Something happened this week that I don’t even know…I really don’t know how to wrap my mind around it.

A man came in, a very elderly gentleman, and Heather, our beloved office manager went to help him. She asked him,

“How can I help you sir?”

And he turned to her and said,

“I’ll wait for a man.”

I don’t even know how to respond to something like that. I mean…it’s so far behind the pale of anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. I can’t imagine turning to somebody, picking out a racial or sexual characteristic, and thus deeming them invalid. This isn’t even going to get into Heather’s supreme qualifications to help anybody who walks into the store, because that is not even relevant here. Unfortunately I was not here at the time, and nobody else felt comfortable kicking the man out, so he got to ask his questions and leave.  But seriously, if I ever heard anybody say anything like that to one of my employees they would find their asses placed promptly and directly on the street with instructions never to return. This is not a customer is always right sort of situation.

I mean, would he have said to my Russian employee “I want to talk to an American” or to my short employee, “I want to talk to somebody tall.”

How does this even work?

I can’t wrap my brain around the callous ease or mental state that would ever make somebody think it’s appropriate to talk like that to another human being.

I pick my employees on one basis – their qualifications to do their jobs. I expect each of my customers to respect them as much as I do, and behavior like this is unforgivable and beyond inexcusable.

Thank you to the thousands of customers who trust us with your computers. We appreciate your support enormously.

-Zac

At least once a week I have the following comical interaction -

Zac – “I’m sorry sir, but your computer is dead. I would be happy to recommend a replacement for you, though, if you’d like to discuss one.”

Alex – “I would be happy to have such a discussion, what would you recommend?”

Zac – “Well, first, tell me what you use your computer for.”

Alex – “I use it for XYZ”

Zac – “Great! Let me pull 5 models out of my closet and show you some options.”

….

30 minutes of discussion pass about the merits of various laptops, and a best one is settled on

….

Alex, “Thanks for all your help! Now can you tell me where I can purchase this laptop?”

Zac,  “We sell it right here!”

Alex, “Oh, I didn’t realize you guys SOLD these laptops, I thought you were just making a recommendation!”

Zac, *headdesk*

So yes everybody, we have spent a great deal of money on demo models and training in order to bring you the latest and greatest high quality laptops. Our shop size allows us to order directly from HP and other leading manufacturers!

So the next time you need a laptop, come on down and take a look at what we’ve got.

Thanks!

-Zac

Just so you all know, we will be open regular hours Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Computers break over the holiday, so we will be here to fix them! Also feel free to stop by to talk about some screaming deals we have on new HP probook and elitebook laptops.

Thanks!

-Zac

Today some jackass went up on the curb and hit our A-board, knocking into into the street! Broke it into a few pieces. A memorial to the A-board has been set up at the tree outside our shop (we’ve leaned the splintered pieces against the tree). Feel free to leave flowers and poems expressing your love for the board.

A-Board is survived by his brother, our other A-Board.

Have a good weekend,

-Zac

Owner

Happy Hamster Portland Computer Repair

In company history before August we sold about 30 laptops (we’ve been selling them for 4 months). So far this month, we have sold 25. The reason? Easy. The HP special laptop.

For the rest of this month, we will have an amazing deal on a $599 HP laptop. It is a business class machine with an aluminum lid, 15.6″ screen, dual core processor and plenty of storage space and memory. Normally this guy sells for $699, but we have special HP pricing until the end of the month! We’ve sold tons of these to students and people looking to upgrade to something that will do their e-mail, facebook, watch DVD’s, etc.

Come on in and check in out, we’ll have them for the rest of the week!

Thanks,

-Zac

Today I want to talk about the thing in my job that frustrates me more than any other. I am not talking about the things you probably think of, demanding customers, low pay, difficult repairs, etc. I am talking about the penny wise pound foolish people who come through our shop. For a home user, computer fast, computer slow, who cares? If you want to spend 10 minutes waiting for your computer to turn on instead of spending $50 on the memory that you need to make it start up in 2, that is your choice. Maybe you like to get a cup of coffee while it starts and read the paper, no money is really at stake.

Our business users, however, have no excuse for making that choice. We have a lot of business clients, successful companies, to whom we will say, “Your computer here is 5 years old, we can fix it for $200 but really we want to sell you a new one for $1,000. We think you should spend the $1,000, because it will be much faster.”

