Recurring themes "am I been ripped off" and "it should only take an hour"

Lum

Anyone with a Microsoft Certified <whatever> isn't going to be doing work for home users as frankly home user work is a pain in the backside, pays crap money and half the time the customer ignores all your advice and promptly goes and reinfects their machine the next time they visit a dodgy !!!!!!/warez/coupons site and get an obvious scam pop up that claims they have a virus so click here to install TotallyLegitNotAScamHonestChineseAntiVirus.exe published by Microsodt Corp. Then they blame you for not fixing the problem and want it fixing again for free.

Those certificates are expensive to get and are only actually useful for getting past clueless HR departments and into the interview stage. If the company is really IT clueless (most are) then they'll probably get hired too, then proceed to screw everything up.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-08-31/ still rings true 11 years after it was published.

I wonder if Kwik Fit run a certification scheme for their "engineers"?


(As for the Cisco certs, they are even more expensive to get and only cover enterprise networking equipment. I know that Linksys routers are branded as Cisco these days, but the Cisco cert only covers the proper Ciscos, the ones that cost more than your computer and are configured with a command line not a web interface.)

Strider590

^^ I think Lum just hit the ugly nail on the head, you need certificates to get past HR, you need experience to do the job.

And the Dilbert comic strip is 100% spot on, the number of times i've had almost that exact situation is untrue.

On the home user side, utter pain in the neck. They usually hand the PC over to a 10 year old to "fix", before they bring it to you in pieces and with a HDD full of malware. You then get treated with contempt because they see you as making too much money, for doing what a 10 year old can do.

Lum

Don't forget the part where you open the PC up and find the entire thing caked in a thick mixture of dust and brown sludge from being kept in a tiny room and used by a chain smoker, possibly with mould growing inside from when the above mentioned 10 year old somehow shoved a digestive biscuit through the gaps between the drive bays. Got to scrape all that crap out to stop the thing overheating on you.

I used to keep latex gloves in my IT toolkit, these days I just refuse to do home user work except for my immediate family.

Bonus points if they get really arsey because you can't actually update their pirate copy of Windows XP as the key (FCKGW, naturally) is blocked and you refuse to give them a new pirate copy with a key MS haven't blocked yet and accuse you of trying to rip them off if you suggest they buy a legit copy.

Strider590

mikey72 wrote: »

Probably the most copied items, along with light bulbs.
At £14, that's better than trade, so as you say, if it's too good to be true....

The fakes are mostly the increasingly popular "Aero" type blades, which I avoided like the plague. I just went with the standard super plus blades. They had a date of manufacture 2008, which makes me think these have been bought as surplus or rejected stock from a car manufacturer.
With the way that quality control works, often tens of thousands of perfectly good parts can be scrapped if just one part is found to have a major fault and batch traceability has failed to isolate just a small number of parts (Seen this in action myself).

Unless the supply chains can be infiltrated, the real market for fake goods is selling to individuals who go looking for a deal on fashionable/popular items.

in_the_Cotswolds

Strider590 wrote: »

I'm sorry, but it's the truth in far too many garages up and down the country, mechanics may not speak directly to customers, BUT they do get paid to find more work on each job.
The large tyre/exhaust outlets account for a VERY large portion of the market and we all know exactly what they're like!

I'm afraid I disagree with you. I have never been paid to find extra work. This applied in any and all of the garages I've worked in. Nearly all of them were main dealers. The customer can always ask for the parts to be kept so they can examine them. Yes as a mechanic I was frequently called to speak to customers.

You are however correct about tyre and exhaust centers. One elderly customer of a garage I worked in went in for a tyre and came out with 2 rear shock absorbers and a complete exhaust system.

Lum

So in reality you agree with him then, since those tyre and exhaust places do make up a significant chunk of the market for garage/mechanic services.

As for the "aero" blades, the only ones I'll get are Valeo ones from my local motor factor. I tried the Tesco ones only to have the mounting mechanism snap off while I was doing 70 on a DC road in the wet. Also tried some other brand, TMC or something like that. They come in red packaging and are not curved so only the centre of the blade actually touches the windscreen for a significant amount of the swipe.

The Valeo blades are lovely though, work really well and providing you remove the stupid sticker that purports to tells you when they're worn out, they last for ages!