For the third time in the last couple months I have an unhappy customer.
Because I failed to effect a timeley and competitively priced repair? No.
Because I was late? No.
Had to revise an estimate because the problem was bigger than I originally diagnosed? No.
Then why one might ask.
Why because when I said doing a reformat and reinstall of windows would wipe out everything, they seemed to think that was everything but Microsoft Office. Or everything but that cute little card game their freind emailed them. This is why I ask…is there anything that needs to be saved, programs, personal files, anything at all that you use on a regular basis that you don’t have disks/CD’s for. Even then they cannot always be saved. Did you really want me to install a backup of the apps from a machine with 17,000 infected files 116 of which are repelling every reasonable effort to remove them?
Oh and of course they have their office XP and quickbooks CD’s but lack the registration codes which they have promptly misplaced and demanding I somehow magically pull $600 worth of software licences out of my ass to replace the ones they lost.
Oh better yet, one of them sitting in his $500K house even had the balls to tell me he could only afford an hour of work, I felt sorry for him since he is starting a new business and went ahead and did the reinstall and reload drivers, etc even thought it took more like 2.5 hours (I’m a fairly new biz myself, and it was a slow day). Now he is my number one griper. Sure its an emachine and came with restore disks that he cannot find but somehow its my fault he no longer has MS word. Perhaps a quick install of Open Office might placate him…nooooo. Can’t figure it out…looks weird…my boss can’t open the files (keeps saving in open office native formats instead of as word .doc files that will work fine which I demonstrated before leaving.
Damn dude. It’s so hard being new in the business. Makes you not be able to afford to tell people to take a hike.
Looks like you have to start your long list of “things that will be added to our standard contract because customers are idiots.” Need some clearly defined text about what “anything” means.
Dude, I feel for you, but when you ran into THIS guy:
You should’ve passed on the job right there. Look what it got you: underpaid for the work and a whiner on your case to boot. The more I deal with the public the less tolerant I am of jerkoffs like this. Can only pay for an hour of work? then I would be outta there in an hour. If he wants the job finished he can pay for it. I’m betting money would’ve appeared as if by magic.
I told him that this was not going to be more than a 1 hour job and he just kinda gave me a blank look…I’m too damn nice. Still trying to figure out why the hell he felt the need to uninstall the windows default video drivers. I started a list of my whiners on my cell phone with a different ring tone. If I hear that tone they go to voicemail. The rest I answer immediately.
I have zero problem spending tons of time and money fixing something I legitimately did wrong, one I gouged a motherboard trying to put a heat sink back on, ended up paying for the better part of a new machine for that one, another one just a couple nights ago. Customer asking for an auxillary USB card to get USB 2.0 ports on an old pIII. Put the card in, install drivers, reboot, after about 2 min I have a svchost task pulling 100% CPU time. Virus scans are clean, I know of a bug that XP SP2 is supposed to fix that manifests this way and machine is SP1, install SP2…same thing. Pull card and system restore, rolling back SP2 install, same thing, dug in and started dissecting the services loaded by that svchost task and he husband gets home and and tells me it drops back down to performing normally after 10 min or so and they just hardly ever shut it off so she forgot about it. :smack:
In my business (psychotherapy) we have something called “informed consent” which in reality is a list of things that people get pissed off about after it happens to them. Just have them initial after each item and they have been “informed” and have given you their “consent.” After a while of dealing with disgruntled clients, you will have a pretty good list that covers 95% of the situations. However, if you have customers, someone will always have something to complain about. Just be happy you got clients
Never, EVER, irrevocably destroy data on a clients machine, even if they ask you to. When I was working a stint in a computer repair shop, the first thing we would do to any computer was to make a Ghost copy of their hard drive. It was reassuring to always know that no matter how badly you fuck up a clients data, you could always restore it back to the condition you got it in in 30 minutes.
Well if the drive in question was removed from customers machine and mounted the drive to a licenced shop machine you would be legal AFAIK. The backup is for the shop, not the customer.
Yup, you just discovered a universal truth. The worst cheapest bastards are always the worst complainers.
Back when I was younger I did some freelance tech support and had a client who was always trying to get suport for free, even though he made good money in a job with much less hours then me. Finely I told him to fuck off and never call again. Cheap son-of-a-bitch.
But even the shop needs a new license for every computer it’s used on. Even if you restore an image back to a new drive on the same computer you need a new license unless you destroy the old drive. The actual license restrictions on ghost are ridiculous.
And most likely unenforceable from the sounds of it. IIRC the whole point of any copyright/licence agreements is one machine per program. As long as I move the drive to a machine with a licenced copy it is now part of that machine. As long as you don’t start handing out copies of ghost or of those backup disks you created (which would be violating copyright) I highly doubt you are going to get a court to issue any damages.
