When a PC Whiz Can Cost You Time, Money
This week’s article is about the levels of expertise in the Information Technology (IT) field. Our industry has become so complex and changes so rapidly that no-one on this planet can claim to know everything about IT. This is one of the reasons that we have 6 techs and even then we get them to specialise in different areas.
It is the same with many professions that the more you specialise in an area the more you find out about how much you didn’t initially know! Our techs often bring their individual expertise to the ‘round table’ to help us provide solutions to some of the more baffling problems in IT. I would hate to be a one man team again trying to cope with the complexities and rapid changes occurring today.
I find it amusing how often we have a customer tell me how the “guy down the road” or the “cousin of their brothers best mate”, is ‘an IT expert’ – nearly everyone seems to know one! When I enquire further it is often revealed that they are an 18 year old whiz kid studying science at Uni that upgraded their own video card and fixed an email problem for the family next door. Sure, this qualifies them to have great IT knowledge in the eyes of an average Joe – however in the overall scheme of things they probably don’t even know what they don’t know about IT.
In a rapidly changing industry you have to be working full time in that very same industry to just keep up. The average population also look at someone that can change a car tyre and maybe even the oil and filter, as a mechanical expert – again this does not even start to compare to a full time mechanic that has done an apprenticeship and now worked for years in his trade. Unfortunately what the real mechanics and ourselves all too often see is the resulting mess from one of these ‘so called experts’ work – which has gone awry.
Too often we get brought jobs that have been made doubly hard because of the tampering of someone that doesn’t know what they are doing. Sometime we are faced with a situation akin to shutting the gate after the horse has already bolted and we have to start all over again to resurrect a dead PC. These situations are costly to all involved – the customer has already spent some money, the job is now going to be more costly than it would have been initially, they have also had extra downtime which could have been lessened and sometimes even a bridge has been burnt between them and what may have been a friend of the family.
Also when it comes to data recovery from a failing hard drive the initial intervention of an untrained party can often be the difference between us successfully getting the customers’ data back – or not being able to get anything at all. Computers don’t have personalities and don’t just decide to run well because someone has done a few tweaks – they are an exact science, a logical machine that requires proper setup and maintenance in order to extract the most from them. The more important your PC is to you then the more important it is that you always take it to a real IT expert.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
For more advice and assistance from Kerr Solutions, like and follow us on Facebook