Stupid Customer Stories II; Electric Boogaloo

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Rather than ressurect This old Zombie thread, I figure i’d open it’s sequel…

Yes, Mr. Self-Important Prat in an Acura, I saw you cut me off in the parking lot, we were both traveling at parking lot speeds, you saw I had right-of-way, yet you turned and pulled out in front of me anyway, drove fifty feet to the storefront, parked off-center and off-kilter in a very incompetent manner, taking up 1.5 parking spots in front of the store…

You cut me off, jerk, and you were very deliberate about it…

Oh, and now you’re walking into our store with a broken iMac G4?

So sorry, but I’m too busy to help you right now, you’re going to have to check the machine in and have it wait in the queue, no you’re not going to get the quick triage that our NICE customers that aren’t arseholes and don’t very obviously cut me off in the parking lot get, yes I know you’re the only one in the store at the moment, but I have a lot of machines ahead of you, so sorry, sucks to be you…

Oh, you think you can beat the system by choosing priority labor, sure, that might work, but be prepared to pay an extra half-hour labor “Jerk Tax” for that little parking-lot fiasco…

Just think, if you were nice and didn’t cut me off, you could have gotten a quick triage and rough estimate right now, but thanks to your jerkish parking lot incident (which you have yet to apologize for), you won’t, and you can’t even blame your incompetent driving on cellphone use, as you weren’t on one, you’re just being a self-important jerkish prat

go away and leave me alone, and LEARN HOW TO FRAKKING DRIVE while you’re at it…

…i’ll get to your machine when the next spot opens up this afternoon (i’m thinking around 4 PM…)

2

I used to work as a cashier in a well-known convenience store, and one day I was standing behind the desk, doing my thing.

A woman comes up to pay for her purchases. Scan, put in codes, beep, etc. Oh, wait, she wants to scan her lottery ticket? No problem, ma’am, I can just go over here and…

…watch her attempt to feed her lottery ticket into the debit card pinpad.

I had to hold it in until she was a good block away from the store.

3

How to get on your Technician’s GOOD side…

I figure that i’ve ranted and raved enough about the idiocy of the (l)users i deal with on a day-to-day basis, it’s not all bad (just mostly bad), here’s some behaviors that I appreciate and may end up giving you some leniency in your computer repair (common sense stuff, mostly)

the Prime Directive is quite simply…

DON’T BE A JERK!! don’t treat me like dirt or verbally berate me for your inability to maintain backups etc…

stop with the entitlement bullshit, I’m not required to drop what I’m doing and attend to your every whim, your data may be important to you, to me, it’s meaningless, i work on so many machines per day that all the data kind of runs together anyway, I’m not going to remember details about YOUR data unless there’s something there that makes it memorable (Amateur Hobbit Porn on an office computer, perhaps? :wink: ) and even then, I’m not really going to care either way

Learn some basic responsibility, learn how to perform backups, have backup hardware readily available, computers are fallible machines, they can and will fail at the most inopportune time, your computer WILL fail at some point, expect that failure and plan accordingly

Be Prepared for the inevitable hardware/software failures, building on the above paragraph, Murphy’s Laws do affect computers as well as people, have an emergency contingency plan and strategy, whether that’s off-site backups, backup computer hardware, mirrored RAID drives, etc… (you should be doing all of this anyway…)

Be Nice to the tech, i have access to your computer, your data, etc, i would never deliberately damage data or hardware, however, the nicer you are to me, the more time and effort i’ll expend TRYING to get your machine back good as new, who knows, i might cut you a break on labor time, be a jerk and you get just the bare minimum required to fix the problem, nothing more

And Always Remember the Cardinal Rule;
“A lack of planning on YOUR part DOES NOT constitute an emergency on MY part”

my favorite kind of customer;

brings in a machine for repair, but has a backup machine back at home/the office with current backups, and is in no hurry to get the machine repaired YESTERDAY, as they have current backups, they don’t care if the drive needs to be repartitioned/reformatted in the process, said customer has also tried the common fixes, even if they didn’t work, at least they tried to fix it…

“just do what it takes to fix it, don’t worry about the data, it’s all backed up anyway”

I also like customers that actively want to learn what happened and how they can prevent the failure in the future…

I also like customers that bring in “interesting” repairs, brain teasers if you will…

so basically, take responsibility for your computer/computing habits/backup strategy, don’t be a jerk, and don’t be a prima-donna and we’ll get along just fine