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I have a second job as a part-time technician at a pretty major computer store. Due to some terminations we were in need of some new blood and hired two new technicians. One of them was a friend of mine and the other was probably the worst technician in the history of the industry. Below I will give a little background and character development on the technician. But, if you don’t have the time or desire to read the entire post then skip to the bottom where I highlight some of his more memorable moments.
My friend came in knowing that he didn’t know much and was open to learning and being taught by those who have been here for a while. This “kid” (approximately 21 but his maturity level was far below that) came in thinking he was some hot shot guy who was going to blow us all away with his amazing ability. Anyway, when my friend came into do his interview I came in towards the end of his interview so that I could go get a drink with him. As I was waiting on him I saw this kid dressed in a suit that looked like the biggest tool I had ever seen. I don’t know why I made so many assumptions on him based on his physical appearance…but the kid just came across that way and I had a bad feeling about him. I really try not to judge a book by its cover but it just could not be helped. He was awkward, severely over-weight (not that I have anything against that), trying to dress slick but looking disheveled at the same time. As my manager and friend came out I specifically told him, “You’d better not hire this guy. Please (name of manager), whatever you do don’t hire him. It’s going to be bad news.” A week goes by and the manager calls a department meeting; guess who I see there? Yep….THE technician (I will refer to him as THE TECHNICIAN from here on out).
My manager has everyone introduce themselves, new and old employees. When it came around to THE TECHNICIAN he got up and introduced himself and let us know that he worked at Geek Squad for a year and came here. He claimed that he might not have as much experience as us but was sure that he could keep up with us, if not surpass us. STRIKE ONE. As soon as he talked like that and mentioned Geek Squad at the same time I knew this guy would be a total bust. I hung my head in anticipation of all the crap that was going to be caused by him. Through the rest of the meeting when we were discussing our department and what our successes and failures were and what we could do to improve ourselves, THE TECHNICIAN kept chiming in as if he already knew everything about our department and would state the most obvious thing like. “We should fix the computers and then let the customers know.” No shit, Sherlock. I should also mention that we are the #1 store in technical services out of the 20+ stores in the chain. So we knew what we were doing. Most of this talk was just empty manager talk about trying to constantly improve ourselves. This guy had already, on his first day, started to rub all the existing technicians and the manager the wrong way.
I am going to try to keep the rest of this background story short so that I can hurry and get to the main attraction. During the rest of his stay in the service department THE Technician was the bane of our existence. He is one of those people that talk and talk about nothing. Instead of asking a question he will ramble on about irrelevant stuff before finally getting to the question that he needs asked, thus keeping us from concentrating on our work. God forbid he actually solves a problem. He will come to one of us and yap in our ear giving us the play by play about how he did this or that. He was totally oblivious to our disinterest and annoyance even when we stated it directly. His technical knowledge was lackluster at best and I think he broke more computers than fixed them. During the first 3 weeks he averaged 1 computer fixed per 15 hours when the minimum is supposed to be .75 computers per 1 hour. He would receive something simple like a memory install on a laptop that should take no more than 15 minutes if the computer is fine and just let it sit there and not tell anyone. Two hours would go by and he would still not touch it and customers would, of course, be extremely perturbed and yell at us for not having done the work yet. But what pissed us off more was that he would often just get up and leave our department and go onto the sales floor and chat with customers and sell them things. This would be fine if he was a friggin salesman, but he’s a technician. So we would start getting swamped with work orders but he would be gone for hours at a time. He didn’t even know what he was talking about and sell the customer incompatible stuff or stuff they didn’t need and then they would complain and slow things down even more. He would also constantly jerk his body around and almost convulse and mutter things like he was casting a spell and he spooked some of the co-workers. I think the guy had turrets so I was willing to ignore that since he couldn’t control it. I’m probably going to be missing some other stuff but already looking at what I’ve typed…it would take a book to talk about this kid. So I will just go onto his exploits. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he threatened to hurt or “take out” some of our coworkers who corrected him when he kept messing up….yeah this dude was crazy.
