CafeNeves

As some of you might know, I have started working a 2nd job at Staples. Currently I am training at the Hicksville store but by April 4th I will be in the brand new Levittown store. I will be what they call an “EasyTech” at the store, which means that I will be offering services to customers to diagnose, fix, and repair their computers as well as dong setup and installation. This is for all computers, not just ones bought at Staples. In addition to that I will also be working the floor helping customers with their purchases of everything from ink to latops. This post will be the first in what will most likely be an ongoing series of posts talking about some of the more interesting things that happen at work.

So I get to work last night and the resident tech (basically the senior tech and one responsible for the department) points out a particular computer that brought in earlier in the AM that one of the other guys checked in. Seems that a woman came in and wanted to have her computer upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate. Not a problem, we can do that. She wanted all her data transfered as well as backed up to a new portable 250gb HDD she was purchasing. No problem, we can do that too. So the Tech wrote up the work order, rung her up and off she went. The sale was over $500 with about $150 in servivces, which is pretty good. However, there was a catch.

See, the computer was a Gateway. Which in itself is not a problem. But it was an old Gateway, you know, the plain white full size tower kind of Gateway. The type they used back in, oh, 1999-2000. Oh, and it had a sticker on it that said “Intel Pentium III inside”. Needless to say, when the resident tech saw this, he was a bit upset. There was no way Vista was going to install on this computer. There was no way this order should habve been accepted. Hell, for $350 she could have gotten a bran new Compaq AMD dual core with 3GB of RAM and a 19″ widescreen LCD with speakers, mouse, and keyboard. I mentioned that maybe the woman had upgraded the machine. After all, it was a standard case, perhaps they replaced the original Gateway parts and it was acutally a screamer inside. Since nobody had bothered to boot it up I did so. The BIOS came up and it was a Pentium III 650mhz with 128mb of RAM.

Needless to say we didn’t install Vista on it. We called the customer and told her about the new computer. She will be in later this week to pick one up.