Shockingly, many will reply, “no, lets just go ahead and fix this one.”

I will argue the point endlessly, but they will politely decline, making, they think, the wise fiscal decision to save the $800.

Or did they?

Lets look at some real numbers from a real business customer to see how faulty this logic can be.

We service many doctor’s offices in town. One, with 3 doctors, has one scheduler/office manager who handles the incoming/outgoing flow of the office. Her computer takes (timed it) 5 minutes to turn on every morning. A good new computer will turn on in between 1 and 2 minutes. Lets assume the worst case, lets assume the new $1,000 computer we could build would take a full 2 minutes to boot up. With a new computer, this woman could be working on her computer 3 minutes faster than she does now.

Now lets assume she works a standard, full time 200 days a year, and she makes, I’m ballparking low, $50,000 a year.

Over the course of 200 days, she would save 600 minutes waiting for her computer to turn on. That is a full 10 hours per year saved.

At her salary she makes about $30/hr, so over the course of a year, just in boot up time, that would be $300 in savings.

Now, of course, that is far short of our goal of an $800 difference, so lets look at a few more things.

Lets assume she opens Microsoft word 10 times a day to look at documents. On her old computer, it took about 8 seconds to open word. On a new one, it takes about 2 seconds. 8 seconds, ten times a day is 1:20. 200 days a year is another 4 hours of saved time waiting for Word to open, another $120.

Assume the same thing for opening her web browser. Lets not forget her scheduling software. We can take switching pages in her scheduling software down from 1 second per page to .25 seconds per page. We can take her Quickbooks from a 10 minute opening time to a 2 minute opening time. We can save so much time around the edges that we easily get to a savings of about half an hour a day for making the change. Thats 100 hours per year, that is over 2 weeks of working time and nearly $3,000 she doesn’t spend waiting for things to load.

Lets also not forget the other time people can save. The doctor who comes to her computer to ask a scheduling question saves a few minutes every day, because she can open the schedule faster. Phone calls go more quickly because she can access notes in less time. More calls answered means fewer voice mail messages to call back, and we all know what a pain those can be to return every day. Patients get checked in and out faster, so customer satisfaction increases, etc etc.

And keep in mind these numbers are for a non-revenue generating employee!

God forbid we consider a sales guy calling clients all day. One of our clients that sells roofing supplies has a sales staff making calls all day long to new customers. The top sales guy makes over $100,000 a year and manages almost 10 million a year in sales. If he gets back 100 hours a year from a faster computer, he could sell an extra million in product! His company made him suffer with a 5 year old Dell until he took it into his own hands and just bought a new computer for himself with his own money.

Sadly, though, businesses rarely see it our way. They think like home users, they just want it to work. They don’t think about the significant pain caused to a business dealing with slow computers every day. Seconds count, the time it takes a browser to load, a document to open, an e-mail to show up, each one is just a few grains of sand, but over time it makes an enormous difference. Nobody would think to say to a race car driver, “look, your old car isn’t broken yet, do you really need a faster one?” Yet that is precisely what companies say to their employs every day.

I know I am ranting here, so I’m going to cut off at this point. Long story short – If you have a business, spend the money. And, to answer at least the most obvious question, this entire post is counter to my companies short time financial interest. Repair is labor intense, new computers are parts intensive, my profit on labor is vastly higher than my profit on parts. I make this pitch because we want our business customers to succeed, and when we see them stand in their own way it is very frustrating for us.

Thanks everybody!

-Zac

President

Happy Hamster Portland Computer Repair

This has nothing to do with computers, but it is way too awesome not to share. When jets were scrambled out of Portland to fly to Seattle during Obama’s visit they made the trip in less than 10 minutes. Check out this Oregonian story. Not getting into debates about military spending or anything else, but just from a raw “awesome” factor, to imagine that the 3 hour drive or the hour long flight can be made in our aircraft in under 10 minutes falls into my definition of “awesome.”

Good day everybody,

-Zac

President

Happy Hamster Portland Computer Repair

Something I puzzle over frequently is “why do businesses do the things they do?” Many things strike me as counter-productive as a business owner, and in their defense, I have learned a lot of things do in fact have reasons. For example, I used to wonder why every computer repair shop had a counter, and kept customers on the other side of it. I have learned, as a business owner, that they do that because every once in awhile you want that distance. Either the customer has a serious hygiene problem, or they have no sense of person space (mine) and get all up in it, or a few other situations where I can imagine that physical distance would be nice.

