A Word About Techs

11/23/2005 08:09:11 AM

But first, a question or two...

When was the last time a doctor made a house call? Or gave you a diagnosis and a prescription over the phone?

When was the last time an attorney emailed his closing argument for you to present in court?

Techs make house/office calls. We fix problems over the phone. We're there when you need us. And we're professionals.

And like you, we have families to support, bills to pay, and mortgages. Some of us are still paying on student loans, yes, just like doctors and lawyers. We weren't born knowing our chosen craft. We had to learn it. While a lot of you are playing with your children at the park, (or asleep). We're poring over manuals. or networking with our peers, or reading articles on the internet. There are seminars, and "continuing education" for many professions, and we have those as well, but mostly, ours is 24/7.

Why? Because the IT world changes 24/7, and we have to stay on top of it. Over 1600 new viral are written EVERY MONTH. True, less than one percent ever make it "into the wild", which is when you're most likely to get infected, but they're out there. 

And we HAVE to know about them.

Add to that two words. Spyware and Trojans. Need I say more?

Sometimes, we're at your home or office for 10 minutes, sometimes we're there for days. Sometimes, we have to pull your system for special work. During those times we'll be thinking about what the problem might be as we eat our meals, instead of talking football or politics, or be up all night working on it,

And when we present the bill for our services, occasionally, the looks range from mild surprise and shock to indignant outrage. It’s like you're thinking, “He/she didn’t even do that much! This isn't right!”

Doctors have a saying, “the bigger the scar, the bigger the bill”. But we get paid not to leave scars, in fact, we get paid to remove the scars and damage left by viral, spyware, Trojan horse files, and (occasionally) user error. But the bottom line is, we don’t get paid for our time, we get paid for our talent. And the more talent we have, the more likely we’ll fix in ten minutes, what it took you ten hours to do.

The ultimate proof of our competence is that we leave things running faster, better, and running more smoothly than when we found them. If we’ve done our job correctly, you should never see that you needed to call us in the first place.

We keep your businesses, governments, and schools running. We make it possible for your kids to play the newest games from the store, and for you to check your 401k online.

We earn our keep.

The next time you call us at 6am because you can’t get your printer to print that recipe, article, or email, or that homework assignment from the night before,  Please remember that.