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Repairman Steals Hard Drive And Charges To Reinstall It
Phase 1: Break into a realty office, and steal a computer hard drive.
Phase 2: Ask if they will pay you $50 to fix the computer.
Phase 3: Get charged with theft and receiving stolen property!
Phase 2: Ask if they will pay you $50 to fix the computer.
Phase 3: Get charged with theft and receiving stolen property!
"So, uh, I heard your computer wouldn't start because it's missing a hard drive. This is very common in our neighborhood. You're lucky though, I happen to be fully bonded and certified at returning computers without hard drives to their normal working states ... "
Michael Scott could see through that.
My work here is dung.
He charged $50 an hour. For 40 hours of "work".
My sig can beat up your sig.
... they tell you that they can retrieve the files that you had on the hard-drive that was just stolen from your office.
/facepalm
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Here's what I'm curious about: how did he get charged with theft and receiving stolen property?
Was it just that he had possession of the stolen property, so they knew that one would stick, so it was a lesser included offense, just in case they couldn't prove the theft?
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
If it weren't for those meddling kids!!!!
He replaced good hard drive with
a bad hard drive when he stole it.
He should have replaced the hard drive with a blank formatted hard drive. Then when the realty office tried to start the system and it wouldn't boot, take the computer back to his office or shop and retrieve the "lost" data.
Reminds me of the (somewhat) local story I read this morning. A man shop lifted a bunch of clothes from a department store, on is way out he stopped at the front desk to fill out a job application. Sure enough he listed his real information. When the cops showed up he was busy putting away all the stuff he had just walked out with.
He beeped on his way through the door but still was allowed to leave (those things beep so often most employees probably ignore them now). If he didn't give them his personal information, he probably would've gotten away with it.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
When I hear stories like this, (and they are legion) I have to wonder if the tech was really that stupid, or did he believe that a lack of computer expertise in his customers meant they were that stupid. Speaking as a geek, I've noticed a tendency among a (fortunately small) subset of geeks to believe that having a deep expertise in one area makes them generally more competent in everything, including areas completely out of their expertise, like, say, crime.
When I was in college, two roommates apparently had such a misunderstanding, which led to a "foolproof plan" to pay off their student loans and retire in geek luxury. Their criminal career lasted a mere 24 hours. I still have the front page showing them spread-eagled against a cop car.
Sometimes I wonder if extreme geeks -- meaning not the truly hyper-intelligent, but the self-sequestered wannabes -- lacking normal social interaction, have less of an understanding of basic morals than the rest of us.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are three kinds of computer repair people out there.
There are the scam artists, who take a 'broken' computer, reformat the drive, spend five minutes starting a non-legal Windows install, and charge $500. And possibly with some imaginary added hardware costs tacked on too. Person gets a computer they're going to get spyware on six months and it will be messed again. Usually they don't resort to deliberately breaking computers, but who knows.
And then there are the legit repair centers, who tend to take the easy way out, but at least they are honest. Most of the time the easy way is 'replace the computer' so people lose their data, though.
Then there are the good guys, who sit down, don't reformat the drive, work for two hours installing AVG and Ad-Aware, give an hour of instruction during that, and think it's worth maybe $20 and a Coke from their fridge.
All you good guys out there, start charging more. Honestly. You are not charging for work, you are charging for knowledge.
Or think of it this way: The alternative to what you're doing is requires $200 of (legit) repairs or a $300 new computer. You can, indeed, change them $100 for that.
Your time is not worth what you think it's worth. For you, half of it is a game, and the other half is satisfaction at a job well done, but you don't set the value for your time.
Your time is worth what they think it's worth, and I assure you, you're a hell of a lot cheaper than the alternatives. (And provide better value, considering that half the time you're sitting fixing stuff you're providing a computer class in how to not have this happen again.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?