(no subject)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

This morning about 7am, just as I'd crawled from my pit, and before I'd started on my first cup of tea, my Dad phoned me and almost immediately passed me to one of his customers.
He works in a Builder's Merchant, but seems to feel the need to tell a lot of people about his amazing IT-savvy daughter.
This muppet had tried to updated his antivirus, apparently, and afterwards couldn't even get into safe mode, the machine just kept rebooting. So he'd run the restore pack, and now wanted to know where all his files had gone.
"Ah," I said, though it probably came out more like 'uuurgh' - "Did it tell you when you ran it that you'd lose all your data?"
"Yeah," he said "But I'm not worried about the data, I just want my photographs and stuff back."
I calmly explained that WAS his data, and that if he'd not made a backup, the photos were gone and that was that, but that if he'd brought it to me when it wasn't booting, I could have got his files off first. I was about to reccomend he invest in a USB drive when he swore and hung up on me. Ah, just like old times...

Comments

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

My father did that to me with one of his karaoke friends one night. Spent over a hour on the phoen with some idiot.

Sent my father a mock bill with my hourly rate ($88/hour at the time) told him he didn't need to pay, but that my time was worth money and next time I'd expect a payment from anyone.

I don't mind simple stuff, I've even gotten over the "you're from IT? Let me tell you a funny story about what I did" shit. But if you are going to actually expect me to fix something big, you are going to pay. I don't expect my cousin the plumber to come over and redo my bathroom for free, and don't expect my uncle the tile man to come over and put all new marble tile in for free. Why expect the same from me.

[adythiel.livejournal.com]

We're IT though. We are supposed to love working on computers whether we get paid or not. I mean, that's why we got into the field isn't it? So we could have the joy of working with computers all day. We don't have any bills to pay and don't really need to eat do we?

I honestly wonder what goes through people's heads when they expect me to do a complete rebuild of their system after spending 4 hours backing up all the data they have hidden in the most obscure locations. And to do it for free.

[meitemark.livejournal.com]

For friends (most of my friends are geeks) I help them for free when they are stuck. Pointing them in the working direction ain't hard. If the job takes more than 10 minutes I usually get paid just because the people that call me, or ask me to come KNOW that there is no way in hell that they would manage it themself. Not much, but it gets me sweets.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I hope your dad gave that dickwad an earful. What a moron.