February 27, 2013

Episodes of a Computer Consultant

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Way, way back when, when computers were still exciting in the 1980s, I tried my hand at being a computer consultant. I did not like it, not one bit.

Having a knowledge of computers beyond the typical person, I was frequently asked how things work, to help someone out, or to offer advice. Lot of folks said, “Dan, you should be a computer consultant!”

I had no idea what that meant.

Eventually, I figured that a computer consultant was someone you paid to fix problems. Seeing how I felt I could accomplish the task, I took on the job. I didn’t advertise. I didn’t promote. Still, I remember doing the job on and off for a few months. I charged the massive sum of $60 an hour, one hour minimum.

Despite the urging of my friends, I recall making only two official visits as a computer consultant. Both of them were wracked with disappointment.

The first call was from an advertising agency. They paid me to read some of their copy and to sit in on meetings where they worked with a computer company client. It was boring because the computer company wanted to be the next Dell Computer and they had no freaking idea what they were doing. So I sat in on some meetings and got paid for it.

A few weeks later the advertising agency phoned me up. Their modem wasn’t working. I explained that I charge $60 an hour to come down and look at it, but there was no charge if I couldn’t fix it. “That was fine,” they said, “Fine!” They wanted the modem to work.

So I shoed up, tool bag in hand, looked at the computer. Looked at the phone cable. Looked at the phone jack on the wall. And I plugged the phone cable into the phone jack. Problem solved. Total time spent: Four minutes, not counting travel time. Charge: $60.

They weren’t happy. “You’re charging us $60 to plug in a phone cable?”

“Well, you could have done it yourself.”

I made $60, but I knew I’d never get another call. Or a recommendation. It was easy money, but a disappointing experience.

The next call was my final call as a computer consultant. The guy, an accountant, was having trouble with his hard drive. I told him to backup the drive and I’d be right over.

Upon showing up, I whipped out my tools disk and proceeded to run one of my utilities that scanned the hard drive for signs of woe.

That utility erased his hard drive. It was capable of doing that, and I made the fatal error of assuming he was running MS-DOS and not PC-DOS. I should have checked. Heck, the program should have checked! But it didn’t. Hard drive gone.

Oddly enough, he wasn’t angry. I didn’t charge him, but he was happy that he did the backup, and he would go out and get a replacement hard drive.

For me, that was the last straw. My computer consulting career, brief as it was, was over. I don’t regret it.

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