its the small things that make the great even greater.

[abe]

Hi all.

Just letting of some steam, got a computer in at 8:30 tonight with BSOD worked on it for 4 hours and am ready to punch myself in the face. I somehow forgot to try "Last known good config".

Does this ever happen to you guys or am I going crazy. (please say it happens to you too) Do i charge the guy for 4 hours work I don't think so.

Abe

 

[Tiddle]

Its happened before, but no i wouldnt charge him for the full time because id feel like i was taking advantage. Id charge half.

 

[abe]

I was thinking of charging for the first hour but I charge double since it came in after 6pm. which is the same as half. (4hours / 2=2hours 1hour x 2 = 2hours)

 

[nonchalant]

When determining charges for things such as this I consider what it would have cost the customer had he taken it to a local computer shop. If I decide it would have taken them only taken 30 mins to find a solution, thats what I charge.

 

[jj2000]

To Abe -- Everyone makes mistakes, especially late at night when your brain is fatigued.

have to agree with ACG everyone makes mistakes now and again and in my case all my best f**K ups come at night.

but i personally would charge whatever your rate is for an hour and chalk it up to experience.

 

[Methical]

Everyone overlooks the simplest things. Don't beat yourself up about it. I was fixing a mates laptop the other week at about 2am in the morning, and wonderin' why things were going wrong when trying to boot from the Vista CD to reformat and do a fresh install. It wasn't picking up the disk controllers for the hard drives so I couldn't see any HDD's except for my lil' 2GB flash drive which was still plugged in. After much f****g around, I FINALLY realised, that I had a Windows XP SP3 disk in the drive, talk about a long day. Don't know how I got it wrong when Vista n XP installs are so different. Just thought I'd share my embarrassing story with you to make you feel better, even the mrs laughed at me when I told her lol.

More to the point.. since you say it came in after 6 which is after hours, you should charge for an hour @ your overtime-rate; no more than 2 (in the end it was a simple fix that took 4 hours(s**t happens), but in my opinion, knowledge and experience is more valuable than money)

 

[purple_minion]

Wait wait wait... if you always make mistakes then you should be charging HALF price after 6pm, not double. If you are making mistakes it's not their fault your brain is in lala land. Personally if I had a plumber over after hours to fix a leak and he worked on the wrong pipe for an hour and still charged me overtime prices I tell you who wouldn't leave happy! I would be perfectly fine with being charged more since they want to be with family or whatever, but if they screw up then I'm not getting the service I DEMAND and EXPECT. You better be at least as good after 6pm as you are before 6pm. Or simply refuse service, or perhaps say I'll bump you up to first in line tomorrow morning for $XX extra, so you can have you coffee and wake up.

 

[purple_minion]

Everyone overlooks the simplest things. Don't beat yourself up about it. I was fixing a mates laptop the other week at about 2am in the morning, and wonderin' why things were going wrong when trying to boot from the Vista CD to reformat and do a fresh install. It wasn't picking up the disk controllers for the hard drives so I couldn't see any HDD's except for my lil' 2GB flash drive which was still plugged in. After much f****g around, I FINALLY realised, that I had a Windows XP SP3 disk in the drive, talk about a long day. Don't know how I got it wrong when Vista n XP installs are so different. Just thought I'd share my embarrassing story with you to make you feel better, even the mrs laughed at me when I told her lol.

More to the point.. since you say it came in after 6 which is after hours, you should charge for an hour @ your overtime-rate; no more than 2 (in the end it was a simple fix that took 4 hours(s**t happens), but in my opinion, knowledge and experience is more valuable than money)

Wait till xp can't seem to handle that there is a partition it doesn't know about, namely fat, ntfs, and some os/2 varieties. It's like throwing a christian bible thumper into an atheist gathering.