I am in the wrong job...

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Got a call from one of my brothers-in-law last night.

Apparently, he had had an issue with his printer and, rather than call me for advice, he had found some guy who was local after a search on the net.

The guy came out, switched the printer off and on, and started downloading the Windows updates (about 200MB worth I am told).

He also installed the MS driver for the printer... a DELL badged printer.

After almost an hour, he still hadn't got it working, so my brother paid him his wonga - just short of £40 - and he left.

I talked my brother-in-law through getting it working, using the latest DELL printer driver, over the phone.

For free...

 

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Yes you should have charged your brother @ £1 per minute whilst you were on the phone to him

 

Your brother-in-law clearly got took for a ride. My advice to anyone calling out a techie would be "no fix, no fee".

I can picture an IT version of Rogue Traders in the future...

 

If I had phoned him, it would have been...

 

you should have set a timer then then biled him for how long you were on the phone since you could have been doing something better.

 

My thoughts exactly on the 'No Fix, No Fee'...

I wish someone would pay me to click the button to start downloading the latest updates...

Not sure whether IT bods have to belong to an association such as the BCS to be able to trade; however, having to have something like the A+ could help. Especially if there was a complaint mechanism where you could feed back into CompTIA.

 

Nice idea...

Mind you, at least it proved I knew how to fix the issue...

 

It would be a small revenge, but your brother-in-law should call this cretin asking for his money back since you knew how to fix it and this "professional" didn't.

 

He should, but he won't... let's hope he marks it up as a lesson learned...

 

When my family first got a computer I used to love playing around with. So one day the computer BSOD appeared and I didn't know how to fix it back then, so we called a tech. The next day he arrives and works on the computer for about 2 hours. I go to see what progress he has made and found out that he ended up installing windows 95 on top of windows 98SE machine and said that the reason he installed the windows 95 OS was because there were some incompatibilities with the PC. It was an IBM Aptiva btw, which had a system restore disk, which he said was not working. So after a little argument about the money that we owed him we ended up giving him only a 20 CAD and told him to get the f*** out because he was being very arrogant and didn't do nothing for hours except for installing windows 95 without any drivers or updates and nothing was working.

My mom found another guy who really knew his stuff. He came in spent a good 2 hours him self but he installed windows 98SE, all the drivers, installed an anti-virus, memory upgrade, he basically made that pc fly like it never did before.

What a difference. When I look back at that day, I wish I knew as much then as I do now so that I could of saved us some money but the whole time he was working he was explaining to me a bunch of stuff, I guess that's how I got my kick start in a career in IT.

 

So if it wan't for the first crap guy who came Prof ... You owe him!

 

Well thats a good way for you learn, my learning of PC was back when I got my first computer which was a dragon32 and my old speccy. Then I went to a YTS place and they asked me to set up their PCs.

anyhow Giddy I'd bill him, print up an invoice tonight using excel and put it in the post heee heee

 

LMAO... you know mate... I just might.