Some things, though, still make no sense to me. I read this report today about how banks are targeting people to get them to opt into overdraft protection. The report basically outlines the ways in which banks are intentionally trying to milk people for every penny they can get, including strategies, like “free movie tickets’ that they should offer to people likely to overdraft frequently.

I don’t understand intentionally acting against the best financial interests of your company. Sure, overdrafts will get the bank more money in the short term, but they make people hate the bank in the long term. For me, I find that acting in my customer’s best financial interest ultimately is acting in my own best interest. For example, we make very little when we sell a new laptop, usually about $50, but I frequently recommend the purchase of a new laptop instead of a repair. I do this because I think the repair, which may have a profit of $100, is not in the customer’s best interest. This honesty gets us referrals, work from the customer in the future, good vibes, etc, and so while it may be a “bad” financial decision in the short run it is the right decision in the long run.

I can think of a few reasons companies might do this -

1)  CEO’s never lose money. If a CEO engages in stupid, short sighted plans that bring the company short term gain in exchange for years of pain, he will never feel it. The CEO drives the stock up 25% the first year, makes huge bonuses, and when all goes to hell a year later, he might lose his job, but he keeps all the money. So, oddly, it can be in the best interest of the company leadership to do the dumb thing, since nobody ever asks them to give the money back.

2) A total lack of competition. If every bank is doing it, the ol’ “I’m taking my business elsewhere” bit becomes difficult. Thats one reason I love Southwest Airlines so much, as every other Airline does a race to the top for fees, they have remained fee-less. There is no Southwest of Banks that I know about.

3) No personal stake. I have a very personal stake in the reputation of Happy Hamster. It is my business and when people have good experiences I am proud. When they have bad ones, I am sad. Who gets sad at a bank when a customer is unhappy? Who is responsible? Ultimately I don’t think anybody is. Nobody takes responsibility for the reputation of the organization as a whole…it’s too big, and nobody really “owns it” enough to do so.

I have no idea if any of those ideas are right, but they all seem plausible. I hope I never become a large enough company to see things their way.

Thanks,

-Zac

President

Happy Hamster Portland Computer Repair

I am going to continue my trend of posting “stuff a business owner probably shouldn’t write about” by talking about how upset customers get treated. I am specifically not going to address questions of right or wrong, or are they being reasonable, we’re simply going to accept at face value that any upset customer must be addressed regardless of original sin.

We have two primary types of upset customers. The first type, we’ll call them “A” people, will call or come in and explain that they have a problem. They explain the nature of the problem, “I came in because my computer was going slowly, I got it back, and I don’t think it’s much faster now” and wait to see what we will do about it.

The second group, we’ll call them “B” people, come in or call and do a couple of things. The first thing they do is state, unequivocally, that they are incredibly unhappy/upset and demand to know what we will do to resolve the situation. Then we usually have to ask them “what situation?” because oddly these people never tell you, they just tell you that they are unhappy, and we have to puzzle out piece by piece who they are, what the problem is, and what they want to do to resolve it.

Jumping now to strategy, I would say that advice columns and the like tend to advise people to be “B” type people. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that, and that is correct but only up to a point. You see, if you’re a “B” person you will get what you want. Want a refund? Fine. Want an apology? Absolutely. “B” people usually get what they demand.

“A” people, on the other hand, will get whatever we can give them. I am a reasonable person, and I know we make mistakes. When “A” types come in and present their problem, instead of saying, as I will with a “B” person, “what do you want?” and fulfilling it, we will make offers and hear their counters until we have come to a reasonable place.  “I am so sorry to hear you had this problem, I would be happy to offer you a free piece of memory to speed up your computer, do a free tune up  for you, and then to drop the computer off at your office this afternoon.”

The mere act of being reasonable gets a customer far more than being emotional, because we know how to deal with reason. I can have a conversation with a reasonable person and come to a mutually agreeable understanding. The emotional person, so furious and upset, simply gets their solution thrown at them in a sort of “okay, okay, take it and leave would you?” kind of mindset. So while yes, being emotional and upset is likely to get you attention, being reasonable will get you a far better response.

