Here is a copy of a mail one of my customers sent me, it never ceases to amaze me at the most obscure, tenuous and petty reasons or excuses people will come up with as to why they should pay less or if at all possible nothing at all!
"Regarding the installation of our new pc onto the network. Whilst I do not mind paying £65 per hour for the installation for a reasonable amount of time I am disappointed with your invoice. A few years ago it took one of your staff 5 hours to put a pc onto the network because he clearly did not know what he was doing. Following this we have always agreed a fixed price of one hours labour which should easily be enough time. Should there be any unforeseen problems our end, obviously we would be happy to pay for the extra time. Are you happy with this?"
Wadda you think?
Pete
Originally Published: 02/05/2007
Twitch.... twitch.. reminds me of the guy 10 years ago who agreed for emergency per hour service to remove spyware and viruses from his computer, and demanded we keep all his programs and data intact... 5 hours of removing a nasty worm (at 100 dollars an hour), he balked at the price and said he could buy a new computer for a bit more than that... THEN said why we didn't do our 199.95 os reinstall and tweak package instead and he really didn't care about the data..
I'm not sure if it will come up in this series (Seriously? -) but we had a customer who's server went down. It took us three days to repair the server and restore all the data due to his antiquated backup solution. Clearly his bill was going to be excessive, however a director made the mistake of giving them the server back, subsequently they refused to pay the £900.00 bill.
I feel your pain on that one. About as bad as doing a home install and when your done and putting away your tools in the car, the owner has shut and locked the door
LOL
Just now... someone I do computer work for.. called me up and said.. I think I've been hacked. Well, individual people usually don't get hacked.. so I wanted to know what had happened. Moment he said "My ISP called and told me I was infected with viruses, and they walked me through remote connection." I knew what had happened.. this was confirmed when he then said he was missing 10,000.. sighs. when will people understand, your ISP, and Microsoft wont call you to offer tech support!
#facepalm
Okay so you have to pay for someone's time, but they have to be competent. Some systems may be so messed up it's quicker to nuke them and start again