To buy a computer is one thing. To make it work is something else. Just ask any of the high-tech consultants who specialize in making house calls. Their business is booming as they respond to distress calls from frantic owners who are having anxiety attacks after a computer screen has suddenly gone black or a machine has refused to start.
These consultants must often restore the users’ sanity along with their faulty software and reluctant hard drives.
John Greenleaf, for example, the 49-year-old founder of Mac Mechanix, tends home-based Macintosh machines in New York City, and says, “Most of our work is crisis management.”
As the number of computer users grows–60 million American homes now have them, according to recent data from the research firm Media Metrix–so do the number of crashes, freeze-ups and error messages. As the divide between the digital haves and have-nots begins to shrink, people facing these predicaments for the first time are like hypochondriacs who happen upon a medical dictionary–the symptoms may be minor, but the prognosis appears grim.
Greenleaf remembered taking a call from a client whose monitor had just gone blank.
“He kept yelling that he couldn’t get it to turn on again,” said Greenleaf, who ran through the obvious questions: Is the computer plugged in? Is the monitor turned on?
The client felt insulted, but Greenleaf told him that if all he had to do when he got there was plug in the computer, the client would still owe him for the full hour.
“I have to admit,” Greenleaf said, “it wasn’t all that hard taking the money after I plugged the computer back in.”
Dana Friedman, 35, who owns Drangonfly Technologies, a New York computer consulting and troubleshooting firm, recalled a client whose new PC kept crashing.
“The problem was with the keyboard, so I replaced it,” Friedman said. The client wanted to know how that could happen. Friedman noticed a small stain on the replaced keyboard. Several questions and answers later, the client remembered a coffee spill.
“But since the coffee only hit the keyboard, she didn’t realize it could have caused any damage,” Friedman said.
In the world of the house-call technician, the new population of the digitally impaired can be divided into three groups:
– The obsessive-compulsives: These users tend to be excessively cautious about even cosmetic changes made to their desktops, forcing technicians to be needlessly meticulous.
“Even if you had to rebuild the hard drive from scratch,” said Tony Melian, 41, a partner in Mac Mechanix, “you want to memorize how the client had everything arranged. Otherwise, you’ll get a panicked call the next morning because one little thing may be different.”
While there may be quick fixes for the computers, there rarely is for the owner. “It’s like going into a national park,” Melian said. “You have to leave the computer a little better than you found it.”
– The overeager: Friedman calls these clients the most confounding. They must have the latest thing whether they need it or not.
“We cringe when something brand new debuts because invariably it means spending weeks talking people down,” she said.
– The lost generation: Jim Blue is a private high-tech tutor in New York who works with executives, most of whom are over age 50 and possess varying degrees of technophobia.
“A message can come on the screen, `Abort program,’ and they won’t have a clue what this means, which can be paralyzing,” said Blue, himself a former corporate executive and in his 50s.
He told of a computer neophyte who tried to log on to AOL but could not get a dial tone. “She had been up practically all night doing the same thing over and over,” Blue said, “so by the time she got to me, she was quite a bit frustrated.”
Blue arrived at her apartment only to see that the phone line and Ethernet line plug-ins had been reversed. He showed his client the problem, explained the situation and fixed it.
“Turns out she’d had to move the computer for some reason, and, when she reinstalled everything, she made this simple mistake,” he said.