Thanks everybody, have a good weekend!

-Zac

President

Happy Hamster Portland Computer Repair

In some ways, computer repair service works like any other service. Something breaks, you call us in to fix it, and we get you on the road again. However, in one key way, computer repair is completely unlike any other repair – we have no ability to make it go faster, nor do we have any ability to guess when it will be done. The reasoning on this is simple – there are functionally an unlimited number of variables in the time it takes to repair your computer, and I control none of them. We did, in the last year, 935 virus removals. That is nearly 3 per day. In my life I have removed thousands of viruses. Yet despite this experience, the best I can do for an estimate of completion on a virus removal is a 24 hour window.

To figure out why, I’d like to talk you through a small/easy virus removal job -

1) Run a hardware scan to check for faulty hardware. This can take from 2.5 – 12 hours depending on if your computer feels like going fast or slow. Please note, we can not estimate this based on how fast your computer is, for example, if you have a super fast computer, but a huge amount of RAM, this scan will actually take longer than a super slow computer with not very  much RAM because the RAM scan takes awhile. The same is true of a million other variables in this test, we really have no clue when it will complete.

2) Run through a series of relatively benign/small virus removal steps that I know will take about 15 minutes.

3) Run our first major virus scan. It will takes between 1 – 5 hours depending on but not limited to – the number of files on your computer, the number of archives on your computer that must be broken apart and scanned, the speed of your computer, if any viruses on the computer attempt to interfere with the scan, the number of viruses found that must be removed and a few dozen other factors we can not predict.

4) Run our second major virus scan. Ditto above, but the second one is more in depth and usually takes 5 – 10 hours.

5) Run our third major virus scan. Ditto above, except this one is an internet based scan, so depending on the speed of the servers and the number of people using the service, it can take 6 – 20 hours.

Lets assume at this point all the viruses are removed. We have now completed the easy part of the job, which took, depending, between 14.5 hours and 47 hours, for reasons we can not estimate or know beforehand.

Now lets start the hard part – undoing the damage the virus did to your system.

Now, this is an easy virus removal, so we’re going to assume only 1 major system failure. For our virus removal today, lets assume that the computer no longer connects to the internet. Here are the steps that MIGHT be necessary to resolve this issue, however, we won’t know which one until it suddenly starts working again.Also bear in mind, until we completed the virus removal, we didn’t even know this was going to be a problem.

1) Rebuild the TCP/IP stack: 60 seconds

2) reconfigure your network connection: 2 minutes

3) reinstall your network drivers: 10 minutes

4) run a repair operation of your entire operating system: 1 -3 hours

5) Reinstall a functional copy of the operating system on top of your existing install: 2 – 3 hours

6) Beat our heads against the wall until we figure out what the hell is still wrong with it: 1 – 10 hours

So, now, at the end of our virus removal, when the internet isn’t working, your time estimate to get it working again runs between 60 seconds and 16 hours and 11 minutes.

Now lets update your computer.

Assuming this is Vista, you have between 1 and 500 updates not installed (I’m not exaggerating these numbers) and the install time for your updates will be between 15 minutes and 4 hours. Keep in mind, before we fixed your internet connection, we had no way to check how many updates you were missing, and no way to estimate how long this part of the process would take.

And that is an *easy* virus removal, with a time estimate between 15 hours and 69 hours. Complicated virus removals can take double the time.

So why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because traditional “hurry them up” methods do not work at Happy Hamster Computer Repair. At your mechanic, if you call 10 times a day, maybe he will move your car up in line and get it worked on sooner, but at Happy Hamster we take out and work on every computer in our closet every day at 6 AM and don’t put them away until 6 PM when we close for the night. Often times we leave them running scans in our closet to finish overnight for the morning. So if you call 4 times a day to check on the status, and ask us for an estimate time of competition, it will not make your repair happen any faster. I can no more speed up the pace of your virus removal than I can make the sun rise and set on command.

So yes, we will get your computer done as quickly as we can, it’s good customer service, good business, and how we like to operate. However we can not tell you when it will be done until such time as it is done. Believe me, it would save us a lot of phone time, and be great customer service, if we could say, when you dropped it off, “4:09 PM on Thursday” but computers simply can not be predicted with that kind of specificity.

have a good weekend everybody!

-Zac

President

Happy Hamster Portland Computer Repair