figure! 15 years full-time in the business and these are the first @#$#@'s that just decided they didn't feel like paying. Too bad I didn't bill them for every minute I spent on them on the first billing (I'm too nice of a guy sometimes (translate--stuuuupid)). I can't sue them for any more than the original invoice + finance charges & court costs. Thanks for letting me vent......:MAD:

That is a crappy deal! If you didn't get your tools back, I'd say sue 'em. If you did, bill 'em, and if they refuse to pay tell them that you'll send it to a collections agency who will see that the bill gets paid. There are agencies who do the dirty work of badgering the customer, and will sue them on your behalf. They take a flat rate per customer. There are also Private Investigators who do this work for a small fee.

What OS were they running? If they were running Win 95/98, you could easily transfer all the files in a short amount of time without Ghost, or program similar.
Just:
XCOPY32 [source] [destination] /e/h/k/c/r/y
The operation takes about 10-15 minutes.

------------------
***the Beast
- Fate drove me here...then told me to get out of the car...

personally i would have given him a round-a-bout time persiod. nevertheless he has NO right to lock the door on your stuff and operations while in the middle of doing something. he could have simply told you to stop and paid you what you were due. i too would take him to small claims court. how were you supposed to know what he expected to pay?

-skut

Sounds like its time to get postal. Did they specify an amount of time they wanted this task done in? Did they say we can only spend this much? Regardless that was just wrong of them. Are you an employee or employer, if an employee then its up to your boss, if not then every penny counts. Don't make it sound like you really need the money but the fact that you are not a charity. Take an ad out in the local paper explaining what happened or something. I would definitely take it to court or something, its just not right. Maybe even call other local computer shops and explain what happened or see if they had the same customer which gave them the same problem. I had customers that would screw ya and go to another shop for work until they reached the last shop and treat that one nice. You need to be paid for doing that especially when it entails AOL.

Tony

I too have been involved in a few incidents like this. The company I work for usually just sends the bill onto a collection agency who charges us a 10% flat fee against the bill. Never have to worry about that customer again and they get perminatly blacklisted in our company. On the rare occasion when we did not send the bill to a collection agency, all current orders on products and credits being processed were halted until payment was recieved (but I already put a $500 down payment on the new computer your building us!! -Then you had better pay your outstanding $60 labour charge)

Our company (CompUSA) has more than a law firm in town locally (Dallas here is our HQ) and they are handleing it. Last I heard they were sueing them for the time out there, and the firms fee's. (Over $3k so far and climbing)

Good job! Those people are going to wish that they would have paid the 3 hours labour fee rather than being stung with a $3,000 law suit!
I'd love to see the looks on their faces when they get hit with the suit!

------------------
***the Beast
- Fate drove me here...then told me to get out of the car...

That is just wrong. I know customers can be bull headed and all but to flat out refuse to pay for services rendered, no way. Regardless of the time it took to d/l the files (btw, their fault for misplacing the software), you still have a job to do. If you got halfway done, what the heck were they going to do "lets let him get so far then f**k him"? We are professionals and do our jobs right, we are not Domino's. There is no 30 minutes or less guarantee. Whatever your fee is, it is certain to have added up to much less than the ensuing law suit.


------------------
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

I don't normally judge, but it was a house/business with 3 guys living/working there together. 2 Bedroom, 1 computers/work, 1 Other with king size bed.

Soo... well.. frankly..

Figure it out for yourself.

------------------
---
Jon Hutto

I hate to say it but you took way too long to do the task. I think that even though YOU may be an OK tech if you take too long to do something (while maybe fumbling with this and that) it can give the consumer the feeling that you are not competent. In my experience less than thirty percent of the people that do what we do are competent. If by chance you looked like one of the other sixty percent (at least to the customer) who can blame them.

Vince

Tree hours to transfer 4 gigs of data to a new hd. You took em for a NYC cab drive. I would testify for them.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by HEHEHEHE:
Tree hours to transfer 4 gigs of data to a new hd. You took em for a NYC cab drive. I would testify for them.

---

Still, it doesn't give them the right to obstruct his work, much less "steal" his tools (stuff)...

OK, some problems with some of the responses here.

1) Who are you to judge his competency based upon the little information presented in the forum? He apparently just gave the vanilla facts, didn't address any other problems he might have encountered... yadda yadda. It seems to me these 'clients' were the type sitting behind him asking questions left and right.

2) He never said it took 3 hours to copy files. He said the 'whole process' took about 3 hours. Gathering info (which we know can be a pain in the *** with (l)users, going though AOHell to track down the required files, getting the whole thing setup and finally xfering the files.

Wile

Might help if I could type... sheesh how embarassing....