We had to know everything... somehow

[MrSmiley]

This could be under the Management section, but it also belongs here in Technical stories so...

Around the time Starcraft announced it would have to be delayed for another year, I worked as a sales drone at a computer shop that's no longer in business. The owner was a grouchy old business man, somewhat tempered by his wife who also worked there, and most of the employees were teenager or 20-something folks who had been playing on computers for years. Thus with this wealth of geekdom, the owner expected that every new product that would come in, software and hardware, the salespeople would learn about it so they could make knowledable sales.

Of course to do this we'd actually have to have manuals or demo units or a magazine telling us ABOUT the products we were trying to sell. The first wasn't allowed to be taken out of the box. Demo units were allowed but most of the time we didn't have time to set them up... and of course if there was a customer in the store we were supposed to drop everything for them at all times (and also follow them around asking if they needed to be helped... and this was in a rather small store, so theoretically we could take 5 steps in any direction and still be within respectable range of a customer). The third was actually viable... the owner would let us take ONE tech/game/whatever magazine home with us to read when we weren't working. Of course nothing ever seemed to be covered in just one magazine.

Almost once a week, the owner would bitch someone out for not knowing anything about whatever product he had ordered in and was trying to sell. He'd be especially angry if this was in response to him asking another employee about a product because, he didn't have time to learn anything about the stock he was ordering. We also weren't supposed to admit to any incompatibility with hardware or drivers because that made the company look bad... so it was all sell sell sell!

I also remember that he ordered a whole wall full of Tex Murphy: Overseer because the original game boxes had a gimmick of a blinking LED light... and the owner thought this would get people's attention and sell itself! It's not a bad game by any means (it's certainly better than most of Access' games, including previous Tex Murphy games) but everyone in the store had to look at this insane looking wall of blinking LED lights on cardboard boxes.

We were also a store that sold Apple products, before Apple rose like a Phoenix from their previous status and developed their own store chain. Unfortunately everyone the owner hired was a PC person and so there was really nobody employed in the store who knew what the hell to do with Apple products other than plug all the parts together (Apple hardware has always been pretty easy) and cross fingers.

The computer store was also near a radio shack and the owner would get angered when we let customers "get away" to go to that other store. Of course there was no way to prevent this, since we couldn't be rude and walk in front of the customer. And we couldn't come up with discounts on the spot to entice customers (though we could talk at length about products they customer had no intention to buy and how great they were).

I finally got fired from that job after some time, through my own fault, because a customer had asked for something "in writing" for what sales pitch I was giving him. Apparently this is a big no-no... and doubly so because I had the price wrong anyway. So this screwup got me canned... and I was pretty happy to leave. The store lasted another year with maybe 2 employees staying until the end and then closed forever.

[Kullervo]

Its like the story of my beginnings.
Well except I was one of those teenager employees to stay at the store till they quite litterally shut off the utilities.

I considered the entire experience the murder of my love of pc diagnostics.
I will say I learned alot while I worked there. But thinking back. Whole lotta crap.

[Shalom]

I was one of those teenager employees to stay at the store till they quite literally shut off the utilities.

Anybody here from Western New York?

I lost my unix shell account when I graduated college. At that time, Slackware was the primary linux distro, but back then it was an assload of 1.44meg floppies that all had to be downloaded over a 14k4 dialup line and I didn't want to be bothered with that, so I went looking for a shell on a commercial provider. There was an ISP in Rochester, NY called Vivanet; I was in Buffalo at the time, and they had a POP there which you'd dial into it and it would telnet to the shell server in Rochester, thus saving me from what was then a fairly expensive long distance call.

(The city of Rochester was its own LATA, as the Rochester Telephone Co was never part of AT&T or New York Telephone. Calls to there were always LD from anywhere else in the state, even if it was only an hour's drive away.)

Now at some point we had begun noticing little things going wrong here and there. /tmp was filling up, stuff like that, and email to support wasn't answered. What the heck, it was mostly still working, so I shrugged it off. Then one day in maybe June of '97, I dial into the POP and it times out trying to connect to the server. That's weird, sez I. I try a couple times more, finally I try dialing in to the main dialup number in Rochester. It rings, but no answer.

I eventually found out that the company had gone bankrupt months ago, and the sysadmin had shut the lights, locked the doors, and walked away, leaving everything in place, up and running. It continued up and running for something like three months, entirely unattended, and didn't go down until the guys from M&T Bank finally broke down the door and repossessed the servers.

(Although it occurred to me later, the sysadmin could have SSHed in from elsewhere to do the maintenance stuff even after the place shut down, but he may have just said The hell with this noise, and washed his hands of the whole situation. Depends on how disgusted he was with it, I guess.)