This gun says you ain’t leaving until my PC is fixed ABDUCTION 151228046, 2700 block of S. Grove Street. At approximately 11:00 a.m. on December 28, a male subject refused to let a computer technician leave the residence until his computer was fixed. The suspect allegedly had a gun in his possession and threatened to kill the victim. Joseph Nestor Mondello, 50, of Arlington VA was …
We sadly have had a mixed bag.
Some are excellent and get the job done quickly and professionally.
The one we never forget is the "technician" that took apart a Dell AIO using a powerdrill with a screwdriver bit. The problem was a cracked screen.
He shredded 2 screws taking it apart, fitted the new screen, shredded another 2 putting it back together (this included a lot of grunting and the sound of the ratchet slipping) only to find he had managed to crack the new screen.
We got a whole new PC and never saw him again.
Mine too. Once you have persuaded the muppet on the end of the line that there is a problem, it is not a driver problem, yes it has been tested extensively and it is not a BIOS upgrade that is required (machine normally has at least 20 clones, all working properly.
Bottom line is, once you can actually get them out, no problem at all.
I was a TV repairman in the days of all-valve TVs, where stability was an 'interesting' concept.
One particular customer would insist on repairs being done at a time of day when the test card was showing, and when completed would get a ruler and measure the dimensions of the image on the screen. He had a list of the sizes he considered were correct, and would not let you leave until they were 'correct'. In those days, the picture would often 'breathe' depending on the difference between the scan rate and the local mains frequency.
Nobody ever got out of there in less than three hours.
Excellent story! (unless you were there for the 3 hours, of course)
I use to be a TV engineer for Rediffusion in Norwich back in the 1970s. We never had that specific problem though we did have one particular customer who used to swap all the valves around in his set and then call us to put them back into the correct sockets. Being quite hardy things there was (mostly) no damage done to the valves.
I was sysadmin for a Pr1me machine for ~4 years in the early 80s. Usually the field engineers were brilliant. However, there was one who I'd rather lock out of the machine room rather than lock in. Australian and very accident prone. Used to take working boards out and then manage to break them by treading on them and once dropped a bolt into a washing machine disk drive that was spinning with its lid open. Shudder.
a washing machine disk drive that was spinning with its lid open.
Let me guess, he had just disabled the interlock to diagnose a problem? Otherwise it shouldn't do that.
A colleague of mine walked in to a computer room to see an, ahem, solidly-built workman standing on the lid of an RP06 (Memorex) disk drive. Those have a sliding lid to load and unload the pack. A glass lid.
As he wasn't too keen on scraping shredded bits of leg from between the remains of the platters and heads, and the tub, he grabbed the guy by the belt and yanked him backwards.
A few years back, we had major problems with a Cisco router, and the vendor's "support" messed us about big style.
Eventually, an engineer turned up with a replacement router, which fixed the problem. Unfortunately, he was told to take it back to base as another customer needed it (presumably one that paid them more than we did).
When he gave me the news, I called in other staff and the exits to the machine room were rapidly barricaded. A senior manager said "Call your boss, explain the situation, then I would like to have a cosy chat with him or her because you're not leaving with that router".
After a two minute not-so-cosy chat, the engineer was told not to be so bloody silly, and leave the router in place. We then agreed to let him go, and the following morning I received an apology from the vendor. It didn't affect our relationship with them, but they did think twice before messing us about after that.
Our accounts department had Amber. They hot-desked, so whenever a machine broke, she'd swap places with the unfortunate, and phone in the problem to IT. The rest of us mere mortals, who weren't such stunners, got our hardware problems resolved in a couple of hours. She could guarantee a tech crawling under her desk within ten minutes.
ahhh one of 'those' users.......
i particularly hate the ones who sit on issues for months..and then when i absolutely have to be onsite..then they have a laundry list of stupid stuff they NEED..... bigger icon, smaller icon..this border is black...why can't i print to x printer....blah blah blah......