TAKE A LAP:
This kid was very emotionally unstable and excitable. A customer had bought a bunch of components and asked us to do a custom build and put it together for him. THE Technician took this one…but it should be no problem right? Not until he finishes putting the unit together and then the customer decides he wants another power supply. Again, it should be no problem. Take out the old one and swap it out with the new one. But instead, he starts hyperventilating and arguing with the customer. The customer is, understandably, angered and calls the manager over. The manager comes over and finds out what is wrong. He is totally confused as to why this is even a situation. He tells the kid to go “take a lap.” Anyone would understand this is a figurative phrase to go cool off. But no, he actually runs around the entire shopping complex and comes back huffing and puffing and almost in tears and crying because of chest pains. I think the manager might have called 911 because of him. Needless to say, the manager was far more careful about only talking to him in a literal fashion.
SQUARE INTO A ROUND HOLE
We use IDE/SATA to USB adapters to hook up internal hard drives to our computers for data backups. It is a little adapter that plugs into the back of the hard drive as if it were a cable leading to the motherboard with an associated power cord with a 4 pin molex tip. These drives and the power cord are keyed to fit in only one way. Yet somehow, THE Technician manages to plug it in the wrong way 3 times within the span of less than 2 months and fries the hard drives. The first time is understandable, because you might not be paying attention. But this guy was a supposed tech at Best Buy and he kept making the same mistake. It’s as if he could realize that the reason why a cord wouldn’t fit was because it wasn’t supposed to go in that way. Instead, he decided to manhandle it and make it fit.
SCREW YOU
We get a lot of repairs or upgrades for iMacs. These are probably one of the easier Apple units because disassembly is pretty straight forward. The customer wants a hard drive upgrade. No problem. THE Technician actually manages to get the case off and hard drive installed. However, re-assembly was another matter. He had not kept track of the screws properly and forgot what screws go where. When all was said and done he was left with 2 screws to screw the LCD unit to the case. Unfortunately, these were the wrong ones and were too long. But, he begins to try to screw the LCD in. Shortly after starting to screw it in he senses resistance as the screw can not go any further in the thread. Most normal people would unscrew it and check to see if it was the wrong screw. HELL, just by visual inspection you could tell that this screw was not for securing the LCD. But no, he was determined to make it work. He ignored the fact that the case resisted having the screw go in any further and he marched on. When all was said and done, he had taken two screws and screwed them so far that they punctured the back of the case and stuck a good ¼” out of the case.
SCREWS + VIDEO CARD + ELECTRICITY = BAD
THE Technician was looking at a unit that would not POST. So he did something pretty standard by pulling out some components to isolate the issue. However, as he unscrewed various cards he decided to take the screws and leave them on top of the video card that was still plugged into the motherboard. Once he was satisfied that he had only the key components left (motherboard, cpu, memory, video card, random screws on top of a circuit board) he turned the unit on to discover sparks flying from the unit as he fried the entire god danged computer.
There is more…but my hands are tiring and I have to get back to coding. So I will leave it at this for now. There are more stories about this guy that I will add to the thread if people want to hear more about him.
Update: 3/26/2008 - More stories ----------------------------------------------------------
THE BET
This incident was fairly recent. I think it was about a week or two before the guy got transferred to sales. Well, we had a store stock unit, aka. returned unit from customer, that needed to have the hardware checked and then a system restore done before slapping clearance stickers on it and putting it back out on the sales floor. He got through the diagnostics program OK enough but when it came time to restore the unit he could not get the unit to restore properly. He claimed that the unit crapped out when the progress bar hit a specific point. Him being the high-strung individual he was, of course, started getting extremely flustered and kept complaining to my manager. My manager, by this time, was tired of his incompetence.
Manager: “Are you sure it won’t restore?”
Him: “I am positive. I’ve tried everything I can.”
Manager: “What if I get the unit to restore?”
Him: “Huh?”
Manager: “Let’s make it interesting and put down a bet. What will you do or give me if I am able to restore the unit?”
Him: “Hmmm…ok I guess, sounds like fun. How bout lunch?”
Manager: “How about your job?”
Him: “Oh nooooo….I would never bet that!”
