I had a similar experience yesterday with a paying customer. Something they broke, by messing with things they shouldn't have been messing with netted them two storage arrays (about 5TB of storage) that no longer had any useful data on them.
All because they wanted to save a few hundred dollars and not call the vendor, us!
Well, we've been billing at $275/hour for the past two days to fix their money saving service activity and when we are done, they'll have to recover from tape.
Of course, they want things done yesterday, complaining about the response, citing their contract. I just remind them, as politely as possible that this is a mess of their own creation, not covered by the contract, and that I can concentrate on finding a solution much better and probably faster if my phone doesn't ring every 5 minutes by some new manager calling me.
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Quote:
Lastly, how do you guys deal with those people that become overwhelmed and defensive with anything computer related?
Perhaps you need to frame their situation differently... Do the work and use general terms to explain what you are doing. I have the downfall of explaining exactly what the issue; I need to stick to something like: You have issues with the security of your computer. We need to work thru the issues to get you back running correctly. I'm going to need to do several things.... and so on. Using "We" usually helps, connoting a team effort. When someone crashes in and starts mucking with the "P" of a PC, people can get territorial.
If not...
do the minimum, pack up, leave; identify more appreciate pro-bono candidates.
It may be abrupt but doing $50-$75/hr work (for free) that is occasionally aggravating enough without additional emotional stress.
I work in IT (don't do PC work) and have spent 10s of HOURS fixing people's computers and educating them. When my advice is not heeded it smacks of a professional insult, and consequences of not heeding my advice are no crisis in my mind.
Plenty of appreciative people out there