Dec
15
Entitled - Notepad
Filed Under Data recovery, Ranting, Stupid, djlizard
Welcome to part 1 of 1 of Self-entitlement for dummies: hunting and escaping.
When I left you last I was blathering on about my history and crap. Now I'll tell you what happened that SNAPPED me right back into reality.
Tits McGee entered the shop at 4:00 and was all like "here's the laptop and keyboard for the keyboard replacement" and one of our receptionists was all like "oh hey Mike there's a keyboard replacement" and I was all like "not to mention the keyboard replacement"
But seriously...
(Remember, naughty language ahead. This time I fucking mean it.)
She's from Venice so she can't exactly go home from here just yet, so she leaves for 30 minutes of errands. I replaced the keyboard just fine except for the sand that is coming out of every orifice. The computer itself is quite weatherbeaten. Since her kids have torn it up I guess I should I say childbeaten. No wait, that's not quite so good. No bueno indeed.
I started the computer. 4,152 minutes later when the computer had finally arrived at the desktop, I was informed by a friendly software application that there were exactly 689 privacy violations on this computer. Golly! It's such a good thing I'm here to save it! At least the keyboard is completely functional again.
I shut down the machine and waited for her to come back, and when she did, I told her about the huge infection she had. Ok, I don't know what infections she had, but her computer was quite infected.
I explained that in order for me to remove the infection, I would need to keep it for several days because we were at the bad spot of the following holidays check-ins pattern:
no computers no computers no computers no computers 9000 COMPUTERS CHECKED IN ALL AT ONCE OH THE HUMANITY no computers no computers 4 bucks 4 bucks no whammies no whammies STOP.
The other option was to format the system. I showed her how to access the laptop's recovery software and explained she would need to backup her data before going into it. When I exited the recovery system, it rebooted the computer and attempted to boot into Windows before I could stop it. It doesn't matter anyway... it stopped on its own.
Error loading operating system
Golly! Good thing I'm here to explain what just happened. Oddly enough, the recovery system still seemed to work. I told her I would take her computer, recover the data, and use the recovery system to blast a new OS onto the system. She left for a bit longer, and I figure this won't take long. Do you realize that "this won't take long" is the worst possible thing you could ever say? It's right up there with "this can't possibly fail!" and "this won't hurt a bit". "I'll just pull out".
Husband gets on the phone, a perfect crescendo of anger ensues. I can see her hair flying away from her face from the pressure of the audio waves streaming out of her cell phone. The way he's talking it seems like he's implying I broke it, but whatever - some people are just sandy vaginas because their daddy didn't say "I love you" during the bad touch. Okay, I'll just fix the computer, don't freak out, guy.
She leaves for a bit longer and I begin investigation in my rescue system. The hard drive is failing, hurrr.
I call her and tell her "hey sorry to call you back so fast after you just left, but I just found out your hard drive is failing and I wanted to tell you how much it would cost and" blah blah blah. She tells me to call the husband because it's his and whatnot so that's fine, I do so. I was about 10 seconds into explaining what happens with my usual direct style of presenting all of the facts and then all of the solutions and then the solution I would choose. This dude began unloading on me like the end of a bad Taco Bell bender. Holy shit, what the fuck crawled up this guy's urethra and took a shit?
Suddenly, everything slowed down as my brain synchronized with The Matrix. I began actually processing everything he was saying, even though he was speaking faster than I can type. Those of you that really know me will realize how fucked up that is.
For some reason, even though he was yelling so loud our entire office could hear every word he said quite clearly, he never actually cursed at me. Interpolate the following for 20 seconds straight: "I don't know what you did, but when you replaced my keyboard you must have done something" --> "you broke it, I want a brand new computer right now or my computer fixed by TONIGHT | ...your company trying to rope money in from me I know how you are... | I'm going to call the attorney general!" - and then he hung up.
My face was boiling red and I was shaking because I was so angry. He called back 10 seconds after hanging up on me (or accidentally dropping the phone behind his midget porn collection causing it to disconnect) so I quickly informed the boss of the situation and he picked up the phone.
Dude-man's verbal diarrhea seemed to be quite plentiful and rich with color, but he never really cursed. The stuff he was saying was completely ridiculous and the more he yelled, the more obvious it became that this guy has more issues than a newsstand.
Boss-man remained completely cool and collected and informed him that if he was going to continue yelling, he would have to hang up. "I know what my employee did every step of the way and he did not break it." Dude-man kept going, Boss-man said he was going to hang up. And did.
Woman-man re-arrived and we both began explaining the situation. She was pretty certain I had messed up because I wasn't using her power cord. She told me that she always puts her laptop into hibernation and never uses the computer without the power cord because the battery is bad. That wasn't completely obvious to me being that it stayed on for all of the time I needed to get what I wanted to get done. No matter how much into detail I went about how hard drives behave, she was quite convinced it was because I had the computer running for 2 minutes (not even inside of Windows except for the first quick peek) without using the power cord. What do I know? I'm just a computer technician, after all. She's a ... what is she again? Oh yeah, a bitch.
