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We pay you *what* for support?

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  • We pay you *what* for support?

    One from earlier in the week...

    For one reason or another, Sarah's computer kept blue-screening. She'd be working on a spreadsheet and randomly get BSOD. Logging in, first thing in the morning, BSOD. Didn't do it all the time, but enough to be annoying.

    I spent quite a bit of time running various tests, cleaning off spyware, viruses, seeing what was running at startup (Autoruns is awesome for this), updating Winblows, and anything else I could think of. Apparently, her computer was afraid of me. The stupid thing would work fine for a few weeks, but would then start randomly start failing again.

    So she moved all of her files onto the server (why she didn't save them there to begin with, since that's backed up every night), had our 3rd party tech back up her email, and prepared to reinstall WinBlows. I would have done it, but I was involved with another important project (aka my lunch ), and he'd offered to take care of it.

    He got everything installed, except for her email settings. We work in the financial industry, and have to archive all messages off-site. Pain in the ass, but we don't have a choice. Better than getting audited. Anyway, he couldn't get the settings to work with Outlook, and decided to have Sarah contact our company IT people, and get them.

    While all this crap was going on, I handed Sarah a sheet on how to connect to our email online (basically open up IE and log-in), so at least she had that.

    Seems that even though I'd handed him an *exhaustive* FAQ on how to set up the company email, he couldn't get it to work. Apparently, in his mind, we were to download the "new Office" from Micro$haft, set up outlook, and do it that way. Why? "Because you can't import the emails."



    After several hours, he left. I didn't have enough time to get it finished before closing, since we usually get swamped with orders. Next morning, Sarah wasn't in due to illness. I couldn't resist turning her computer on, to see how badly he fucked it up. As expected, her email was a mess. She had *multiple* profiles, all under the same name. Anything coming in got dumped to one of about a dozen profiles

    It took me about an hour to get things working correctly. I simply trashed all of the old profiles, pulled her email archive off the server, and then imported them. Keep in mind that our 3rd party tech claims to be an expert, has multiple computer-related degrees, and charges about $150-plus per hour for his services. $150 an hour and he couldn't even do a task like that. Yet, I have a business degree, and picked up most of what I know over the past 15 years working here.

    With that said,
    Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines. --Enzo Ferrari

  • #2
    Back when I was working on IBM System/36's the tech support company who had our hardware/software support contract with literally sent out the 3 Stooges to do a hardware repair/OS re-install/data restore on a machine in Atlanta. Took them about 3 or 4 hours to NOT do anything but in hardware repair. I had to fly in from Chicago (round trip LAST minute airfare flight BIG $$$$$'s + hotel 3 days/2 nights + rental car) to actually perform the OS re-install/data restore from backup tapes. To boot I was in the middle of a nasty bout with the flu and felt like death warmed over.
    I'm lost without a paddle and headed up SH*T creek.
    -- Life Sucks Then You Die.


    "I'll believe corp. are people when Texas executes one."

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    • #3
      Yeah, that's one of the things I hate about my industry; all that education and not a minute worth of experience in the field, and they are the ones hired into places. Meanwhile, I've got a decade worth of experience in the field and only minimal education to show it, and I can't find a job in my field in my area and had to start a computer repair business to actually do the job I got my education for!
      The customer is not always right. Most of the time, the customer is a clueless moron. If this offends you, you are this moron.

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