I find that there are 3 main "types" of people in the PC industry...
- Thread starter xenium
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tlarkin
VIP Member
My manager cannot do my job. It's not that he hasn't done 'grunt' work for so long he forgot either. I know all IT managers aren't this way but stereotyping them is fun
True story. I was 18 years old and had my first tech job ever. PC tech for a chain of computer equipmen resellers. Supported customer and did warranty work for all the equipment we sold. My very first pain in the ass client had purchased a free PC. Some of you may remember that MSN was offering a 400 dollar rebate if you signed for a three year contract with them when you purchased a new computer. Which made all entry level computers pretty much free. They had 32 MB of RAM, came with Windows 98se, had integrated everything (nic, video, audio, riser modem, etc) and like a 6 gig HD, and a celeron 400Mhz processor. Not the greatest PC ever, but one that could do basic office word processing and internet surfing. The video shared 8MB of the ram, so it was running on 24MB of ram. Which is actually enough to run windows 98, but really you needed like 128mb of ram for it to run well and multi task.
This client also just happened to be MCSE certified and was bringing the computer in because it was locking up at a certain point. We ran a diagnostics program called PC Check, which is fairly decent and in fact I still use the current version to this day. It runs your hardware through a series of tests and detects defects. For the most part it is fairly accurate. I run a full hardware diagnostic on his system and it comes back flying colors. So I then decided to poke around in the BIOS and see if anything was different, also by default I would set it back to optimal or default settings as part of a troubleshooting process. I noticed that he had turned the RAM down to 2 MB to the video and had set the HD up in user mode, and did not have LBA enabled. So, I was like well this looks fishy, so I changed everything back to auto and re-enabled LBA mode, and changed the shared memory to the video card back to 8MB.
I couldn't find the problem so I had him come in and show me when it occured. It happened when the screen saver came on, some .dll file was messed up and it would lock the system. I was like well that is most likely software related problem. He disagreed with me and kind of got mad (I think he wanted a replacement computer). He said he had just formatted the machine and did a clean install of everything, which was Office 97 and windows 98se was the only software he had running on this computer. He then proceeded to ask me about all of my qualifications, and that if I was certified (at the time all I had were company training internal certs, and my A+) so I told him what certs I had, and he busted out that he was MCSE certfied and that he thought I was wrong. I told him that the sreen saver crashing and locking the whole system is probably software related considering his machine had passed all diagnostics with flying colors.
Next I showed him the BIOS and told him that someone (of course not blaming him) had changed some settings around that probably should not have been messed with. He told me he went in there and did that because you have to set the cylinders and the heads manually in the BIOS for the HD. This was like in 1999 when this happened, and I told the guy no that auto mode was sufficient with today's BIOS. And that LBA mode also gave support for disks over 2GB in size.
He then turned to me, and said verbatium, "How can two microsoft products have conflicts with each other after doing complete clean installs and a format of the HD. There is no way that two products from the same company would conflict like that." I was stunned and didn't know what to say. I assumed he worked in NT4 (perhaps NT3) environment having his MCSE and all so he should be well aware that yes, MS prodcuts have bugs when they are released and sometimes updates or patches fix these types of problems.
The guy got mad at me and said he wanted a second opinion. My boss came over after hearing the whole story and took one look at the guy and then said come back in an hour. My boss was going to exchange his machine for an emachine with the same specs. When the guy came back my boss told him that here is his new computer, they have already exchanged it so no paper work needed to be done and that we do not support emachines so if he has any problems he would have to contact them.
I had been a tech officially for about maybe 2 weeks at that time.
patrickv
Active Member
I've found that those degree's are not needed. Experience and showing that you rock at the tech seems to be a lot better.
I have neither of those and am making close to 80k at 25, working 3 hours a day or so. I suppose it's more about politics and ego.
But maybe my position is unique or something, I really doubt that though.
Ah, life is good, the tech life is better.
ya, thats what am talking about. look at me if you look at my certificates & qualification you would say "bullsh*t, that guy is zero" but hey , it never was about the papers. I have more experience working (havent been to any overseas courses at all) in it than those who have sooo much qualificatinos..lol