What am I, a forensic analyst?

[gholam.livejournal.com]

This guy just left - for better part of an hour, he kept trying to get me to tell him what was wrong with his computer before he reinstalled Windows! And every time I repeated that no, I don't know what was wrong with PC that I've never seen before, and which arrived to me freshly reformatted and reinstalled, he'd try to approach it from another angle. All the while, I have three more machines in the queue, and it's already 7PM... grrr.

Comments

[swwinchester.livejournal.com]

Actually, as a computer technician, you ARE a forensic analyst. Let's face it, until the evidence is destroyed, we're capable of figuring out pretty much everything that's gone on in a given machine, and we usually have to be to figure that out to figure out what is wrong with it. ^_^;;

The problem is that people are starting to realize it, and are thus starting to ask for us to do things beyond our capacities to do without excessive work on our part. ^_^;;

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the problem is, in this case the evidence already has been destroyed, and it is possible (not 100% chance, but possible) to reconstruct what went wrong, it'd take some very expensive data recovery tools, and a lot of time - time spent by people who are paid a lot more than I am.

[jecook]

FIFO your queue, and let the idiot know.

Be sure to make him/her painfully aware that you are charing him by the hour to figure out what was wrong with his OS before he nuked it and started over.

I figured that might be good for a nice, round 10 hours or so.. ::EVIL grin::

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Would that I could. Instructions upon this specific idiot is to keep amount of work on him to a minimum, because getting money out of him is like pulling teeth.