My manager walks over to the computer and hits F10 and starts the destructive restore process.
Him: “Ok, it will stop at this point. It always does!”
A few minutes pass by and the unit gets passed that point and eventually finishes restoring.
Manager: “OK, You lose your job.”
Him: “NONONONONO. I never agreed to that bet!”
My manager was half joking and half serious. But unfortunately he didn’t really fire him because of the potential for legal problems for firing a guy over a bet. Besides, the kid was practically in tears. To this day, I don’t know how the kid could mess up an automated restore process. My manager knows absolutely zip about technical stuff but he was able to do it.
SCREW YOU…Part 2
I swear this guy has the biggest problems with screws and keeping track of them or just knowing what should fit where. The computer in question was a MacBook Pro. You do anything to this computer and it’s going to be expensive. Well, he managed to take a unit that came in for a hard drive upgrade and broke three separate things on the computer. I honestly don’t know why he was assigned an Apple unit. He had been banned from being allowed to work on those after multiple screw ups, but he got it in his hands somehow. Actually, I think at this time he was banned from all customer units for the second time and limited to only store stock units. Anyway, he had to remove the keyboard in order to remove additional screws to take the top half of the case off to get to the hard drive. Well, I don’t know how he did it, but I guess he should yank at the keys to remove the keyboard. By doing so, he managed to break one of the keys off in a way where it could not be re-attached. Then once he go to the keyboard he decided to remove the hard drive but was not gentle in handling it and snapped the cable that attaches the hard drive to the motherboard. Fine, whatever, we replace these parts at the cost of the store. He re-attaches everything and screws everything up and hands the unit to the customer. The customer takes the unit home and then finds he can’t turn on the unit. The unit is brought back and given to another tech. That tech finds that the kid took a screw that was too long for the hole he screwed it into and it had managed to go through the threads and make contact with the board, shorting it out. I don’t know what happened after that and if the entire unit needed to get replaced or not. But we made sure he didn’t get another Apple unit.
My friend came in knowing that he didn’t know much and was open to learning and being taught by those who have been here for a while. This “kid” (approximately 21 but his maturity level was far below that) came in thinking he was some hot shot guy who was going to blow us all away with his amazing ability. Anyway, when my friend came into do his interview I came in towards the end of his interview so that I could go get a drink with him. As I was waiting on him I saw this kid dressed in a suit that looked like the biggest tool I had ever seen. I don’t know why I made so many assumptions on him based on his physical appearance…but the kid just came across that way and I had a bad feeling about him. I really try not to judge a book by its cover but it just could not be helped. He was awkward, severely over-weight (not that I have anything against that), trying to dress slick but looking disheveled at the same time. As my manager and friend came out I specifically told him, “You’d better not hire this guy. Please (name of manager), whatever you do don’t hire him. It’s going to be bad news.” A week goes by and the manager calls a department meeting; guess who I see there? Yep….THE technician (I will refer to him as THE TECHNICIAN from here on out).
My manager has everyone introduce themselves, new and old employees. When it came around to THE TECHNICIAN he got up and introduced himself and let us know that he worked at Geek Squad for a year and came here. He claimed that he might not have as much experience as us but was sure that he could keep up with us, if not surpass us. STRIKE ONE. As soon as he talked like that and mentioned Geek Squad at the same time I knew this guy would be a total bust. I hung my head in anticipation of all the crap that was going to be caused by him. Through the rest of the meeting when we were discussing our department and what our successes and failures were and what we could do to improve ourselves, THE TECHNICIAN kept chiming in as if he already knew everything about our department and would state the most obvious thing like. “We should fix the computers and then let the customers know.” No shit, Sherlock. I should also mention that we are the #1 store in technical services out of the 20+ stores in the chain. So we knew what we were doing. Most of this talk was just empty manager talk about trying to constantly improve ourselves. This guy had already, on his first day, started to rub all the existing technicians and the manager the wrong way.
