PC ProSchools – TechTalk

The month of December for 2009 was pretty busy for me.  I took 3 different exams.  First was the Client exam for Windows 7 (70-680).  Second was the 70-236 exam, which dealt with Exchange 2007.  Last, I took the Comp/Tia Security + exam.  I have been telling my students in every class since I started as an Instructor that learning never ends in IT.  Either you keep on learning or fall into obscurity.

The taking of certification exams servers two purposes for me personally.  I think the most import purpose is to keep me challenged mentally.  I like to learn new and interesting things, but find it difficult sometimes to learn about the tedious boring details.  Studying for a certification exam forces me to look over and learn the details.  The lesser of the two reasons would be that these certifications are valuable to me as far as an IT professional.

I usually never tell my students that I am planning to take an exam.  I also try to schedule an exam when I know at least one of my students will be in the exam room.  I really think it’s a good thing for my students to see their instructor sitting along side them focused on taking an exam.  This reinforces the fact that even IT instructors need to continue learning and I think it sets a good example for students to see me in that room.  I wish we were able to test for Cisco Exams at my campus.  I think that’s one of the areas I’m going to start looking at next.  But who knows, maybe something else will catch my fancy and I’ll head another direction.  That’s another great thing about learning in IT…there is no shortage of interesting things to learn about!

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• MCDST or MCITP Enterprise Support

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my brother. He told me that his new flat screen monitor wasn’t working with his computer. When he plugged it in and turned the computer on, it started up fine, displayed the Windows XP welcome screen and then went black.

His old monitor worked perfectly fine with the computer. I asked him if he turned it off before switching out the monitors.

He said that he did.

He tried a couple of different things that didn’t work. He wanted to know if I could take a look at it, since I was here. First, I wanted to see what happened myself.

We switched out the monitors and it started up and then went black. At first, I thought it was a driver problem. I downloaded and installed the driver for the monitor. When I switched to the new monitor, it went black again. So I went to his other machine and Googled the problem. I found an entry on Tom’s Hardware that talked about the screen refresh rate, sometimes it is set too low for a new monitor to handle.

I switched to the old monitor on the problem computer to find out what the current screen refresh rate was. His rate was within the range suggested by the website. I lowered the rate because I believed that it may have been too high for the monitor. I switched out the monitors again.

This time, it worked. I was now able to use the computer.

Then I told my brother how I solved his problem, He couldn’t believe it and had to see his computer working.

Now he has more space on his computer desk.

Editor’s Note: DJ’s story shows that even a software engineer knows how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.

As my students know I am from New Zealand, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that over the Christmas holiday I called my mum and talked to her for about 2 ½ hours.

Before calling I did some research to find out how much it would cost to call New Zealand and failed to find any information so I decided to place the call anyway, thinking to myself, “I have more than 5000 rollover minutes saved, it can’t be that bad.”

It doesn’t work that way,

I got my bill and the call cost around $520 for the 150 minutes ($3.45/min), this made me very sad and a little angry at both myself and AT&T.

I called AT&T customer service and asked where I could have found out how much it cost to call NZ a minute. The representative directed me to the information which was, by his admission, hard to find and fairly deep on their website.

At this point I am trying to work out how I am going to pay the bill, since my only reasonable argument, that the price information was no where to be found, had just been shot down when the representative asked me if I could hold for a moment.

When he came back, he said he was going to try to put me on the international calling plan (which costs around $4 a month) retroactively, this would reduce the cost of the call to about $12 (8 cents/min) but he needed approval from the international division and from a higher up manager as the credit would be more than he or the international division could authorize.

After a nerve racking 2 minutes on hold, AT&T’s representative came back and let me know it had been approved.

AT&T didn’t have to credit me $510, they could have made me pay it and they wouldn’t have been wrong to do it, although the pricing information was hard to find, it was there and it was my fault for not looking harder. Instead they chose to cut me a break and help me out.

In our current economy a lot of companies are really putting the screws to their customers, if my story is an indication of how AT&T is going to treat their customers in bad times then I think they will have a lot more customers willing to stand by them in good times.

In my case they increased the chances of me renewing my contract significantly (although they will still need to support a phone I want to use) and for what its worth, because I think customers complain too much and don’t praise the good things enough, they got this article from me.

Does anyone else have any stories of great or surprising customer service?