^This except that I no longer get the grunt or disapproving look, they know damn well that's all they're going to get before they talk to me. Took me a few years to get it that way though. I still get more actual tech queries when I'm outside on a smoke break than I do sat at my desk, most of those are DIFM jobs - no tech ability required, just a little bit of nous (except when someone stuffs up something back end and the application throws a wobbly!) I'm definitely on the "I don't work for free" bandwagon though. I'm fortunate enough to have a halfway decent boss that has the approach of "It ain't work related, **** 'em". The exception is the director's gear but he generally does that himself (my head of is a former tech). I get so much more crap outside of the office than I do in it.
And to top it all off he didnt even say thankyou, Me : 'I managed to take a snapshot of your disc, replace it, restore it, it should be as good as new. Its taken 8 hours of my working week' Him : Well it had better all be there. What a ****..
Sounds like he is a complete and utter douche. I say you do as suggested and anonymously inform the governors, maybe if you're feeling particularly cruel the BPI as well
I did, I 100% lost the plot. Problem is he’s only been head for less than 6 months, so everyone has their tongue up his arse trying to be his best friend. I’ll probably get in trouble for crossing him. I’m going to keep it as ammo; it’s pretty unsettled here at the moment due to moving from the 3 tier system to the 2 tier. People being redeployed, losing jobs, massive pay cuts.....Always handy to have some dirt to throw ; ) Anyhows rant over. Any new ridiculous demands today anyone? I need a hug... But I will settle for a laugh : )
The beauty of my policy that every working hour gets paid for one way or another (which basically means everyone except the few members of my immediate family pay me for work) is that when this happens, I multiply the bill by a factor of how big a douché the customer has been after I've saved their hardware, or how often they've given me bad manners when I'm actually saving them a lot of hassle and all of their personal or business data. Case in point: A liquid damaged laptop that I brough back to life a year ago - never seen a laptop come in with so much wrong with it. Any other repair centre would have (and had, in fact) told the customer to scrap it and buy a new laptop. What about the files on it? Oh, they're probably toast as well. So he brings it to me, covered in beer and all sorts of other crap (food, I think... I wore gloves the whole time because I wasn't sure) and I take a quick look over it and decide that it's perfectly repairable. Within economic repair... just - which he's happy about because it's "just out of warranty". I felt like saying to him; Mster, product warranties don't cover beer damage... Anyway, it needed a new keyboard, power adapter, screen and inverter. The board had to be put through the bath about 10 times before it even started looking clean. I also scrubbed it by hand several times with FLU and PCB solvent to get the rest of the gunk off. The HDD survived enough to allow me to recover the data, but it was also covered in sticky beer residue and was a 5400RPM Toshiba, so it got upgraded to a faster and higher capacity WD drive. A lesser laptop would not have been worth repairing, but this was 14 months old and had been top of the range when bought, so it was worth saving. So I do all that, spend almost a week saving this poor laptop's life and the guy calls and texts me several times every single day for the last 3 days that I have the thing, asking when it will be ready and how I'm getting on with it. This is after I've given him a very specific day and time when I will be delivering his laptop and confirmed with him that it's ok and that he has another computer to tie him over in the meantime. The guy sent me 5 texts and called me 4 times the day that I delivered it. So, I applied the rule. The labour for the repair got almost doubled. Because he'd been such a pain in the ass about it. And so had his laptop. By the way, the title of the thread is "People expecting miracles". Well, a laptop being in full working order and looking as good as new one week after having several gooey foodstuffs and a pint of beer spilled on it's keyboard is about as close as it gets
I like your style : D maybe i need to quit and start up on my own.. Your story reminds me of another 'Customer'. Member of SLT drops her shiny new iPhone 3GS in a bucket of horse urine...Yes you read that correctly HORSE URINE. She then decides to put it through a 30 degree wash, stating to me that she didnt use a 40 degree wash as it might damage the phone. It came to me smelling rather confusingly of Persil / a Stable it is then sha asks... 'Can it be fixed, it dosent seem to hold a charge any more' Facepalm.jpg
Damn straight charge them extra! It is the ****-fee. The extra charge needed to make their crap flush. How can people be so ungrateful? Makes me sick.
I lol'd I'm working on a 10 year old computer today Built in two thousand and freaking two It's getting upgraded as much as possible to last another few months, then it's being replaced with a laptop. So far, it's gotten an Athlon XP 1800 removed and replaced with a 3200, 512MB of RAM replaced with 2GB and a slow as **** IDE hard drive replaced with a slightly less slow drive. Now installing Windows and software updates. Am I above this sort of work? Yes, obviously. It's ten freaking years old! It should be in a landfill or a third world school by now. Am I going to refuse to do it when I can do so to help someone out and still charge them for it? Nope.
I am happy to sort any family and friends pc for free, but cross me once, and only once and its back to pc world and their charges for you. No-one I have done stuff for has taken the p*** and often I have had something bought for me as a gift as they know I won't charge them. I must be doing something right as once I remove all the bloatware crap that is usually the problem I install a few free security things and make sure they update them and run them once a week, and to be fair nearly all of them have.