I am going to try to keep the rest of this background story short so that I can hurry and get to the main attraction. During the rest of his stay in the service department THE Technician was the bane of our existence. He is one of those people that talk and talk about nothing. Instead of asking a question he will ramble on about irrelevant stuff before finally getting to the question that he needs asked, thus keeping us from concentrating on our work. God forbid he actually solves a problem. He will come to one of us and yap in our ear giving us the play by play about how he did this or that. He was totally oblivious to our disinterest and annoyance even when we stated it directly. His technical knowledge was lackluster at best and I think he broke more computers than fixed them. During the first 3 weeks he averaged 1 computer fixed per 15 hours when the minimum is supposed to be .75 computers per 1 hour. He would receive something simple like a memory install on a laptop that should take no more than 15 minutes if the computer is fine and just let it sit there and not tell anyone. Two hours would go by and he would still not touch it and customers would, of course, be extremely perturbed and yell at us for not having done the work yet. But what pissed us off more was that he would often just get up and leave our department and go onto the sales floor and chat with customers and sell them things. This would be fine if he was a friggin salesman, but he’s a technician. So we would start getting swamped with work orders but he would be gone for hours at a time. He didn’t even know what he was talking about and sell the customer incompatible stuff or stuff they didn’t need and then they would complain and slow things down even more. He would also constantly jerk his body around and almost convulse and mutter things like he was casting a spell and he spooked some of the co-workers. I think the guy had turrets so I was willing to ignore that since he couldn’t control it. I’m probably going to be missing some other stuff but already looking at what I’ve typed…it would take a book to talk about this kid. So I will just go onto his exploits. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he threatened to hurt or “take out” some of our coworkers who corrected him when he kept messing up….yeah this dude was crazy.
TAKE A LAP:
This kid was very emotionally unstable and excitable. A customer had bought a bunch of components and asked us to do a custom build and put it together for him. THE Technician took this one…but it should be no problem right? Not until he finishes putting the unit together and then the customer decides he wants another power supply. Again, it should be no problem. Take out the old one and swap it out with the new one. But instead, he starts hyperventilating and arguing with the customer. The customer is, understandably, angered and calls the manager over. The manager comes over and finds out what is wrong. He is totally confused as to why this is even a situation. He tells the kid to go “take a lap.” Anyone would understand this is a figurative phrase to go cool off. But no, he actually runs around the entire shopping complex and comes back huffing and puffing and almost in tears and crying because of chest pains. I think the manager might have called 911 because of him. Needless to say, the manager was far more careful about only talking to him in a literal fashion.
SQUARE INTO A ROUND HOLE
We use IDE/SATA to USB adapters to hook up internal hard drives to our computers for data backups. It is a little adapter that plugs into the back of the hard drive as if it were a cable leading to the motherboard with an associated power cord with a 4 pin molex tip. These drives and the power cord are keyed to fit in only one way. Yet somehow, THE Technician manages to plug it in the wrong way 3 times within the span of less than 2 months and fries the hard drives. The first time is understandable, because you might not be paying attention. But this guy was a supposed tech at Best Buy and he kept making the same mistake. It’s as if he could realize that the reason why a cord wouldn’t fit was because it wasn’t supposed to go in that way. Instead, he decided to manhandle it and make it fit.
SCREW YOU
We get a lot of repairs or upgrades for iMacs. These are probably one of the easier Apple units because disassembly is pretty straight forward. The customer wants a hard drive upgrade. No problem. THE Technician actually manages to get the case off and hard drive installed. However, re-assembly was another matter. He had not kept track of the screws properly and forgot what screws go where. When all was said and done he was left with 2 screws to screw the LCD unit to the case. Unfortunately, these were the wrong ones and were too long. But, he begins to try to screw the LCD in. Shortly after starting to screw it in he senses resistance as the screw can not go any further in the thread. Most normal people would unscrew it and check to see if it was the wrong screw. HELL, just by visual inspection you could tell that this screw was not for securing the LCD. But no, he was determined to make it work. He ignored the fact that the case resisted having the screw go in any further and he marched on. When all was said and done, he had taken two screws and screwed them so far that they punctured the back of the case and stuck a good ¼” out of the case.
