Overall Terracon was a pretty good place to work. They were an engineering consulting firm; basically if you wanted to build a road or a shopping mall or something like that, these guys would come out and tell you if you were trying to build on quicksand or not. They had ~100 employees in the KC area, and probably 25-30 satellite offices spread across the country, mostly in the west/midwest. This was '96 so computers weren't exotic or anything, but they were definitely behind the curve; one of the first projects I worked on was replacing a BNC token ring network in one of the KC offices with actual Cat5/NT server setup. Most of the satellite offices were little more than a tricked out NT workstation on some secretary's desk asking as a pseudo file/print/email server. Email used the old Microsoft Mail I think, and the main office literally had 5-6 modems that would periodically dial modems at each satellite office and deliver whatever mail was ready to go out. It was big news when the main KC offices got an ISDN line.
Anyway, decent enough company, but the situation I was placed in....it's almost comical that I lasted as long as I did (~1 year). Here's the picture: The main KC offices had three IT people; a manager, a programmer who I think was still trying to figure out Visual Basic, and an old-timer who did a little programming and ran a couple of old IBM VAX style machines they still had for some reason. I was given an office with these guys, yet I technically didn't report to any of them. My boss was actually a consultant based out of Colorado who was good at schmoozing important people and had somehow managed to wrangle the support contract for Terracon. Support was myself based in KC, my boss who was constantly on the road to other clients, a gal in Omaha and another dude in one of the Terracon Colorado offices. My responsibility was to take care of the ~100 KC employees and also take calls from the various remote locations, which were kind of divided up between me and Omaha Woman/Colorado Guy, while somehow trying to coexist with the other local IT folks who of course hated my consultant bosses guts and were either trying to sabatoge me or get me to "convert to their side". Of course I was naive and stupid so I didn't really realize this...but yeah. Looking back I can't believe anyone thought that this kind of setup was a good idea. "You know we keep getting more and more of these computers, and while our local IT guys have done yeoman's work providing support it's not really their specialty and it takes away from their primary functions. How can we solve this: I know! Let's totally alienate our existing IT staff by hiring in some hotshot consultant who will treat said staff like they have leapersy and allow him to hire all the support staff, keeping them decentralized in different offices across the country!"
Added to this was my living arrangements. When I first got the job my friend Shannon was living in KC, in Grandview to be specific, which is basically on the other side of KC from Lenexa. But he had a two bedroom apt so I figured what the heck, and moved in with him. Two months later he leaves for a weekend and doesn't return; about a week later he calls me and tells me that he's moved to California, and I can keep whatever he didn't take with him (which basically amounted to a couch, bed, and TV stand). So there I am, two months into my first real job, now by myself in an apartment that isn't in my name, basically not knowing anyone in KC besides some aunts on the north side of town who's kids were all at least 10 years younger than me. I basically spend my days driving 45 minutes to and from work every day (Yay Grandview Triangle!), working a job where I rarely saw or even spoke to my boss, having little to no interaction with the other IT people that were actually there, trying to solve support problems that I usually had not run into before, or trying to solve problems I did know over the phone 50% of the time with secretaries who barely knew how to turn a computer on. After about a year I finally decided that I wasn't very happy doing this, and maybe it wasn't the end of the world if I didn't end up spending the next 30 years at this company. On the slimmest of job leads I turned in my two weeks and moved to Wichita to live with James, who worked at Boeing and assured me that he wasn't planning on moving to California any time soon.
After a few weeks of job searching I finally caught on with CompUSA as a break-fix tech, which is something that was a dream to me at the time. Computer come in with a clearly defined problem, you sit in the back away from the customer, fix the problem, and out goes the computer. In truth I still kind of miss the break-fix lifestyle; I think that if you were to set me up in some featureless white room with a radio and an endless supply of problem computers coming in, I could be happy for quite some time.
CompUSA was pretty much what you might expect; a bunch of kids parlaying their knowledge of computers gained from school and their parents rigs into beer and condom money for the weekends, a few register jockeys who might as well have been working at a grocery store or Sears, sales guys who might as well have been selling used cars or copiers, and the management types who were putting in their time with dreams of becoming a district manager. For anyone with any kind of real intelligence and computer knowledge, it wasn't difficult to become a "lead tech" by default, which is exactly what I did. I spent a total of about 2 years there. Near the end one of the other techs I worked with there, Wes, quit to go work somewhere that sounded kind of odd: apparently the KU Medical School had a branch in Wichita? Two months after landing a job there, Wes came back in and told me that if I was interested, this med school was hiring. And I was; customers were starting to get on my nerves, as were managers who got paid 4 times what I did for doing nothing but sit around drinking coffee and folding like a card table whenever a customer wanted free shit. I interviewed and apparently just blew them away, they couldn't wait to hire me, so in goes my two weeks to CompUSA.
