A Good Day at Work

It’s not every day that something one does causes another person to cry tears of joy. I got to experience this today, and although I wasn’t technically the sole cause, it was still pretty sweet.

There’s this old couple whose hard drive crashed; for those who don’t speak computer, I’ll boil it down to this: There was 1000 years of genealogical data on that hard drive, and they didn’t have a backup. This woman had spent nearly 50 years of her life compiling this data, and was now facing the prospect of retracing her steps and redoing all that work. That’s like the feeling of having to retype a term paper times 100,000. I don’t even want to think about the steps involved in making peace with that situation.

We took the hard drive to a data recovery guy. I just happened to pull his card out of my boss’ rolodex; I was looking for a different guy’s card. It was an old card, and out of date, and the number was not a working number. I had to look up the company — DataICU — on the internet and get the contact info that way. After doing his intial examination of the drive, he said he could get the data off, but would charge $750 bucks. Data recovery is not cheap. The old couple couldn’t pay this, so we just told him we’d be back to pick up the hard drive and maybe get the data off at a later date. We thought the matter was settled, and planned to just sell the couple a new computer for 500 bucks and call it a sad day.

DataICU then called and told my boss that in exchange for us considering him for our future data recovery needs, he would do the work pro bono. My boss’ eyes just about bugged out of his head, but what could he say but, “Um…ok!” We’re still working out how to properly reward DataICU, but we did agree to go and get the data and not pay for it. I loaded it on the new computer, and the 1000 years of family was restored and in perfect order. I couldn’t wait to visit the old couple and let them see this for themselves.

Before I went over to their house with the computer, my boss assured them they would be pleasantly surprised. He was underselling, not ready to fully believe that the data would actually work. I got out there, I played it cool, showed them some stuff, then proceeded to blow their mind with the surprise. With tears in her eyes, she went through the records of family after family, confirming that they indeed were all saved. Man, it was something I’ll never forget.
You gotta understand, the typical customer/client of ours exists on a continuum between strategically indifferent and strategically surly. People always want to squeeze as much a possible out of you, and feign confusion, disappointment, or outrage when you tell them that if they want you to install an extra printer it’ll be 50 extra bucks. I don’t usually get to see satisfaction (much less tears of joy) from these people. Her tears totally made up for my horrible day yesterday when some chick who looked like Rosie O’ Donnell took credit for my work after I abruptly had to leave before I could make sure it was done (due to my having to get the van back because another tech didn’t want to drive his car through Farmer’s Branch — long story), causing the owner of the business in question to call my boss and ask why I sucked so bad that I couldn’t fix a problem but local moron Rosie O’ Donnell was just able to walk up to the keyboard and hit a few keys and fix it herself, causing my boss to ask me, “Wha happan…?” which caused me to nearly flip out but also remember the lessons I was taught, the first lessons of on-site service, which is, “Never talk to customers unless you absolutely have to, and always act as though you have complete control of the situation (even if that’s a lie). People don’t want honesty; if they did, there would be no posers or brown-nosers. You have to walk around like a soulless machine with no emotions that spits out solutions to computer problems like an online reference book, even when everyone around you displaying every emotion they have all the time no matter how inappropriate or paranoid or manipulative those emotions might be. That’s called professionalism, and while it won’t stop people from complaining, it will stop them from knowing what to complain about.”