We got a job for a publicly traded company, Flooring Liquidators, in the way we normally do, the phone rings and we answer it. The person on the other side asks us a barrage of questions, we set up a time, and we headed out to their location to solve their issues.

It’s sort of a running joke in our company that the customer is always unsure what’s actually broken. On this call we were told their internet was down and we would likely just need to swap out a loose ethernet cable. Once in a while, it really is that simple, however that is pretty seldom.

Most of the time we realize that the customer is probably unsure of what’s actually happened and they need to get back online or in this case they needed to get their credit card processor back to running, they needed to have their printers printing, they need to have their scanners scanning, and they needed to have their internet working.

It reminds us of a time nearly 20 years ago when we were sent out to Post Cereal to help an IT team get back online. After we arrived and went through their security, we were brought into a farm house building where the IT folks had worked. It was nothing more than a closed room with no lights on and nobody in it. Then someone from the upper management team came down and told us that they were losing several million dollars every single hour their systems were down.

Yikes.

Right away we asked: “well, where is the existing team we are going to help get back online?”  The manager replied; “we fired them all because they were outsourcing their jobs and playing video games instead of working. When we went down, nobody had a clue how to actually get us back online because that offshore team was still sleeping.”

That’s not the position you want to be in. So, we rolled up our sleeves and we got them back online. We also helped find new replacements for their staff.

Now, whenever somebody tells us over the phone it’s a simple ethernet problem or they’re unsure of what’s actually wrong, we take pause and keep this story in the back of our minds.

Most recently it was not an ethernet cable. The company had just changed ownership and they also had changed locations. That created some disgruntled IT employees who had enough and no longer wished to continue carrying the brunt of the workload for the new owners. That meant the IT system was not running properly at all. Somehow it was daisy chained through another location and worked just enough to get people to be able to do some things on the computer but they were not able to perform their main job tasks.

We then worked with third party payment providers to get their payment systems back online, we updated software and drivers, we updated hardware. We reset their modem, set up a new network, and put in new ethernet cables. After that we got all of the printers and scanners set up on the new local area network. 

We then dove into a proprietary software called Rollmaster. We reintegrated the entire thing, established the licensing on each computer at the new location, set up each machine to talk with the printer or scanner that it needed to be connected to, and made sure everybody was able to run payments at every terminal.

So what started to be a simple job that should of lasted about one hour to fix, turned into a complicated 12-hour job to get their entire system back online.

And just like Post Cereals, we managed to get this system back online for Flooring Liquidators as well.

That’s what we do here at Clovis Tech Support; we fix anything in the IT world that breaks, even if the customer isn’t really sure about what they need.