SCREWS + VIDEO CARD + ELECTRICITY = BAD
THE Technician was looking at a unit that would not POST. So he did something pretty standard by pulling out some components to isolate the issue. However, as he unscrewed various cards he decided to take the screws and leave them on top of the video card that was still plugged into the motherboard. Once he was satisfied that he had only the key components left (motherboard, cpu, memory, video card, random screws on top of a circuit board) he turned the unit on to discover sparks flying from the unit as he fried the entire god danged computer.
There is more…but my hands are tiring and I have to get back to coding. So I will leave it at this for now. There are more stories about this guy that I will add to the thread if people want to hear more about him.
Update: 3/26/2008 - More stories ----------------------------------------------------------
THE BET
This incident was fairly recent. I think it was about a week or two before the guy got transferred to sales. Well, we had a store stock unit, aka. returned unit from customer, that needed to have the hardware checked and then a system restore done before slapping clearance stickers on it and putting it back out on the sales floor. He got through the diagnostics program OK enough but when it came time to restore the unit he could not get the unit to restore properly. He claimed that the unit crapped out when the progress bar hit a specific point. Him being the high-strung individual he was, of course, started getting extremely flustered and kept complaining to my manager. My manager, by this time, was tired of his incompetence.
Manager: “Are you sure it won’t restore?”
Him: “I am positive. I’ve tried everything I can.”
Manager: “What if I get the unit to restore?”
Him: “Huh?”
Manager: “Let’s make it interesting and put down a bet. What will you do or give me if I am able to restore the unit?”
Him: “Hmmm…ok I guess, sounds like fun. How bout lunch?”
Manager: “How about your job?”
Him: “Oh nooooo….I would never bet that!”
My manager walks over to the computer and hits F10 and starts the destructive restore process.
Him: “Ok, it will stop at this point. It always does!”
A few minutes pass by and the unit gets passed that point and eventually finishes restoring.
Manager: “OK, You lose your job.”
Him: “NONONONONO. I never agreed to that bet!”
My manager was half joking and half serious. But unfortunately he didn’t really fire him because of the potential for legal problems for firing a guy over a bet. Besides, the kid was practically in tears. To this day, I don’t know how the kid could mess up an automated restore process. My manager knows absolutely zip about technical stuff but he was able to do it.
SCREW YOU…Part 2
I swear this guy has the biggest problems with screws and keeping track of them or just knowing what should fit where. The computer in question was a MacBook Pro. You do anything to this computer and it’s going to be expensive. Well, he managed to take a unit that came in for a hard drive upgrade and broke three separate things on the computer. I honestly don’t know why he was assigned an Apple unit. He had been banned from being allowed to work on those after multiple screw ups, but he got it in his hands somehow. Actually, I think at this time he was banned from all customer units for the second time and limited to only store stock units. Anyway, he had to remove the keyboard in order to remove additional screws to take the top half of the case off to get to the hard drive. Well, I don’t know how he did it, but I guess he should yank at the keys to remove the keyboard. By doing so, he managed to break one of the keys off in a way where it could not be re-attached. Then once he go to the keyboard he decided to remove the hard drive but was not gentle in handling it and snapped the cable that attaches the hard drive to the motherboard. Fine, whatever, we replace these parts at the cost of the store. He re-attaches everything and screws everything up and hands the unit to the customer. The customer takes the unit home and then finds he can’t turn on the unit. The unit is brought back and given to another tech. That tech finds that the kid took a screw that was too long for the hole he screwed it into and it had managed to go through the threads and make contact with the board, shorting it out. I don’t know what happened after that and if the entire unit needed to get replaced or not. But we made sure he didn’t get another Apple unit.
I go to offer to help and keep things running while he's out. He refuses. I asked what software we used to see if maybe there was some replacement that would allow us to avoid this issue in the future. Turns out he was taking the databases and manipulating them on an old 386 using DOS macros rather than upgrading to a Windows based program that anyone could use. Jackass.
I went through the entire building, yanked out all the staples that pierced the cables, and put them back up with duct tape because I don't have the proper tools on hand. For the rest of the IT manager's vacation, the network was stable and ran fine. I received much praise. 
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