The Lazarus Project
There are times that I just don't understand what people are thinking. I had been asked to work on a PC for a fellow employee here and I told him I would take a look. I asked him what he had and he said it was his old PC, he just wanted me to clean it up so he could send it to his nephew in Mexico. Ok, fine - I'll take a look.This thing is old. So very old. It still has ISA slots. Somehow it was upgraded to a Pentium S running at 100MHz with a whopping 16MB of RAM. That's about all I can tell you because every drive in the box was shot - HDD, CD (2X!!!), and the floppy - all dead.
After a whole 5 minutes of looking at it, I told him to put it in the trash bin out back. He pushed on and wanted me to give him a number for repairing it and installing Windows 98 on it, stating further that it didn't really need anything else because his nephew was just going to play games on it and do homework. Right. I asked him with all seriousness what he felt was a comfortable amount to spend on such a project. His offer was $100 (labor included) and he needed it tomorrow.
He was bummed that I turned him down. "I'm a technician, not a magician. I can't work miracles and that's what you need." I went through the painful process of showing him how to read the "minimum requirements" on various software packages and he winced when he realized that he doesn't even come close to the requirements for most games on the market.
So what happens next? I become the bad guy. Shoot the messenger. He acted like I had a direct line to Bill Gates and proceeded to tell me all the things that were wrong with computers and software. I asked him if he wanted me to put the PC in his car or in the trash. He grabbed it in a huff, litterally threw it in his trunk and then peeled out around the corner out of site to the back of the building. A few minutes later, one of the service techs came running up saying "Dude!! You better get out here. Some guy is going postal on one of your computers!" I busted out laughing, giving the tech a description of the guy I was just talking to. "Yeah, that's him! He's doing a hell of a job on the thing. I doubt it's worth much anymore. I don't know, you might be able to fix it." More laughter, harder now. "You should see him. He was jumping up and down on it and the case barely dented." Laughing so hard I can't breath at this point - tears streaming freely.
Joe, the tech, just stood there for a minute until I could compose myself. I thanked him for his concern and told him I would explain later. People wonder why I do this job. They say it's thankless and that people take advantage of us. On rare occasions such as today, I think we break even.
posted by Bonzai @ 4:54 PM
2 Comments:
Wow, what can I say to that. That guy needs to attend anger management. Someone in the office asked me this morning to help them fix their keyboard, becuase it wasn't working. I told them to throw it out, keyboards are being discontinued, and giggled, as Bill ran over to help... Sometimes it is the simple things that make it fun, right...
Absolutely! I still have fun with one of my old favorites:
Technoweenie: Hey, my printer stopped working.
Tech Yoda: Hm. A big file must have gotten stuck. Have you looked for a lump in the cable?
Technoweenie: No, hang on. I'll go check.
Tech Yoda: [hits the mute button because he is laughing so hard]
Yeah, you definitely need to have some fun with it. Good ol' "Rule No. 6".
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