My last day at CompUSA is also kind of interesting. It was a Friday probably, getting on about 2:00 or so, so I was definitely in "Almost done" mode. In walks some lady with her husband and son in tow, with a broken computer naturally. She was one of those "I bought a computer from you 18 months ago so you owe me free technical support for life" types, which in our terms generally meant at least two hours being completely unproductive from a "look how many computers I fixed" standpoint. Since it was my last day I figured what the hell, was nice and took charge while the managers cowered in the back not wanting to deal with her.
She went wandering off somewhere while the husband and son stood by me, watching me work and trying to impress me with their computer knowledge while simultaneously taking mental notes of what I was doing. This was always one of my favorite customers; guys who had to try and convince you that they knew all about these silly computers, and it was only their busy schedules or their charity that allowed them to bring it to me to fix. Meanwhile they are right over your shoulder the whole time like a dog looking at you when you talk to it; he doesn't exactly understand what's going on but he knows it's important. I always liked having fun with them by going into Regedit with these types and browsing directly to some random key deep in HKEY_Local Machine like I knew exactly where I was going, opening 5 different DOS windows with various commands, rebooting unexpectedly for no reason; you could almost hear the disappointment descend on them as they realized that they were never going to remember what all I did.
Eventually in looking at the machine and talking to them both, it came to light that they had tried to install a version of Internet Explorer; 5 maybe? Seems like it would have been too early for 6 but I'm not sure. Anyway this being 98, when something went wrong with an IE install it messed up the system big time. I thought about uttering the dreaded "You'll have to reload" phrase, but I still had another 3 hours or so on my shift, and these two weren't all that unpleasant, so I decided to go into Heroic Mode. Went and got a copy of IEx that I had on CD from somewhere, just to see what another install attempt might do. After a couple false starts and some other measures I don't remember, I eventually got it working again. IE launched perfectly, all boot-up errors were gone, all the desktop settings and documents were still there, husband and son were in awe of my Tech-Fu. All in all it was an awesome system save, if I do say so myself, and was an excellent way to end my CompUSA days.
Until she came back over.
Dragon Lady showed up wanting to know what was taking so long. I told her it was fixed, showed her even, along with a glowing report from husband and son. I told her that normally such a thing would have been a $99 charge since the problem was caused by husband and son tinkering, but since I was able to take care of it relatively easily and I didn't have anything else going on, she was free to take the computer, no charge. In truth I could already see the look in her eyes and knew that $99 would be fight, it was my last day, and both the tech and retail managers had basically been ducking this problem, as chicken-shit managers are want to do, so I figured what the hell.
She wasn't having any of even that generous offer. She insisted to me that this computer was crap, that there had been many other problems with it, and that nothing less than a total refund was acceptable. Sigh, fine. I was pissed that this tech plebeian didn't even try to appreciate the effort, but had also long since learned that some customers are just assholes, and it's not my job to deal with them at that point. I head to the back to tell the retail manager who is still hiding back there, that this lady wants a refund on her computer.
"Go tell her we can't refund it because it's been too long."
"Umm...OK she's been told that already multiple times since she got in here. And she's asking to speak to you about it."
"Yeah she's a real witch, I've been avoiding her all day. Just go tell her I'm busy and we can't refund it."
My last two weeks at CompUSA had actually been pretty good. With the knowledge that I'd soon be done with problem customers forever (Ha!), customers bitching didn't seem like that big of a deal anymore. I had been pretty productive and had managed to pull some pretty snazzy fixes in that time, Dragon Lady's IE included. But all of the sudden the reason I was leaving in the first place hit like a waterfall again. So I did it; I went back out there, told her the manager was busy, but that we couldn't make a refund on a computer she had purchased over a year ago. I think I may have even made the analogy of trying to return a car you had owned for over a year (a favorite of the managers there), and reminded her that I had taken the time to fix this computer for her for free, where it normally would have cost her $99. Of course she lost it, started tearing into me about how I didn't know anything about customer service, how I was being unfair to her, blah blah blah. I just sat there and took it for what seemed like forever, this lady just railing against me loud enough that it was drawing looks. Finally the chicken-shit retail manager emerged, and I think I said something like "I just fix computers, you need to tell this guy about it", turned and walked to the back. I don't really recall what I had in my hand now, a pen or a screwdriver maybe, but as soon as I was back in the tech area I threw it as hard as I could at one of the benches. Typing it out that doesn't sound like much, but it was metal-on-metal and made quite a racket as it clanked around the benches a couple of times, and I must have had a look on my face that made people fear for their safety because everyone in the shop literally took an unconscious step backwards. Like I say it doesn't translate well to text but it's probably the maddest I've ever been in my life and the closest I've ever come to just completely losing control. The tech manager quickly came up and told me that was good enough for today, go ahead and knock off a couple hours early. Which I did; and that was how I left CompUSA. I think I just went home and started drinking.
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