Fun and Games

Well its been a couple of months since my last post. How time slips by when your not having fun.

Have been moving my business into new directions, or should I say multiple new directions.

The computer repair industry is just not what it used to be in regional areas. Well some regional areas anyway.
More and more of my clients have either closed up and moved on or even more disturbingly disappeared in the middle of the night owing me and others cash.

One such case was a couple who ran a main street business about an hour and a bit away. By all accounts it was fairly well run, the POS units seemed to be humming along nicely when ever I was there doing work.

My last job was building a new desktop system for the back office as the other one had suffered a nice little blast from the power grid (foaming caps anyone). Normally in this day and age its payment before or on delivery, but I’d been looking after these particular clients for awhile and so I gave them a 7 day account. Well its now been 14 and no sight of them or that money. The shop closed down and had everything moved out over the weekend and even the landlord wasn’t expecting it. I checked at their home too and empty and gone, one of the neighbourino’s ,  mentioned a big truck and furniture and another mentioned that the couple on one occasion had discussed the jobs going in Western Australia….

Another hard lesson learned, write it off, pass it on too the debt collectors and make sure everyone pays up front, cash preferred.

Sad, yes, Frustrating very.  Trouble being its a sign of the times, people are treating computer repair, maintenance and servicing as something to be avoided at all costs. Computers running slow, its playing up, will just get the teenager who sweeps the floors to take a look at it, after all he can work an Ipod.

And then when its gotten to the point where its just bad enough to call someone a few have unplugged it and gone around to the local chain store and picked up a brand new system on lease. Not to matter that the other system had stuff on their they needed, they have it written down somewhere, they’ll find it come tax time.

Even when they do call you fix the system clean out the numerous keyloggers and remove the teenagers porn links they’ll take three times as long to pay.

So as I said I’ve been moving my business into other directions. I will still be doing repairs and servicing but that will be getting less and less hopefully.

As for those other directions, well like everyone else I have an idea or two for an Iphone app, I also have started back on Web Development, and looking at doing more consulting work -  yes consultants do work it just doesn’t look like it sometimes :p

Anyway next post should be much more perky. lol.