I don’t know what has been going on this week, but it seems like people are out of their minds still.  My co-workers still are quite lazy.  I ended up doing all the work tonight even while I had help, and then spent the remainder of the night finishing most of the work by myself; having a lot to do does not bother me as much as having a lot to do, while everyone else stands around, wasting time.  The way people think, eludes reason, I believe.  One woman came in wanted a SD card that was crammed into her laptop pulled out, even at the expense of the slot.  She was even wiling to pay and have it yanked out.  One guy did all the troubleshooting himself and the proceeded to question my knowledge, and I got to drop my long list of certifications on his ass — which didn’t really stop him much, but it isn’t everyday I can pull out that list.  Most people interrupt after about two Microsoft certifications.  I’m just tired of people coming in, throwing tanrums because their computer or other piece of equipment got fix.  It is way to common for us to fix somthing and then turn around to an angry customer because they agreed to have it fix at a certain price, and now they want the repair to be free. More often than not, we give in granting them free work — teaching them that throwing a tantrum in a public place, like a little spoiled child, will always get them what they want.  Our whole upper level of management refuse to stand up to them and say ‘no’.  When anyone tells a customer no, they end up looking like the wrong party, because management turns around and bows to the customers whims.  I believe, the customer is not always right.  It depends on the situation.  It seems like no matter how hard we work to be the best techs in the district, we are never good enough.  Our turn time is never good enough, we don’t make enough money, we don’t outsource our jobs enough — always something isn’t good enough.  I’ve probably just spent too much time in the big box for the last couple of week — everyone has been taking back to back vacations, and I’m the one picking up the slack for the missing person. I don’t know what we are going to do when everyone is back from vacation.  We are barely making enough money to support being short one person.  I think they need to fire two or three of the guys, but my opinion doesn’t really count when it comes to hiring/firing people — likely I’d be one of the first ones against the wall when it comes to being fired.

People have been out-of-their minds for the last several days.  I had a guy come up to the counter on Monday and almost literaly throw a playstation 3 at me.  He was on his pissed off high horse, because he could not get any blu-rays to play on the console — he wasn’t runing the firmware updates, so they wouldn’t play.  What pissed me off royally, after he threw the console at me, he told me to fix the problem and the walked away.  A minute later, he shows back up with the general manager, who then treats me like an idiot.  The general manager wanted me to baby the guy, since “he spends a lot of money here.”  Yeah. . . .not going to happen.  Most people who come into the store spend a lot of money; why should one guy who treats people like shit get special treatment over everyone else?

(more…)

Generally, I don’t understand why people act they way they do.  After working at the big box for several months, people make even less sense than before.  If you are an actual A+ certified technician, then you should know how to replace your own power supply and not call us and scream at me like a little spoiled baby when I tell you I’m not going to exchange a computer over four months outside of policy.

Everyday is a new crazy adventure.  Not only the customers are off the wall, but the employees are off-the-wall too.  I don’t see how one kid even got hired as a tech.  Every day I find out he doesn’t know something basic — for example, he did not know how to launch an administrative command prompt in Windows Vista.  Something simple as right-clicking and chosing “run as administrator.”  I can understand not knowing all the nuances of working the command prompt, even I don’t know everything about the command prompt, but I know enough to figure what will get the job done in the simplest way.  I feel like I can barely trust any of the other guys, except for our supervisor.  He is the only one who is probably more computer savvy than I.  Half of the guys are barely useful; when most of them work the same shift, nothing gets done.  I have, multiple times, had back to back days off and come back to find everything in the exact same place, and not a single thing has been done to fix the problem — even if I write explict instructions on what to do.  Everything the non-tech kid checks a computer in, it blows up in my face.  The other week, he checked in a computer that was “randomly powering off.”  After checking it over for eight hours, I was unable to reproduce the problem and left a note telling them to close out the computer.  Two days later, it was still there and more messed up than when I had left.  They ended up screwing up the system so much, that the only way was to reload Windows.  The reload then turned into a nightmare.   The computer’s owner showed back up the day after picking it up screaming at me because the system would now blue screen at boot, and her web cam stopped working.  I spent, at least, a hour fixing the problems caused by a sloppy clean install and talking the customer down. She ended up leaving happy and I haven’t seen the computer come back yet.

Thu Apr 30 01:33:45 +0000 2009 I’m at Hendersonville, NC 28791, USA (, Hendersonville NC 28791)