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techrecoveryBackstory: I managed to get a computer lab tech job in college despite no real computer knowledge and then got promoted to a managerial position after one year because I learned so much about troubleshooting both Macs and PCs. Why is this relevant you ask? Thanks to my friends (and family) bragging about how helpful I am ("Just doin' my job ma'am") I have been whored out as a tech for the last 2 years. This has lead to me being dropped without warning into situations from "the mouse won't work" (plugged it back in) to "it won't let me install this program because it's already got a wrong serial number in it and it won't let me enter another one" (registry editing) to "Well they said to do this but I don't know what they're talking about!" (tech-speak translations).
My current (paid) job is in-home computer technician and tutor. Yes, that's right. TUTOR. I get to teach little old ladies what the right mouse button really does and other mundane run-of-the-mill tasks. Yes, _I_ am the person who teaches the end users that the Desktop is not the Screensaver, all the while hoping that if my clients have to call in to get real tech support they'll at least be able to follow directions without the poor tech resorting to "thingy" at any point!
Sadly enough, as bad as these little old ladies can get, the local techs I've encountered while working with them have caused me to headdesk more than the little old ladies have.
Examples:
1: I tell the client I don't know how to make Outlook start up with the default screen being an off-site calendar rather than her never-used inbox. She calls up her company's on-call tech to ask, figuring rightly enough, that the tech would devolve into "techie speak" and start doing "techie things" and she'd like me to translate so she knows what's going on. Twenty minutes later the tech has created a shortcut which opens the calendar in a window all by it’s self, all the while ignoring repeated interjections of "I don't care if it's just a blank screen and I have to click on an icon (Oh Rapture! She remembered what an icon is!) to get to my calendar, I just don't want my inbox as the default (Yes! She remembered that too!) screen!" 3 minutes and one quick search of Outlook's Help menu after she tells the tech to not worry about it anymore, I have the default screen set as a blank screen with a nice easy icon on the side for her to use. WHY did the tech ignore her for 20 minutes in favor of such a complicated and time consuming "fix"? He's not even paid by the hour! Oh, he's also told her never ever to turn off PC Anywhere and that there's no way to disable it or turn it off or even alert her to when someone is watching her computer. She now knows the joy of Right-click + "Cancel Host" so that she can work on private things without the fear of being watched.
2: I received a cry of "Help! The computer's not working!" from one of my mother's friends who I've been whored out to in the past. I find out she's taken the computer down to one of the local little computer shops to have the battery on the motherboard replaced and it hasn't worked since. Great. I can guess what's happened. Opened up the case and, sure enough, I was right. While the tech had managed to correctly put the PCI cards back in, he hadn't bothered to connect up the cables to anything but the floppy drive! I'll give him the benefit of a doubt though and assume that he was just busy or rushed and wasn't deliberately trying to make this slow-speaking, white-haired grandmother come back in to pay a minimum of $20 straight-up fee, plus another $30 (half-hour minimum) just to plug in the cables again. Or to try and sell her another computer...
3: My mother has a new nickname for her company's tech support fellow; Twit. My mom's machine was (I've managed to get her upgraded in the last 2 weeks) Windows 98 First Edition on a 400MHz Pentium with 256MB RAM. Old, but still stable (no blue screens of death in the last 3 months!), just a little slow because of its age. Twit gets called in to see if there's anything he can do to make the computer faster. He looks, gasps in horror, pronounces DOOM upon it if the "load" (he never specified which kind) isn't reduced immediately. Pulls out his trusty USB drive and tries to plug it in... Big surprise, he can't use it. The stumped look of "Oh SHIT, what do I do NOW??" almost made my mom do a headdesk. Her words "Hasn't he ever heard of floppy disks?"
Well he takes it back to the shop, ghosts the drive, fiddles with it, then comes back a week later proudly proclaiming that the "load" had gone from 51% to over 80% now. (I'm going WTF at this point as I hover in the background) But... He’s about to prove he deserves his nickname. Like most end users my mom is picky about how her Desktop looks. And somehow he's managed to do SOMETHING to the computer so that it will change every Appearance color but the Desktop. "Well that's not a problem" he sputters, "because it's the custom colors that you're trying to make Windows do that are causing your computer to be slow!" By now mom's smelled a rat and states that she doesn't care if the computer runs a tad bit slower, as long as her icons aren't black-on-black so she can read them! Twit then seals his fate by confessing, in a burst of what I can only describe as sheer bowel trembling terror and guilt, that he DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO USE WINDOWS 98 AT ALL! Mom (politely, she is a lady after all) threw him out of her office and left instructions for him to never touch her computer again. I walked over, moved the mouse, clicked a few times, and changed her colors to burgundy with white.