:)
I had a tale from a colleague once who was locked into an un CRAC'd comms cupboard by a client employee he'd annoyed at some point by doing something reasonable like reporting the porn he was downloading on the company ISDN or something. Apparently it was genuinely hot in there, and he was feeling genuinely woozy, before he started shutting down the servers.
Ended with the door being unlocked by the MD, who eff'd and jeff'd at mate before stopping and realising that the key he had taken was still in his hand - the employee had just left the key in the door so the MD hadn't used his - rather making the point that mate wasn't pissing about when he said he'd been locked in, and that he hadn't just, say, accidentally tripped over a the mains sockets, etc.
Shortly thereafter apologies came, names were named, CCTV was checked and said employee was marched off site by security without references under the threat of arrest.
Never knew how 'strictly' true that tale was (the MD seeing, but not realising the implication of the key in the door, for example), but knowing the guy....yeah, it wouldn't shock me. He was a magnificently ruthless bastard, but he was rarely wrong. A dangerous mix. He wasn't one for bullshitting that I ever spotted, either, and had a collection of other tales from the coalface that we all have that were perfectly believable so I'm inclined to believe that he at least did get locked in a server room, killed the servers to make a point, and got away with it.
I've been in positions where I've had to head back to base to pick up some extra bits etc (more often than not, things I thought I had in the car, but found out I didn't - CAT5 cables, RAM, my entire bloody toolkit...), and I've had customers get shirty with me about this, but usually a quick "dude, you know where I work, I'm hardly going to go into hiding over a network cable and the travel time I can't really charge you, am I?" cleared the air well enough.
I did have one guy 'jokingly' threaten to block his driveway to prevent me leaving after I didn't think to take a spare modem with me and I'd have to go back to get one (it really didn't sound modemy over the phone, more browsery); not taking that too kindly, I 'jokingly' suggested that I had several sharp objects on my person due to the nature of my job, an interest in finding alternate uses for them, and an inclination to react badly to being backed into a corner which might make him reconsider being locked in a house with me - all delivered calmly with a pleasant smile on my face - which quickly shot down that conversation, and got him blacklisted from our services (after a modem and router swap fixed him - I'm not a complete bastard)...
...I guess a Glock changes that balance of power somewhat though.
I'm so glad I don't do customer site work any more, and especially private home visits. There are some right odd ones out there.
The only time I have encountered a "customer" like that, he ended up backing away very slowly, and dropping his baseball bat.
His PC had shat itself, and I hadnt grabbed all necessary components from my car to fix it when I walked into his apartment. When I told him I had to go down to my car to grab a part, he started ranting that I was going to leave without fixing his computer, and insisted on following me (with baseball bat) to ensure I returned.
Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for him, that day was the one day in the week where I actually had swords and armour packed in the car (was in a medieval reenactment club at the time). I just wish I had a third hand to hold the camera to record his face when he saw the viking hand axes appear.
I did go back in to finish the job, he did pay promptly (in cash), and even threw in a bit extra to "apologise" for his behavior.
Unlikely. Re-enactment weapons are generally heavier than the real thing, because they are made of approximately the correct material, but are blunt not sharp.
Injury is avoided by pulling the blow just before impact. How well that has to be done depends on the armour of the opponent. (If it is just a loincloth and a gladiator helmet it has to be done really well).
Nope, they are the real deal, with the exception of lack of ultra sharp edge. You also have to take into consideration, that a lot of medieval swords and axes weren't as sharp as is often portrayed in the movies, as a sharp edge would very easily be curled over and damaged upon impact again armour, shield, or other weapon edge/haft.
These things were designed to go through metal armour first, and then into the flesh. Due to this, they often have edges about as sharp as butter knives, and rely on force of swing, and weight of weapon, to do the damage.
Way back when I worked for an Apricot dealer we had one network installation that was always playing up. We suspected power was part of the issue (it was a haulage company on an old industrial estate).
As one point the company owner got so fed up with the number of engineer visits that he tried blocking the car of the latest visitor in the car park, with the same threat. It didn't help (but then nothing much would have except major electrical works).
Been there- done it.
