Warning: The ineptitude of the I.T. Guy and the businesses network I am about to recount may be unsuitable for children or people with queasy stomachs.
I’m Joe (hello joe) and I’m a capable IT person (gasps intermixed with reluctant clapping)
On average, our IT consulting business gets one new client a month via the “your current IT guy is not actually an IT guy” referral method.
We don’t run much in the way of Ads anymore because Facebook has lost public trust and we’ve found google too be way too expensive so our best course of growth is through our SEO, our sterling online reputation and a steady flux of inbound curiosity from people with horrible “I.T. guys”. (please note I use I.T. guys, because I have never inherited a terrible network and new client from an inept IT girl, likely because they do a better job)
This is a story of one of these new client calls (names have been remitted to protect the parties involved).
Our hero is browsing IGN when he receives a cold call from a business claiming to have “VPN issues”.
My first reaction to this call is usually to assume that everything they’re saying is wrong. People call every form of remote access a ‘VPN’ even though most of the time its RDP, GoToAssist, or some other completely different remote service.
RDP is not a VPN, your desktop is not a Hard Drive, CCleaner is not CC Cleaner, your router is not a modem and Outlook is not your email provider, ugh, but I digress.
The problem, he states, is that remote users at the satellite office are being disconnected from the VPN and, because their current I.T. guy is unavailable for the week, they need a little help.
Now, while this call may seem simple and straightforward, I think it important for you to understand what an I.T. person hears from the statement above...
- Remote users – Working with remote users, sucks because we are relying on them for key information and they will either give you the wrong answer, not know the answer or answer wrongly rather than admit they don’t know. They also suck because every one of them acts like restoring their remote access is the most mission critical issue on the planet. It could be a temp, the boss’s wife, a salesman or the HR woman, it doesn’t matter, they all think that their remote access being temporarily unavailable is the end of the world and that it requires immediate attention.
- A ‘Satellite’ Office – See the Remote Users diatribe above but multiple the headache times 10 because we now have to include things like unlabeled cabling, routers without passwords, random WiFi devices, 15 year old printers that “used to work” and all other types of items that have been haphazardly patched together by someone’s second cousin.
- They have a ‘Current’ I.T. Guy– I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I.T. Guys hate other I.T. Guys. We’re snarky to each other (not just to you), we always ask (in a condescending way) why things were setup “that way” and we always think the other I.T. Guy is the idiot (and we’re both usually right). Working with another IT guy, and in this case potentially stealing his client, is almost always going to make getting critical network information a huge pain in the ass.
- They Need a ‘LITTLE’ help – Him painting his network issues as being ‘little’ means they don’t expect you to need to do much and therefore, don’t expect you to charge much. It doesn’t matter if the network is on fire, horribly reconfigured, riddle with viruses or on the verge of collapse because they called you for a ‘little’ issue. Things that have also been mentioned to me as “little issues” are things like no backups for any servers, Public WiFi giving guests access to the business files and only one person being able to connect to the office printer. So, LITTLE usually means big.
In spite of the fact that I knew I was walking into a s*** show, I told him I would come by the following day and take a look because honestly, if everyone knew how to properly build and administer a network, we’d be out of business. So, thank you to all the crappy I.T. Guys (which I estimate to be around the 80% mark) for doing a horrible job so that I can come in and look like a genius for mapping a damn printer.
The following morning arrives and the friendly office manager shows me the network.
- (1) 2008 server
- 4 Computers
- 1 Printer
I asked to talk to the satellite office and the nice people down there give me remote access and it is actually was a VPN that they were using.
Ok, so the information was somewhat accurate here, this isn’t going so bad.
They have a Netgear VPN that allows the satellite office to connect to the main office’s central program but they show me that it keeps cutting out.
Now that I have a better grasp, I turn on my Terminator assessment mode and start me troubleshootin’s…
- Server assessment: …..old…..dusty….no backups…..no patches since 2014….. Status: 99% Fucked
- Current I.T Guy assessment: ……Calls Server Mainframe….Male…..Weezy….. Status: Inept Asshole
You need to understand that this previous “I.T. Guy” is horrible, which I see all the time so it’s not really surprising, yet it still amazes me.
This Server had never had security updates, hadn’t backed up in over year (if ever) and he had just sold them a brand new printer which he informed them was incapable of being networked (which is a lie at worst and a display of stupidity at best) and because he couldn’t troubleshoot the VPN issues (which only allowed only 1 remote user on at a time) he told them the issues was on the satellite’s end and to get multiple internet connections to “up their bandwidth”.
So this poor satellite office had to pay for 2 internet connections for 2 people. This folks, is what happens when you hire someone’s nephew to manage your tech.
When one users would login to the software it would kick the other out, and their IT genius deduced that it was because they only had 1 internet connection, makes perfect sense.
Within 1 hour I had fixed the VPN issue (both computers that attempted to login to the company software had the same LAN IP address), had networked the printer and had then proceeded to show them that their server was a ticking time bomb.
Because there were no backups, if that server had any issues, they would have lost everything.
On top of the unknown risk that they were accepting, their productivity was already down to a crawl because of the mis-management and lack of tech support.
Now, this is not me bragging that I can do basic IT work, it’s mean railing against people who should not be in I.T. at all.
I.T people like this rip off and destroy businesses.
A power hit, a hard drive gone bad, a virus or any number of issues could have wiped away their entire business.
If you’re a business owner, you need to understand how vital tech is to your business because it runs literally everything:
- Its your data
- your security
- your productivity
- your communication
- your customer satisfaction
- your DR
- It runs literally everything
- your CRM, sales, and everything related to your businesses growth
Now I get that spending top dollar on tech isn’t always necessary but ignoring the obvious signs of a horrible I.T. Guy works great until the day you walk into your office and realize your server won’t boot up and no one bothered to notice that the backups haven’t worked in over a year.
We see situations like this all the time and if it doesn’t tank the business, it sets them back months at a minimum.
Moral of the story – A bad IT guy will do more damage to your business than any other staff member can
