I’m Going to Buy a Van and Park Outside Staples

If you know me in person, you’ve got a pretty good idea where this is going. I’ve talked about this before, and it’s something that baffles and irritates me so much that I regularly feel the need to rant about it (again and again and again). This is one of those times, and this time, everyone gets to hear it.

Best Buy Geek Squad and Staples EasyTech

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/uxud/3396427350/in/photostream/}Gavin Schaefer{/link}

First off, I would LOVE to do these kinds of things for a living. Playing with, fixing, tweaking (and occasionally, but never permanently, breaking) gadgets is one of my favorite hobbies. And I’m pretty decent at it. I’m the one my family calls when they have a question about or a problem with their computer or cell phone or wireless network.

And all bragging aside, they’re lucky to have me.

Yes, I know that sounds cocky. Get over it, because I’m going to make a very good point with it.

“Professional Tech Support”

I put that in quotation marks because I think the title is bogus. And anybody who has called or chatted online with any company’s tech support knows exactly what I mean.

“Have you tried turning it off and then back on?” “Have you pulled the battery?” “Have you tried unplugging it and counting to ten?”

Seriously?!?

Those kinds of questions are why I HATE having to call support for a serious problem, because even if you’ve already done all that, they tell you they still have to walk you through all the steps. (“I’m sorry, ma’am…”) Then they tell you they have to escalate you to someone higher up the chain because they don’t know what to do to help you. Usually, I just sit there and play solitaire on my phone and say, “ok… uh huh… now what?…no, that didn’t work either,” until I get past the minimum wage employee reading from their manual to someone who can actually help me.

Hell, even my mom gets irritated with the simplistic shit they ask you to do when you call in. And she once called me to fix her computer and it turned out she had set a notebook on top of her escape key. I’m not kidding.

But I digress.

No, not everyone is as computer savvy as I am, and not everyone wants to be. That’s part of why they call me in the first place. And that’s fine.

After all, if they had to go out and pay for these services, they’d go broke pretty quickly. And if they had to call tech support instead of me, they’d probably go bald from pulling out all of their hair.

Profit, jobs, fulfilling needs, and meeting a demand for services

I understand that the world doesn’t run on charity, that it’s more efficient to outsource certain things to an expert (like getting your transmission rebuilt), and that at the end of the day, a company needs to make money on a service that it provides. So while I’d LIKE to say that Best Buy and Staples are raping customers by charging ridiculous prices for some of these services ($9.99 to pair a Bluetooth headset? Are you kidding me?), it’s not entirely true.

I do think the prices are a bit steep, and I think they’re so high because they can take advantage of the people who don’t want to call free tech support for their product but who don’t have someone like me to call instead.

But that’s not the root of the problem, because a need really is being met by these companies.

The real problem here is that some people will actually pay those prices for those kinds of services. After all, if no one did, they wouldn’t be offered at all, or at the very least I would have seen a price reduction on them in the last couple of years. People are actually so lazy, that they’d rather pay someone else $10 than read a two page instruction manual and figure out a two minute process for themselves. Or if they really do need help, they don’t have someone they can ask because no one socializes any more.

That’s just sad and pathetic.

And yes, I know there are exceptions to what I just said, but tell me it’s not true for about 80% of the people who pay for that kind of crap. After all, how much is your time and convenience worth to you? $10 for 2 minutes for that Bluetooth headset means $300 an hour. I know MY time isn’t worth that much.

Educate yourself

You can do a lot of this basic stuff. Or you can learn. And most of it, if you mess it up along the way, you’re not going to do any permanent damage. Just try again.

Google it, for God’s sake!

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/moneyblognewz/5267464508/in/photostream/}MoneyBlogNewz{/link}

If you do have to ask someone for help with something, watch what they do. Ask questions about what they’re doing and why. Then next time, give it a go for yourself. I have to give my mom credit for this. She tries to fix stuff before she calls me, and if it’s something with a lot of steps she doesn’t think she’ll remember, she asks me to write her up a guide.

But back to what I said at the beginning – my family is lucky to have me for stuff like this. And I’m not complaining about their asking me for help. I had to learn too, it took me lots of time and trial and error, and it probably would have been easier to have someone show me. They’re just lucky they don’t have to pay these outrageous prices for simple things, and good for them that they ask me to help them rather than just paying someone to do it for them. Because there’s a difference between asking for help, and asking for it to be done for you.

The rest of you – STOP paying for this garbage. Do you really need to pay someone $30 to put a disc in the drive on your computer and click “next” for you? And that’s if you take your computer to them; it’s $120 if they come to your house. What about $10 ($90 at your house) to uninstall old programs, defragment your hard drive, and use a can of compressed air to blow dust out of the damned thing? Or do you think you can Google “defragment Windows 7 (Vista, XP, whatever)” and follow some instructions?

If the demand goes down for these services, they’ll get cheaper. And then, when your 90-year-old grandmother needs help hooking up her printer so she can get photos of her grand-kids, she won’t have to pay $130 for that nice man at Staples to come to her house and help her out. Or fly you across the country to do it for her.

/rant

Oh, and if you need help with anything, hit me up on the contact form or something. Or look for my panel van in your nearest Staples parking lot. I’ll at least point you in the right direction.

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