You probably know the well known T-Shirt from ThinkGeek: No, I will not fix your computer .
There is also the opposite syndrome, very well known too, that many IT geeks have both in their professional life and in their personal life.
Fitzgerald (the geek) will come in your house, look at your PC, and say: ‘gosh!!! you don’t have the latest / greatest / super cool version of BestOperatingSystem !’.
You ‘nope, is it a problem?’
Fitzgerald ‘well, not exactly …. BUT with the new version of BestOperatingSystem you will have this feature you can’t live without!!!!’
You ‘and so?’
Fitzgerald ‘waiting for our pizza to come, I can install it for you: it’s just a matter of 10 minutes’
And here starts the hell …he will lately discover that:
- you don’t have a decent ADSL so it takes hours to download the upgrade
- the PC is so old that the modem drivers are not working with the new version
- you don’t have a recovery disk
- you don’t have a disk with the old operating system because it was installed, in weeks, by another friends of yours
- …
The results is that he goes home and you don’t have a PC working any longer.
What’s even worst is that often this mind set is used also in professional life … and you don’t have email for days!!!
PierG
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June 19, 2008 at 11:51 pm
lucacar
PierG,
I agree with you, this happens too often also in professional life.
fortunately it’s now possible to avoid these situation creating virtual machines on external drives or mirroring disks before anyone is touching your PC (or worse your server!!!)
but too often we ara not using these tools and the scenario you mentioned is visible everywhere… both small companies so as large companies.
I’m always telling custoers, so as friends that there is no job in ITvjust taking few minutes. When you tell it will takes minutes, be sure something will get wrong and minutes becomes hours….
-luca