Originally published at: Fixing Macs door to door in the 2000s - Boing Boing
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One of these specialists came to fix my iMac in the late 2000s. We lived in a remote part of Maine, so it was super nice that they sent someone instead of having me drive a few hours.
Over three or four visits he replaced every part on the computer. Then they declared it a lemon and replaced it with a brand new one. I doubt hardware changes would have solved the problem, but I wasn’t going to complain about a new machine!
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I did PC repair in the late 90s, out of a retail store owned by a largish national chain. Think gateway, but way sketchier. They hit the news for sanding off CPU markings and overclocking them.
Well, I worked at that job for months and eventually I was told by the manager to do a house call.
“Whaddya mean, a house call?” as I stubbed out another cigarette in the ashtray.
“You have to go to this place and reinstall windows.”
“Why can’t they come here like everybody else?”
“‘Cause buddy kept his original sales contract and actually read it.”
“Bullshit. What does it say?”
“It says everyone gets free house calls for a year. We didn’t think anyone would ever use it. Now put your fuckin’ coat on and get outta here.”
It wasn’t many weeks after that that I walked out the door and never came back. They went out of business with the rest of the dotcom scum and I don’t miss it one bit.
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I too did some PC repair and building and more sales of computers in the mid-late 90s as well!
The first company I worked for went out of business due to horrible mismanagement and probably due to some fraud with business loans. He was nice to me, but probably a con man to others.
The second one did quite well, but after I left it shut down because it turned out one of their bigger buyers was using stolen cards and they didn’t know about it until about $10k worth of goods were sold. The owner decided to close as it would have been hell to recover. Though he did all right for himself. He went on to to running a back up server farm in the basement of a half empty building in down town KC. Turns out that building had access to TWO different power grids, meaning they could keep the power on even if one went down. He slowly bought up floors as it expanded.
Then downtown got revitalized, the property area he was in exploded, and he sold the company for millions, last I heard.
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