Where can small businesses go for quality tech support at a reasonable price?

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T22:22:53.124938+00:00

That's my thought too, we're running a business too, and bigger clients means bigger profits. Small needy clients eat away at the bottom line. She wouldn't be needy though, so I think she may have luck getting a company like yours or mine to do a network assessment for a fee, and quote out an infrastructure improvement project. I think she would scoff at what we would charge to take her on as a full client though, she couldn't justify the expense.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T21:36:03.872404+00:00

That's what we do as well, I don't think we're looking to take on clients as small as hers though, but maybe that's just us.

jitsuboy · 2012-05-23T20:09:52.130650+00:00

I think Sage does user training of some kind. Some of our clients use it and I know they send a few people to workshops every year or couple of year. Don't know much beyond that though.

DrToonz · 2012-05-23T18:17:21.516478+00:00

Maybe:

The ship that crashed at roswell was a scout for the fleet, which was not some roaming war party, but rather a colonization or migration effort. Think Battlestar Galactica. The scouts found a world with a suitable environment and sent the message (or flew) back to the fleet. The fleet changed course and arrived 50 years later - as fast as they could get there.

You can't reboot a space ship, if you're spaceship ran on Windows XP, you can't pull over and update to Windows 7.

The threat of a computer virus was so minuscule that they didn't have safeguards when they left 'home' and it's reasonable to expect that some alien race wouldn't be able to hack it. They may or may not have known that the scout wasn't destroyed, and even then, if the survival of your species meant taking the risk that some primitive race might have reverse engineered some of your tech, would you give up and keep sailing?

The bigger plot hole is that they were able to create the virus at all. It was probably something analogous to a DDOS, with their modified ship overloading the mothership with data. A species with telepathic communication and a hive mind is probably less likely to design a system that's compartmentalized enough to limit the effect of this kind of attack.

DrToonz · 2012-05-23T18:00:54.554384+00:00

Maybe something like conscious vs unconscious weightlessness.

In the van your body is merely experiencing sensations of weightlessness, your mind cannot attribute a reason or understand it.

In the dream, the sensations of weightlessness appear, but your mind is active, and while it might not understand the reason, it can accept it as a fact.

You go into the next dream, and your mind 'fixes' gravity.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:53:53.704036+00:00

I've got a Gerber Shard on my keychain. The phillips head cuts plastic and stickers as well as a key, and is the right size to get into a computer case. The bottle opener may well be the most important feature.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:51:06.435988+00:00

Well, the deodorant I keep at the office, along with a spare toothbrush, toothpaste and a shitty razor. All have been handy once or twice after a rushed morning or late night.

The jacked I keep in my bag along with a very streamlined set of tools. I work for an MSP, so I travel often. It's nice to be able to walk into a client's office dry. A plastic poncho would fit the bill too, but this looks and fits much better.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:47:30.367326+00:00

The proper way to decommission a hard drive.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:46:30.604666+00:00

I should really do that instead of spending the time browsing the web aimlessly. Lately I've been pulling up netflix during late night hurry-up-and-wait sessions.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:45:36.439999+00:00

List of numbers would be good, and I used to keep money, then one day I was hungry so I turned it into a Spicy Chicken Sandwich and ate it. I suppose I should restock.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:43:58.922556+00:00

That's on my shopping list. Need to find a good one.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T16:43:01.845872+00:00

That second option is where I think I'll offer my services. I'll see if I can get a good map of her network, and definitions of basic services and functions. Audit everything basically. Any work that I see that needs to be done, I'll tell her exactly what to ask for from her local shop.

Then when she has (major) issues, I'll have her email me first for some insight.

For example, in the most recent situation of a virus. Through the audit and improvement I would like to personally do, I would have set her up with a decent backup system (if she doesn't have one already.) She would email me, explain the situation in her own words, I would reply saying:

"Tell the IT guys that you've got a virus, and to have them try to remove it. If they can't remove it in a reasonable time, have them back up your data and restore the machine to the latest backup prior to the infection. According to my records, that should be May 20th, at 9pm."

That would help ease the communication barrier and give the IT guys a place to start.

Now, the obvious danger here for me is that I become the unpaid 24/7 on call guy. She's been really good about not running to me first, but it's to the point where now when she tells me what's going on I wonder "Why the hell didn't you call me first?". She's a very professional person, and we might be able to draft some sort of agreement for any actual work I do without damaging our relationship. Most likely it will become a barter: Free IT in exchange for free Vet services, which I'm completely okay with.

bandman614 · 2012-05-23T14:53:39.229571+00:00

Well, if I didn't thank you for the inspiration earlier, I thank you now!

fatbastard79 · 2012-05-23T14:21:21.012045+00:00

mkosmo · 2012-05-23T14:20:25.350888+00:00

/r/talesfromtechsupport

or perhaps it could fall under a "Job Woes" or a general "can you believe the shit I put up with?" tag.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T14:16:00.234379+00:00

True, but I'm 1000 miles away and couldn't support her during business hours.

I will probably take an in-depth look at her systems next time I'm up there and come up with some ideas that she can take to a local company (know any good folks in Des Moines?).

I try to give her the foundation to have conversations with her go-to guys. The problem is that she doesn't know the 'language' to explain her problems or get what she wants, and they have no incentive to offer suggestions for improvement. They seem like the kind of company that would rather give you what you ask for, ignoring any other problems they might see because they know you'll come to them when it becomes an emergency - because you'd be willing to pay more then.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T13:37:14.837399+00:00

Also, I don't know how to properly cross post.

bandman614 · 2012-05-23T13:34:48.878197+00:00

Someone on here a while back wrote that they heavily comment their scripts, but use special tags for high-level documentation:

## Verbing the Noun
## -Verbs the Noun by adverbly verbing the adjective noun.
# switch the comment for debugging
# noun = verb -adjective -debug noun
noun = verb -adjective noun

They then wrote a script that pulled out all the ## and dumped it in a text file, giving you an output that was something of a hybrid between a definition and pseudocode.

For quick scripts, it's very low-effort, which would make me more likely to document.

AgentSnazz · 2012-05-23T04:27:08.925960+00:00

I'm wondering if the best thing for her to do would be to find a larger local company, probably a well-established MSP, and hire them for a one-time project to fix any problems with her infrastructure, set up minimal-oversight backups, and document the hell out of everything so the next guy that comes in on break-fix can approach the problem with some intelligence.

WhichFawkes · 1 day

First one to pass out loses!

AgentSnazz · 1 day

That would be my procedure in house. Today's case was a client on his laptop two states away. Told him to be extra suspicious for the next few days.

AgentSnazz

TROPHY CASE

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