Digital Pictures are my Bane!

Do you want to know the reason I started the offsite backup branch of Sensible Gurus (www.sensiblegurus.info)

Do you want to know the real reason?

Digital Pictures, there I said it, Digital Pictures.

I screwed up. Plain and simple. I switched my wife’s computer from a Desktop to a Laptop, and stored the desktop in the basement. I asked, “Hon, is everything you need on your new computer?”…

Flash forward 7 months, right around Christmas… where my wife wanted to print out a collage for Grandma, and she goes to her computer where she kept the digital pictures she sent out for printing, and they were gone!!! No worries I thought, grab the hard drive from the basement, plug it into a USB Adapter and *click click click*

For you non-techies out there… *click click click* is… bad, real bad

I tried every trick in the book… Freezer trick, mallet trick, Spin-Rite, SysInternals, I spent over 100 hour trying to recover data from that disk! Nothing!

My wife even wrenched it from my hands and brought it to her work where her cousin works as their IT manager (It’s a Fortune 1000 company, and in the top quarter) and tried to get it working there, spending precious corporate time… nada.

I have backups, I have all the RAW images stored on my Desktop, a backup USB Disk, and DVD’s… but I don’t have her edits and selections. To go through my database of pictures…. You are looking at over 200 gigs worth of data…

Yeah… I’m in the doghouse, still! I printed out some pictures for my kids “Marvelous me” week at school (isn’t kindergarten grand!) and… some of the pictures I printed out were not in any of the photo albums we own. Sleeping on the couch again!

Anyway… since this happened, I have

a) Shadow Protect doing daily snapshots

b) The “Sensible Online Backup” backuping up the critical files (the my documents, my pictures, my favorites, etc, and the oh so looked over .nk2 file)

Just so this doesn’t happen EVER again!

Windows 7 Release Candidate Update

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/04/24/windows-7-release-candidate-update.aspx

The successor to Vista, Windows 7, is going into its next phase getting ready for release. The staff here at Sensible Gurus (http://www.sensiblegurus.com) is really excited! We have been running Windows 7 build 7000 for a couple of months now and it is pretty rock solid! The RC (Release Candidate) is being released to TechNet and MSDN Subscribers on April 30^th, and will be available to the public on May 5^th.

I do not recommend downloading and installing the Release Candidate on any machine that you actually “need” as it is not guaranteed to work! Expect to “play” with settings, drivers, interfaces, and navigation all without support! But, if you enjoy tinkering with computers and operating systems, this is a fun time during the release cycle.

And one more bit of advice… BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!

-Gj-

Customer Service, what is happening to it?

I just got off an instant message Chat with one of my close customers, actually, I managed and trained this customer when I was working at WennSoft, and he is someone whose technical skills are very sharp! It sparked something in me and I decided to blog about it a little bit…. Here is a cleaned up transcript:

(2:01:28 PM) Mr Customer: Stupid vendors!
(2:01:36 PM) Gjeret at Sensible Gurus: Hey! I resemble that!
(2:01:51 PM) Mr Customer: Xerox guy was going to come Monday never did
(2:01:56 PM) Mr Customer: called him Tuesday
(2:02:16 PM) Mr Customer: said he would be here first thing Wednesday never showed
(2:02:21 PM) Mr Customer: called him up today
(2:02:24 PM) Mr Customer: can’t get a hold of him
(2:02:28 PM) Mr Customer: not picking up his phone
(2:02:42 PM) Gjeret at Sensible Gurus: lol
(2:02:45 PM) Mr Customer: called the phone people yesterday because I tried saving a $200 service call and swap extensions myself
(2:02:54 PM) Mr Customer: and umm well I need them to clean up after me as it did not work right
(2:03:00 PM) Mr Customer: said he would have someone out first thing today
(2:03:02 PM) Mr Customer: never showed up
(2:03:05 PM) Mr Customer: same thing
(2:03:07 PM) Mr Customer: can’t get a hold of him
(2:03:28 PM) Gjeret at Sensible Gurus: you would think in this yucky economy that people would be pounding down your door
(2:04:03 PM) Mr Customer: well Xerox we are not paying for this as it’s a leased printer and we are still working out initial setup issues
(2:04:11 PM) Mr Customer: but the phone people get $200 for setting foot in the door

We then went on to talk about how my business partners can help this particular customer out…

OK, now for my rant.

What happened to Customer Service? What happened to putting an appointment in your CRM Program or even Outlook!?!

I’m looking at my bookshelf right now, and there are a number of books on the subject from back in the time I was a Manager including;

Why Service Stinks….

Raving Fans (Ken Blanchard)

Gung Ho! (Ken Blancard)

The first couple of time I read these books, I couldn’t help but think, wow! This must be a joke? Why would you NOT want to help your customers? The customer is going “Here, take my money, please take it!” and the vendor is just ignoring them!

I got off the phone with a new customer of mine yesterday echoing the same sentiment. She said to me “Gjeret, Thank you very much for calling me back, it is a refreshing change” I’ve been hearing again and again and again stories like this.

Please, if you are being ignored by your vendors, Let me know! In this economy, no, in ANY economy the customer… that means YOU… Should NEVER be ignored! If I cannot help you out, I will find someone who will! That is my promise!