I'm certain the customer will get a customer satisfaction survey and mark the engineer down,
Dell live by how satisfied the customer is. doesn't matter they sell products that break down and they have to have use 3rd outsource technicians to fix it - who loose there contracts if they get bad customer satisfaction..
Used to work for a company that had 1000 cabinets in a computer, every direction looked the same.
It wasn't the case that the engineers were being held hostage, more like they couldn't get out. Found one once that had been trying to find the exit for 30 minutes and was getting rather worried.
As an opposite to hostage, had a DEC engineer on site to sort out a VAX issue, went back to see what he was up to and found bits of VAX all other the floor, some of the expletves were "What the f*ck are you up to", was asked to put it back together now, which he did after phone calls to another engineer. Suffice to say he was banned from site after that.
Never had a case like this, but having an agitated C*O on your back the whole time isn't going to help finish repairs either.
"So, are you going to keep me from actually working on the problem by continually demanding to know why it isn't done yet, or can you let me concentrate on finding and fixing it?".
Most of the customers I dealt with as DEC FS were on service contracts, so in that respect it wouldn't have hurt even if the problem took days to resolve. But yeah, "Not letting me get to my car to fetch the spare part I need to fix this problem will just add $monetary_quantity/hour to your bill" should add a certain persuasion to terminating the standoff.
I was a field service engineer back in the nineties, and my patch included Norfolk.
One day I went to a gentleman who was a little strange. I nearly stood on a dead rabbit as I entered his house, which he said was going to be his dinner. He wasn't threatening, but just really creepy and the house was full of shotguns. The next week when I had to go back, I rang the office from a payphone on the village green (mobile signal stopped at Cambridge in those days) and told them I was about to go in to Mr Yokel's house, and if they didn't hear from me in an hour's time, to call the police. They found this very funny.
My next job was also field service. One of my colleagues got locked in by a little old lady, somehow he called the police and she got a telling off.
Here's the best tale. It was circa 1999, and this whole Internet thing was taking off and everyone wanted to get connected. The firm I worked for sold PCs, and some genius decided that for a small fee, punters could have an engineer unpack their PC, set it up, get them signed up with an ISP and show them how to use the mouse. We hated it, as we had enough to do fixing stuff. It would take an hour and twenty minutes at best by the time you'd unpacked all the peripherals out of the cardboard boxed and got the sodding 5.1 speakers out of the little plastic bags.
Anyway, one day I was sent to a less well-off suburb of Peterborough. Long story short, the bloke didn't have a credit card, and you needed a credit card to sign up to the ISP.
I plugged the whole thing in, printer, scanner, the lot. "Am I on the Internet?" said the customer. I broke the news as best I could. He got a bit funny and told me to take the PC away. I didn't have that authority, so I phoned Customer Service and explained the situation. At this point, he got out two large oriental swords and started swinging them around.
I noted that he was between me and the front door, and that door was locked.
My exact thought at the time was "I wonder what will happen next."
I played Snake on my trusty Nokia whilst the punter swung his swords round the kitchen. After a couple of minutes he said "It seems, Mr McCann, you are unable to help me."
"So it would seem", I said. He let me out, and I jumped in the car and locked the doors.
Company policy was changed after that.
Way back when I was working an entry level job that didn't pay much I fixed computers on the side to make ends meet. My rates were low partially due to my relative inexperience at the time (I was, after all, in my early 20s and didn't even have a degree yet) and partially to undercut the local computer shops I had to compete with.
I once had a guy take a swing at me when I told him that his motherboard was fried and that I'd have to order him a new one so it would be about a week. Unfortunately for him I'm well versed in self defense. I left while he was picking himself up off the floor and never took another of his calls. Sadly I didn't get paid for the diagnosis I'd already done, but all things considered I decided it was well worth losing $25 (did I mention I kept my rates low?) to not have to deal with him again.
I heard later that he'd taken his computer to a shop known for charging significantly more than any other shop in town (and about 3 times my rates at the time) and got told the same thing. Plus as I understand it they took a month to get his motherboard in. The satisfaction I derived from that news made me feel a little guilty.
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