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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."
It sounds as though they re-interviewed everyone in an attempt to see who was violating company policy.
I don't know how big Geek Squad is but I've cleaned up several of their messes. The reality is they are attached to a LARGE company and have loads of assets and liability.
My guess is they dismantled by ax and not with a razor.
No, my precious little snow flake, the world isn't fair. And please wipe your feet before you park my car.
> "The first two were fired for burning a non-copyrighted CD..."
What do you mean by "non-copyrighted"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm a GS agent as well and in our precinct we went through the same sort of thing, although we didn't have any of those torture session or anything. Corporate confiscated all of our harddrives and external backup devices and said they were checking for SOP compliance. About three weeks later or so we got a message from them saying we were 100% compliant with approved tools and such so as far as corporate was concerned we were angels. Any agent that has the time to look through someone's personal files must either be bored, in need of more work, or just waiting to be fired. I honestly don't have time to look through everyone's personal image files and mp3 caches. I grab your information, associated you with a service order number, and go from there.
I think they were right in sacking the agents who weren't working while on the clock. Our budgets are pretty harsh, so we don't have the service budget to give you hours to burn porn on the clock. Being sacked for being the supervisor trying to fix things is BS though, sounds like upper management trying to disguise the fact these things had been going on under the noses.
Since GAY isn't a claim that can be proven, anybody can claim it. So literally, everybody is protected.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Can we start a union of computer workers so we have a little more barganing table? If Hollywood writers, janitors, garbagemen, Disney employees, etc. can unionize and fight back for some rights, we can too.
Imagine what kind of mess they would be in if there was a strike?
Is there any reason that we CAN NOT have a computer tech or programmers union? Seriously.
http://Communityville.com - A free place for new and old neighborhood webmasters to hang out.
You mean something like CompTIA?
I've mentioned this guy before; he had graduated from a local technical school and was even a card-carrying A+ tech. As this school had the reputation of "pay to pass", I decided to test him, and pointing at an open box, asked him to point at the motherboard.
He pointed at the case. I repeated the question, wording it differently.
He pointed back at the case.
Standards organizations only work when they're not cash-oriented, and there's always some unscrupulous ninny willing to trade cash for sheepskins...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Welcome to corporate Amerika.
As the years go by, you'll recognize that this type of behavior is normal. The company that I work at reorgs every 12-months with random no-cause firings in between.
Don't try to understand it. "Right" and "wrong" are concepts that cannot apply.
13/h?
When I worked at staples, they paid me 7.70/h to do it. As an actual "easy tech". And I was the "business machines specialist" - AKA department supervisor.
Talk about underpaid.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I would also like to add that doctors and lawyers are protected by the law when they need to keep secrets private. A doctor can tell to his boss that a given practice goes against medical secret or medical ethics. There are no such things in IT.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
All management types know what to do is how to kiss their superiors ass, and blame/fire the guy who isn't the problem. Target management seems to act the same way at most stores.
the funny thing is Best Buy contracts there Enterprise IT needs... to the company I work for. They will not let the geek squad touch any Best Buy corporate machine.
I used to work for best buy when they first rolled out the Geek Squad service. I was one of the original techs in my store, alone with a few others who had been there before me. Every one of us were real techs, not the promoted sales bs that was soon to follow. Funny how the higher paid real techs become "poor performers" when corporate realizes it can pay less for sales people to install norton antivirus and do system restores. The idea of actually fixing a problem is gone at best buy. Let the finger pointing begin. 2C
I volunteered the summer between 11th and 12th grade at a computer donation place where we refurbish computers and repair computers that we have sold in our thrift store. There were some kids my age and a lot of people who all were adults learning about technology and knew enough to be pretty damn smart about PC repair, a lot of them were going back to college or needed jobs or were veterans. They were some of the most fun people to work with and they did a good job too. I was humbled by them many times and I considered myself to be pretty good with computers, inside and out (which is why I volunteered there in the first place). The place was community driven and non-profit. My boss and one of the other head guys were from back in the day talking about old computers in the 70s and 80s, showing us old equipment, and setting up Linux (the second guy was trying to start up Linux classes and other open source promotional stuff, although the systems we did has 2000 on them). The point is, it isn't so bad to hire kids or other people from the community as opposed to someone who's gone through 3 different schools to be certified in IT.
Also, I once was doing some sort of virus check or disk check (I forget now) and some middle aged woman had brought this computer in that her son used that they had bought at our store. The file names start flying by and there is tons and tons of porn (I can tell because they are all porn actress names or "boobs" in the filename with video and image file extensions) and it was extremely awkward because the woman was sitting right there.
These types of associations exist in other practices, and they usually end up hurting the members because there will always be lowballing bastards ready to do a poor-quality job, and clients usually don't know any better. The sweet spot is usually in the middle, higher than the cheap morons, but lower than the pros.
:) A while back, I was working for a pretty big computer supplier, and the boss was sharp as a tack. We had three basic power supplies: a cheap one, a decent no-name and a quality brand-name . The cheap one cost us $5.00, the no-name $15, and the fancy one about $60, yet we sold them at $40, $80 and $100 respectively. Being a naive, un-greedy Canadian, this seemed odd as my instinct at the time was to price things relative to cost, like maybe $10, $30 and $85. Note the biggest difference is in the mid-range prices. I priced it $50 cheaper than the other guy, and even my mid-range was lower than his cheapie.
