(edited) – Rob
I was at a restaurant, and while waiting for a table, I decided to check out the computer store located next to it. While in the store, I was messing around on an Acer Iconia 6120 (neat, but not very practical) demo unit, when a customer comes into the store and tells them his hard-drive is broken and he wants the data recovered.
From his description of the problem, I surmised that one of the files needed to boot was corrupted, but the hard-drive itself isn’t actually dead.
The person who is supposed to be helping the guy tells him that they can get his data back, but it will cost $750 as they need to “cut the disks into little pieces and try to get them to fit together so that it’ll work.” The customer seems hesitant but is informed that they do this almost every week and it hasn’t failed yet.
The worker brings over his manager who confirms that yes, they do that all the time and claims that it hasn’t failed… At this point I am shocked and pull out my ubuntu recovery stick as I ask if I can try something with his computer. The customer told me that I could try whatever, so I plug in the stick, boot it up, and show him one of his files.
Of course, at this point the customer is enthused. This, however, annoys the workers at the store, as one has the nerve to say the files I’m showing him are “read-only and can’t be copied from this operating system which is why we need to rearrange the hard-drive.”
Since the guy’s files didn’t take up but a few gigs (and I really want to make sure the shop doesn’t make any money off of the guy they were trying to scam), I give him a spare 16GB flash drive I had on hand after loading it with the files he wanted to keep.
We were both asked never to return to the store again. I was only too happy to comply and the guy paid for my dinner since he didn’t feel right taking my flash drive without giving me something back.
via: [Reddit\TalesFromTechSupport]
[Picture Source: thisreidwrites (CC)]
Friend of mind used to hate shopping at Fry’s, but occasionally had to either for stuff nobody else had or price. “Stuff nobody else had” usually had to come out of a locked case, and that meant dealing with the moron sales droids, and standing in line for a while to get your turn.
Unless, of course, you a) have more technical knowledge than every sales droid in the store combined, and b) can explain things in a coherent and believable manner. He’d stand next to the sales droid and listen to the BS sales pitch, orientented towards upselling to a product the droid gets more commission on (and is usually an outright wrong product), and start correcting the BS.
And we’d move to the front of the line immediately. Every time.
It’s outright amazing how many frauds there are in coputer and tech stores.
One once tried to sell my friend (who was wise enough not to go alone, as he knows nothing about computers) a pentium 4 as ‘better than a quadcore!’… Needless to say, I got banned and he is never going back there.
Yeah I work for (Insert retail chain here) in Australia and my co workers are dumbfounded when I pull out a Linux Boot USB drive and fix the issue right there every time.
I feel like hanging near a Geek Squad area and advertising that I can fix it for a lot cheaper with near no files lost depending on the problem.