How Best Buy Tried To Whip The Geek Squad Into Shape

The Consumerist site is featuring a follow-up to their Geek Squad porn collectors story, a feature we discussed back in July. According to Consumerist, Best Buy set up their own rigorous internal investigation to catch the culprits soon after these revelations became public. At that point, of course, employee morale went out the window. Draconian interrogation methods were apparently used, and innocent employees lost their jobs. "There were three Geek Squad members fired from my store including myself. The first two were fired for burning a non-copyrighted CD for another employee on a non company issued blank CD-R. I admitted in my interrogation that I was aware of this, and that I stopped these events after that occurrence. I was fired for being aware of this non copyrighted CD being copied. To quote, I did not provide the proper example of leadership. Keep in my mind I removed over 100 illegal tools and pirated discs upon my arrival as supervisor, as well as some remnants of an internal porn scandal."

Comments

Re:Geek Squad CIA as well

[Blkdeath]

You assume that the computer owner stores their files in some sort of logical arrangement. More often than not, files are scattered across directories all over the system--usually whatever the save window's default was. Typically this includes the root of the C drive, My Documents, the Desktop, the specific application's application directory, and sometimes the Windows directory. If you're going to do a good job (not what I would expect from a BB/GS employee), you'll need to check each of those places and more.

I'm sorry, I should have clarified. I was talking about people fixing computers and troubleshooting operating system issues having some sort of knowledge on how to use same.

Start -> Search -> For Files or Folders -> Pictures, Music or Video. Select all three types, click Search. Alt-Tab or just plain minimize the window, perform other tasks. When search is complete, Ctrl-A (select all), copy, open thumbdrive or similar, paste, minimize, perform other tasks, remove thumbdrive from computer and store your bounty in your pocket. Repeat for documents if desired.

If the client isn't using Windows XP or later with its fan-dancy search tool, you could just search for the likes of "*.jpg;*.gif;*.bmp;*.mp3;*.mov;*.mp4;*.avi" etc. and perform the same copy/paste operation.

I just ran a test. It literally took me longer to type out that explanation than it did to search my entire system - including network attached drives - for all multimedia content.

Safe to say I won't be bringing my computer to you for support my friend. :)

Re:Sorry, wouldn't be enough

[bigstrat2003]

hazing was, and still is, a very big part of belonging to almost ANY community. Er... be a part of non-shitty communities? Sorry, but any community I've ever been a part of didn't do stupid things like that. We treated people with respect and dignity from day 1, imagine that!

Regardless, the fact that it goes on still doesn't make it acceptable. By your logic, and Blkdeath's logic, beating your kids should be ok, because everyone does it, and one day they'll have their own kids to beat, and that'll make up for the fact that they got beat when they were kids.

Re:Butlers

[bluefoxlucid]

If there was an IT union, 5% of us would have 20 times more pay. Well, 3% after we took down a few companies by refusing to let them fire us and then only taking pay cuts after hefty and expensive medical insurance improvements well beyond what any normal high-paying job gives.

Ford wanted to close 16 factories to scale back their production costs to meet demand; the unions forbade them from closing more than 6, and won't let them fire anyone. Slight pay cuts come at the cost of more expensive medical insurance. On top of paying 60,000 more workers than they'd like (they have 300,000), they have 10 more of the million-dollars-a-month-to-run production facilities to scale back to produce cars slower. Result? Ford mortgaged 100% of their assets, and since they can't PROPERLY reorganize (their owners know how to do it right) they are in danger of collapsing horribly (this hasn't been said yet; Ford likes to claim they believe they can get out of it. They can, it's just going to be very HARD and slight market force problems can cause major problems for Ford).

I work in IT, and I make damn near nothing. As time goes by my pay will go up, I'll probably be making 5 times what I make now in 10 years, and I think within 3 years I should be making more than I can spend. Fuck you and fuck your unions.