This calls for an anecdote
His logic was sound: only gamers will buy the top-end unit, and contractors will buy the cheapest one. Everyone else will buy the mid-range unit, so make it the most profitable of the bunch. Even though the Antec (with the better warranty) is just $20 more, very few people would go for it. In Canada at least, $20 is the the mental dotted line for most people. Below 20 they don't flinch, but above 20 they think long and hard about their choice. It's kinda weird how currency denominations affect people's spending habits!
It did mean that his high-end stock wouldn't move much, but that's okay because he didn't really care about that clientele, they are few and far-between. Unfortunately for me, even though I got stuff at cost, it didn't benefit me much at all because I've always been a high-end kind of guy. Even on a budget machine I splurge on the power supply; nothing sucks worse than blowing up $300 worth of motherboard, ram and hard drives because you tried to save $20 on a cheap power supply. Well, nothing except blowing up $1500 worth of gear on a cheap power supply. That would be a damned shame!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
1: What you do is persuade your local representative that government contracts require the professional certification.
2: You persuade your representative that certification is required to practice at all.
3: That's when you hit paydirt. Profit!!!
The key to profit is scarcity. Induced naturally, by law or by whatever means you can arrange. It's how the doctors and lawyers have arranged to become wealthy.
Deleted
But I am smarter than Low Tech Bob!
Seriously though, Geek Squad attracts the low-end techies... guys who would be advertising $20/hr onsite in the classifieds otherwise. You pay a low-end techie, you get low-end work.
I can clean spyware too, but I charge a lot more than the $59.99 you'll pay for the Geek Squad because I don't like doing that crap. I can install a hard drive or video card too, but my minimum charge is $60 because I'll take the time to route the cables out of sight to ensure proper airflow. I even charge $150 for an OS install, but you do end up with a fully tweaked and customized version of Windows with its own recovery partition, so you don't have to pay for it again the next time your teenager fries your system with spyware.
You can't really compare my attentive service to the 13$/hr guys, and many people don't care for the luxury service. Joe Blow won't benefit from my expertise, and I'm fine with that. A lot of people drink cheap beer and I'm fine with that too, but I drink the good stuff because that's what I prefer. Some folks prefer quality, and they're happy to pay for it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
How many people really go into debt for $250,000 to go to university? That sounds like an extremely high amount of money to me. Maybe if you became a doctor, and you went to Harvard, and you didn't make any money during your schooling at all, and you had absolutely no scholarships, and drank a case of beer every day, and... Anyway, that seems like you would be going into quite a bit of debt. I know people who went though school funding the whole thing with no help from their parents, and still came out debt free. You have to work a little harder, and you can't go to the fancy private schools like Harvard, but it can be done.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's not hard. Takes a hell of a lot of years of schooling, and it is competitive so the schools are generally high dollar. I work for a state university and our tuition is fairly average, which in this context means around the mean or median tuition. For an out of state undergraduate, it is about $13,000 a semester. That's over $100,000 just for your undergrad assuming a normal 4 year. Law school is more, $14,000 per semester. I don't know how many semesters it is, but it is at least 4 and I think it is closer to 8.
Now please remember that we aren't high end. We are a good state university, not a top private school. You can easy quadruple those semester fees if you try. Also this is tuition ONLY, no books, housing, anything else, just what you have to pay the school for the privilege of being allowed to attend.
So ya, really, people can accrue a quarter million (or more) in debt getting certain degrees, especially law and medicine. There are more than a few people who fall in to the category of having parents that make too much money to qualify for need based aid, yet either don't make enough to pay for it or just aren't willing to (there are many parents who believe their kids should earn it on their own). If you are in that situation your only option is student loans. Even if you get some scholarships or aid, it still can leave a large gap to cover.
I rented a room to a guy in his last year of law school here. He wasn't quite that high, having gotten some undergraduate aid and a bit of family help, but he was well over $100,000 in debt when he finally passed the bar.
You add in the amount of money, plus the years of your life, plus the hard work (law school is an amazingly heavy course load), plus the fact that you have to be fairly smart to do it and you end up needing a reasonably large payoff at the end if you want a lot of people to do that.
CastrTroy at www.kibbee.ca wrote:
How many people really go into debt for $250,000 to go to university?
Just to give you some perspective on how much more expensive university can be in the US than in Canada, I am an American who went to SFU. My non-citizen tuition there was about the same price as in-state tuition at the University of Washington would have been. My roommate, who had Canadian citizenship, paid closer to what community college costs here in the US.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Couldn't agree more. While my getting my RHCE was reasonably difficult, I had a co-worker who got his RHCE during the same class. I wouldn't have trusted him to properly empty the trash of one of the guys that didn't even qualify for a RHCT during the same test. And the guy next to me, that "only" got enough points for an RHCT? He was more capable than both of them put together. Strangely enough, he had more years of experience than the other two put together; I wonder if that has any bearing?
Years ago, I became a "Legato Certified" backup admin. After a 2-day course (from some Windows guy that didn't seem to know how to do basic Unix tasks), I took a 1-hour, open-book, test. That "certificate" never made the wall of my cube. May not have even made the file cabinet; I don't recall.
Anyone that thinks a certification should be the sole grounds for hiring someone, or is any indicator of someone's ability to do a technical job, only has the capability to be in...wait for it...HR or management. Thank you, I'll be here all week.