Onsite Customer issue

[DDDWarp]

Originally posted by Jvaguy:
You what the sadest thing here is this is for all of us .. we all join here cause were weaker in some areas then others ... so all of a sudden pointing fingers and saying well your a crappy tech ... how disappointing

This is so true, all techs have strengths and weaknesses. I have had some techs who did not know DOS very well but was a God with WIN NT. I have also had times when I had a brain cramp where the steps that I thought would not take much time goes for a long time. The point is that the customers did not have the knowledge of doing repair themselves and he got the job done. That is what we get paid to do, fix problems on the computer that other people cannot get done.

Also, stop with teh Norton Ghost, unless the 2000 version is different, I have never gotten it to work with HD Bios overlays.

[Irons]

Whoa

3 hours?? 40 mins??.. Wow you guys are fast, I did something simialar and it took me 6 hours. And no, I am not a tech :P I came in doing it as a virgin, not knowing about bios limitations and OS limitations, hell I didn't even know what fdisk was and the whole ordel was a pain in the a$$. But eventualy I learned overnight, was kinda fun actualy. My friend asked me if I could do something similar to her system and I did and guess what no problems at all to both systems. Now if I went to school and taught all that stuff and been asked to go to some strangers house work on the floor and been given a a wack on the head saying your not "fast" enough and not paying you thats just not right.

Sorry jhutto, looks like you got screwd and pay no attention to those lamers saying how fast they are, they just showing off. Cuz they are afraid of a younger faster guy who is willing to do it for cheaper and better then they can. So they advertise there skill and take down other techs, kinda like the discover channel huh?

I don't think I want to be a "tech" anymore considering on how everyone behaves on this thread.

Irons

[APCSI]

Originally posted by compaddict:
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

Hey bud, 30 and 60 does not equal 100 and who do you think you are telling someone that they took too long. You were not there so just shut your pie hole you ill-informed puke.


[This message has been edited by APCSI (edited August 27, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by APCSI (edited August 27, 2000).]

[crtlaltdel]

Yea would like to know how jhutto made out?

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What do you think this is ? The Holiday Inn...

[compaddict]

I think we all know what the other ten percent are! (It was a typo on my part).

Originally posted by APCSI:
Hey bud, 30 and 60 does not equal 100 and who do you think you are telling someone that they took too long. You were not there so just shut your pie hole you ill-informed puke.


[This message has been edited by APCSI (edited August 27, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by APCSI (edited August 27, 2000).]

[dataware]

OK... So Register!

Originally posted by IIIBradIII:
Has anyone else noticed that the one's who think they know it all and try to stir up trouble are also unregistered? Just a thought...


Yes, yes, I know I am too, but I'm also not the one pointing the finger! Put that in your pipe and smoke it! :

[ZiLLa]

Life is like a magnet. Positive or Negative energy. While they both MUST exist in equal amounts at all times, that creates a convenient and simple way to make everday decisions. If it's good, then all that derives from that can ONLY be good. Be good to your fellow man. Do not dabble in thier negative energy. It leads to more negative. Jesus Christ is who you should concern yourself with. The Bible holds all truths.

[3fingersalute]

I would like to know how he made out also, but the other thing I am dying to know is did he even really lose any tools? If you look back through all 5 pages of these posts, he never once said a word about losing tools, that just came up from out of nowhere, and everybody just assumed he lost them....people need to look at the posts more carefully before starting to flame!!

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[email protected]

[Interex]

WOW! Some some long replies here, but all very interesting. I'll keep mine short and simple:

1) We should not consider the time it took him to do the job. What counts is that the job was done right.

2) Intstalling time bombs/encryptions in computers is outright criminal and wrong. You people need to learn some ethics.

3) COMPUSA (and I stress that) should get their money.

4) IF the tools are missing, TECH should get his tools.

5) We are all one big happy Windrivers family. Lets keep it happy and show CONSTRUCTIVE critism.

[klenard]

Ok so 3000 posts later.....

To offend someones technical abilities is just plain stupid. Every one starts out somewhere, we are not born to know how to fix complicated problem, we learn them just the same as anyone else. Who cares if you call yourself an "EXPERT", you where not one when you first decided to learn about computers. Who cares if you have x amount of years of computer experience, it does not justify the berratement of anyone else, you will never know everything, so just stop it.

[jhutto]

DAMN PEOPLE

I posted this like a week ago or so, mainly because I thought it was odd, and it keeps going and going and going.

Let me clear up a few things

1) I had my tools with me when they closed the door.

2) Being about a 5 year old version of maxblast the new versions wouldn't see it. Neither would Drive Copy, Ghost, or anything else I had on me.

