As many of you know…I own a PC Shop/onsite service in Central CA.
Today I recieved a referral I almost could not believe. Customer has a friend in Thailand who is having problems getting reliable IT people to solve various issues on the windows machines in her business.
Yes…Thailand.
Its official ladies and gents we have officially become PC Search & Rescue International
<cracks knuckles>
Time to kick some remote support ass with a 14 hour time differential
25 megabit comcast line…running at full speed, check.
GotoAssist, online, check
customer online, check.
cheese grater, check.
Time to kick ass, take names, and send christmas cards from 8300 miles away.
God I love the internet
If anyone here is looking for a fabulous way to get help with windows PC’s anywhere in the world…I know a guy
Actually so far everything has been chat based and they speak perfect english in chat…its a thai company that places students in US schools, so they are already dealing with US companies regularly.
Dang… Here I was thinking that helping clueless relatives on the other side of the USA by phone was distant enough. “OK, now right-click that icon. No, right click. Use the button on the right-hand side of the mouse…”
Sounds a lot nicer than trying to support end-users in Hong Kong and Mumbai. Fortunately, most of them can compose a reasonably coherent email.
I’m not surprised a Thai company has had to resort to this. In Thailand it’s really easy to get a guy to set up your computer with (pirated) Windows and all the software you want.
But ask them to solve a problem they will poke around for a bit and if they can’t fix it, they just tell you “cannot.” Then you can reinstall or just live with the problem. Windows is often not updated because it is not properly registered. Even in Government offices and major companies, most PCs will be running pirated software.
The most frustrating though, are intermittent problems. Even if you explain that the computer crashes every hour, unless you can replicate the problem right there, it is difficult to get them to understand you.
One Christmas day I got a call to go to my userous aunt’s house and setup their computer. I was supposed to show them how to use it too. This was about 1984 with cassette based computers and no point and click interface. I had already marked her as userous years ago and told her no way. I said a few other things after the call to the rest of the family members that were with me.
My furthest work is cracking a server in Florida from NY. After the sysadmin passed away. Said server was not connected to the internet, and I did it with a technical illiterate at the other end.
This is kinda what was explained to me, apparently the place is also a very plush looking office and price quotes seem to skyrocket once techs set foot inside and look around. Apparently alot of those guys don’t believe in backing things up before a reload either.
BTW we were using a fairly simple crappy little JAVA VNC service for doing remote work until a few weeks ago. If you have a need to do remote work for relatives, GoToAssist (made by Citrix/GotoMyPC folks) rocks. Its pricey ($70/mo) but still beats the hell out of trying to talk people through stuff.
She used people to do all her needed work and was not above making her companions pay for activities she wanted to go to. She would arrange to go on weekend trips with someone, and then tell them what their portion of the trip was. Their portion financed the total cost of the trip she wanted to go on. The come over and teach me to use this computer Christmas day fits her typical behavior of do a large undertaking for me.
I just had to add the latest episode. Mother was dealing with someone that was soon to die after a decade of taking care of her. A couple days after the lady was in the nursing home, my aunt who doesn’t even know the lady, asked mom to give her all the lady’s furniture. Her daughter is worse than my aunt. My aunt was asking for her daughter.
My brothers found out all her kids are the same. They used to go on week long hunting trips to Utah and the such with her sons. The gas costs were very high and everybody in the party ended up paying hundreds for their share of gas. Her son’s managed to collect double the gas money from others for a good five years or more.
I won’t hijack the thread anymore. Explaining what I meant for a word has taking up enough of this thread.
I hope this new job is just a foot in the door and you get more customers from this job.
It took me a minute, but if I’m right you need to read it as User O.U.S. then recall “The Princess Bride” (and change one word from R.O.U.S. to another word with the same first letter)
I take it Mr. Discord doesn’t think highly of his auntie’s computer aptitude.
Good luck on the expansion.