One good and positive thing is that, thanks to all of the above, I now feel justified in raising my prices from $13 an hour to $20 an hour! (higher for more complicated matters and drives over 15 miles) Before I didn't feel like I was really earning that much. But if the above are any examples, I think I'm more than justified in charging at least half of what they do!
My current (paid) job is in-home computer technician and tutor. Yes, that's right. TUTOR. I get to teach little old ladies what the right mouse button really does and other mundane run-of-the-mill tasks. Yes, _I_ am the person who teaches the end users that the Desktop is not the Screensaver, all the while hoping that if my clients have to call in to get real tech support they'll at least be able to follow directions without the poor tech resorting to "thingy" at any point!
Sadly enough, as bad as these little old ladies can get, the local techs I've encountered while working with them have caused me to headdesk more than the little old ladies have.
Examples:
1: I tell the client I don't know how to make Outlook start up with the default screen being an off-site calendar rather than her never-used inbox. She calls up her company's on-call tech to ask, figuring rightly enough, that the tech would devolve into "techie speak" and start doing "techie things" and she'd like me to translate so she knows what's going on. Twenty minutes later the tech has created a shortcut which opens the calendar in a window all by it’s self, all the while ignoring repeated interjections of "I don't care if it's just a blank screen and I have to click on an icon (Oh Rapture! She remembered what an icon is!) to get to my calendar, I just don't want my inbox as the default (Yes! She remembered that too!) screen!" 3 minutes and one quick search of Outlook's Help menu after she tells the tech to not worry about it anymore, I have the default screen set as a blank screen with a nice easy icon on the side for her to use. WHY did the tech ignore her for 20 minutes in favor of such a complicated and time consuming "fix"? He's not even paid by the hour! Oh, he's also told her never ever to turn off PC Anywhere and that there's no way to disable it or turn it off or even alert her to when someone is watching her computer. She now knows the joy of Right-click + "Cancel Host" so that she can work on private things without the fear of being watched.
2: I received a cry of "Help! The computer's not working!" from one of my mother's friends who I've been whored out to in the past. I find out she's taken the computer down to one of the local little computer shops to have the battery on the motherboard replaced and it hasn't worked since. Great. I can guess what's happened. Opened up the case and, sure enough, I was right. While the tech had managed to correctly put the PCI cards back in, he hadn't bothered to connect up the cables to anything but the floppy drive! I'll give him the benefit of a doubt though and assume that he was just busy or rushed and wasn't deliberately trying to make this slow-speaking, white-haired grandmother come back in to pay a minimum of $20 straight-up fee, plus another $30 (half-hour minimum) just to plug in the cables again. Or to try and sell her another computer...
3: My mother has a new nickname for her company's tech support fellow; Twit. My mom's machine was (I've managed to get her upgraded in the last 2 weeks) Windows 98 First Edition on a 400MHz Pentium with 256MB RAM. Old, but still stable (no blue screens of death in the last 3 months!), just a little slow because of its age. Twit gets called in to see if there's anything he can do to make the computer faster. He looks, gasps in horror, pronounces DOOM upon it if the "load" (he never specified which kind) isn't reduced immediately. Pulls out his trusty USB drive and tries to plug it in... Big surprise, he can't use it. The stumped look of "Oh SHIT, what do I do NOW??" almost made my mom do a headdesk. Her words "Hasn't he ever heard of floppy disks?"
Well he takes it back to the shop, ghosts the drive, fiddles with it, then comes back a week later proudly proclaiming that the "load" had gone from 51% to over 80% now. (I'm going WTF at this point as I hover in the background) But... He’s about to prove he deserves his nickname. Like most end users my mom is picky about how her Desktop looks. And somehow he's managed to do SOMETHING to the computer so that it will change every Appearance color but the Desktop. "Well that's not a problem" he sputters, "because it's the custom colors that you're trying to make Windows do that are causing your computer to be slow!" By now mom's smelled a rat and states that she doesn't care if the computer runs a tad bit slower, as long as her icons aren't black-on-black so she can read them! Twit then seals his fate by confessing, in a burst of what I can only describe as sheer bowel trembling terror and guilt, that he DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO USE WINDOWS 98 AT ALL! Mom (politely, she is a lady after all) threw him out of her office and left instructions for him to never touch her computer again. I walked over, moved the mouse, clicked a few times, and changed her colors to burgundy with white.
One good and positive thing is that, thanks to all of the above, I now feel justified in raising my prices from $13 an hour to $20 an hour! (higher for more complicated matters and drives over 15 miles) Before I didn't feel like I was really earning that much. But if the above are any examples, I think I'm more than justified in charging at least half of what they do!
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