3) I spend maybe 1 day every 2 weeks onsite somewhere. 99.9% of what I do is in shop, so I don't have a dial up Net connection I can use onsite. (Cable at home, and T1/4DSL/2Cable all in the shop)

4) I work better and faster when someone isn't standing over my sholder asking questions about everything I'm doing. He was. Asking me "how do you know that is the right jumper", or "Why is slave the second drive" etc. This is fairly common on small business onsites.

5) This thread has gone on WAY WAY too long.

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Jon Hutto

[Brentos]

That happened to the company that I worked for. A lawyer didn't pay for the services that we provided.

We set a fax on autodial sending reminder notices to the client. This clogged up his fax line for 2 days. Everytime they turned the fax back on they'd get another lot of fax's. Eventually (once we'd crippled their bussiness) they paid there bill.

[Spian]

You should know as well as anyone else that a job can include a number of other things which complicate it. You should also know that to take every single utility that you may require with you when you go out to a site would mean many a cd to carry (assuming of course that they can be loaded from a cd). To make sure you do a job well, its better to spend the extra time in making sure everything's right, instead of the client calling up later and saying "this isn't fixed" or "that doesn't work the way it used to".

Originally posted by HEHEHEHE:
You doont have the tools with you to do the job d/l'g them off the net should be on your time not theirs. They should have paid for the service call thats all, Just for kick I took a hd out of a mchine hooked it to another machine went on the net using aol d/l maxblast (didnt need it carry that and all major hd companies diagnostics) transferred all the files to the new hd deleted the enum key in the registry reinstalled all drivers. Took 45 mins and I was not rushing

[cyberhh]

I have a related story....

A woman came into my store one sunny arizona afternoon carring her computer like it was a rattlesnake that was coiled to strike and dropped it on the service counter. I asked her what seemed to be the problem. "My husband just bought this new motherboard for his computer and it doesn;t seem to work - can you guys fix it - it should be under warranty." "Okay - do you have your reciept?" "Sure" she says, then proceeds to hand me a reciept from another computer store in a town 60 miles away. I explain to her that she didn't buy her part here and that there was no way we could repair it under warranty, so please take it to the store she bought it from and let them deal with the warranty issue - I didn't want the customer to have to pay for my labor when the part could have been under warranty. She insisted that we work on her computer - her husband was out of town on a business trip and the computer was a sore in his side before he left, she would like to give him a welcome home gift when he returned. I explained our labor rates and told her that if, for whatever reason, some hardware was bad that we would not be able to provide any type of warranty on the parts from another store. She agreed and I told her I would call when the diagnosis was complete.
I opened the machine and found that her husband had purchased a Pentium mainboard and tried to put a Cyrix chip in backwards, didn't use standoffs and bolted it directly to the case backplane, frying the mainbaord and CPU. I called the customer and told her the diagnosis, again stressing that the only shot she had at any type of warranty was to return to the place she bought the new parts from and beg for mercy, but once again, she insisted that we install new parts. I quoted her a price (discounted because I felt pity for her) and installed the parts. She picked up the machine and payed the bill - took the machine home and made her husband happy. (I return all replaced parts to the customer with their machine) and I reccommended that she try to get a warranty replacement on the mainboard - It's worth a try and I have given warranty replacements and store credits for that in the past. She seemed grateful and left the store.

A month passes and I get a letter in the mail from the BBB stating that we had charged them instead of replacing the parts under warranty and never allowed the wife to decide if she would like new parts of to try to get warranty service from the existing equipment. Basicaly they claimed that I did not say all those things I stressed to her on more than one occassion.

I responded with a three page certified letter with dates and times of conversations with the man's wife an told the BBB that at no point was the husband available to speak with (in his letter he said that he spoke with me - by name). I called the BBB and their complaint was removed and they never sought to cheat us again.

[WinKrushR]

Originally posted by jhutto:
About the time..


First, the old drive was formatted with an old version of MaxBlast. The new version wouldn't read it (I have a boot disk). They didn't have the disk. So I had to find and download from there FTP site an old version through AOL.


That part alone took over 2 and a half hours.

Installing, and configuring the drive once everything was setup took maybe 20 min.

Ah...and the truth shall set you free. I figured the d/ling was taking a while. After about 6 months with a tech shop, I told the owner (actually it was a copier center, I was just helping) that we couldn't take any more Compaqs. Between the old software you couldn't get anymore, lack of support for legacy stuff, and locked BIOSes that only function with a CD available from Compaq, I had had my fill of the company. Now, they're a completely different story. Then? A nightmare.

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"...and the only time we chill is when we kill each other. It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other."

- Tupac Amaru Shakur -