I work 8:00 - 5:00 (even though the shop is open from 9:00 - 6:00) and it was now 5:00 so I got the hell out via the back door to my warmed-up getaway car. Unfortunately, my boss had to stay and continue arguing with her in person and with him on the phone, passing back and forth between them. We were stuck having to help them because we are members of the Better Business Bureau and every report gets logged on the BBB as a negative item even if it's full of shit. Customers who visit the BBB to check us out before considering calling would see this and possibly not even contact us. Where's the Better Customer Bureau?
The next morning Boss-man had started the full-on rescue and we began reinstalling Windows to a new hard drive, doing updates, installing drivers, etc. We finished the computer and Boss-man told them not to ever come back.
All of this snapped me back into reality because I would have never believed there were people like this. This guy thought he was Billy Badass on a stick. What I should have done is turned it around on him and told him how I think he's a scammer and that he set this up from the beginning to get a free repair, knowing his system was already failing - I know his kind. I should have called the attorney general.
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10 Responses to “Entitled - Notepad”
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You made me feeel it! I understand as I have had similar situations.
Just say to your self! "SELF" look here forget about these assholes. Because you know you did "the right thing".
Anyway we have missed you these last couple of months....... welcome back!
Mike
That sucks man. Hey, check your email :).
Ugh, yea, I hear ya man. I got a low-paying job at some big company (will remain nameless) to try and get by through college. Oh, how I hate dealing with customers in favor of correcting/researching the inner workings. Thanks for the smile of reading!
Ah, the joys of customer service. If you deal with the public, you will get a few like that - no gettin' around it. I hope your rant helped release the stress.
Part 0 and part 1 sound and feel oh so familiar. I feel your pain and have dealt with this a few times in the past myself. I have had one incident very close to your but I wont post it here. (E-mail me if you would like to here it) And many others that bring there computer in to be cleaned up and I do so. Several months later they bring it back in saying it still doing the same thing and it is sort of. I then tell them again that they via what-ever-bad-thing-they-are-doing and explain that if they would be more careful that it wouldn't happen again. We don't charge if they bring it back in within a few days of the first cleanup even if we know that they went back to what-ever-bad-thing-they-are-doing again.
Hi,
IMHO I would say to that is that if the OS fails to load on any PC then I would assume that the hard drive was porked until it was tested and proved to be working 100%.
Yes I use Spinrite and before you say it Mike I know you really *love* Spinrite ;-)
The number of times I have had a "Well I only need this one tiny thing fixed and it will take only 5 minutes" type job and it takes hours or days are too many to count.
Tips are often connected to icebergs.
Anywho your Boss did the right thing, fix the laptop and tell them never to come back. I have done the same. In some cases I have fixed items for free and then told them to go forth and multiply.
It's a shame there isn't a Web 2.0 site where business can report pain the ass customers so others can avoid them. A sort of Better Customers Bureau ...
I hope you are feeling better now and you have that incident off your chest/mind.
Try not to dwell on it to much, analyse, learn and move on :-)
Keep the faith.
Kind Regards
Simon Zerafa
Man I know exactly how you feel. I also am a computer tech for a local computer/web design store... and I honestly cant believe some people some days. They bring the computers to us to fix... and when we tell them whats wrong they say it never did that before they brought it in. Its like WTF?!? I had one customer argue with me and threaten me because we had replaced her socket 478 board not once but TWICE in a year because her house was so dusty you could have built a sand castle with the shit we cleaned out of her case. We promptly told her on the THIRD time it failed because of overheating that we were no longer honoring the warranty. She freaked out and was saying shit like 'ive never had a computer due this, your heatsink is defective (from intel) and your boards are designed bad (from asus) and how is dust not covered.. i thought your warranty covered everything.. and blah blah. . . People like that make me so angry. And now on to fixing this customers computer.... ;)
this surely reminds most of the tech how stupid customers can be, BBB dosen't it have a way to check whats goining on independently......
dude your software is on most of the computers in USA,
I must say that it helps us a lot instead of manually registering the files we can do it via the software seriously its a blessing for us......
Damn same thing happened to us in Norman, Oklahoma, last December. (Not Exactly, but Damn Close).
Foreign Couple walks in to Norman Computers. wants something fixed, Tech does ~ same thing, PoS does the Hose Dance. They demand compensation.
Think this is a scam going around?
Lata
Whitesound
Heh, Oklahoma. I was born and raised in Tulsa.
Anyway, my case was not a scam. It was a couple of people who felt that their computer worked fine despite the fact that its hard drive was failing.
Just the other day, a customer gruffly asked what was going on considering that he brought his system in for virus removal and is now being told his hard drive is failing. I sternly asked him if he thought we did it, to which he ended up saying no.
I don't know what's wrong with people, but first they claim they don't know anything about computers, and then your diagnosis isn't good enough or is other than what they had expected. This is like when you go to get an oil change and the mechanic notices a huge crack in your <insert critical internal part here>. BUT I JUST CAME IN HERE FOR AN OIL CHANGE!
My fault, I guess I should have let it go. A week later when it fully fails they'll be back, claiming I misdiagnosed or that they deserve a new computer anyway. You can't win.