The Internet cafe is open again after the powers that be shut it down for a week for someone stealing or misplacing one of the Gateway laptops that's used there. The cafe was shut down as punishment to everybody for the dork that did this deed. After what these computers have gone through the guy who took it is an idiot and I hope they catch the rat, we have no room for thieves and idiots out here. Personally I don't think these computers are worth even the weight of just carrying them home but I'm somewhat snobbish about my computer equipment. Every one of these computers has been operating in the temperatures of over a 120 degrees daily, not joke, for months at a time, about a third of them are fried, most like from all of that heat, it's amazing that the rest are still running. Posting pictures on my fotopage hasn't been the most comfortable thing, daily I sweat at least a bottle of water out just sitting in there during these summer months and the computers are slow and lock up all the time. Five years ago having an internet cafe and cheap phone calls wasn't possible. I have a few beefs with the people that run the place, not bitching about the service, it's great, just local powers that control it. The things I'm complaining about are all easy fixes that any single person in the chain of command that run the place could take care of in a couple of lunch break but they seem to be dense mules that don't want to step out of their nice air conditioned offices. What happened with customer service? It's a service they offer and you're supposed to take care of the people you're serving. Guess they weren't brought up with good work ethic. I'm actually being nice in my wording in case they actually read this and shut the place down because someone complained about it or bar me from going there. The service is better then anyone should expect being in a war zone but our local delivery blows.
Here's what's on my beatdown(tm) list:
1) Our internet cafe has one A/C that doesn't seem to blow out cold air at all, we have A/C units sitting all over base and it wouldn't be hard to request one. Considering how bad heat is for computer equipment and how pissed off they get over one piece of lost gear, wouldn't they want to protect it better? Not to mention make it more comfortable for us, it's hotter inside the tent with the A/C on then outside.
FIX: requisition one, once piece of paper with maybe 6 lines filled out and within a week a new A/C unit is sitting out back.
2) The administrator is too lazy to install updates to instant messengers so none of them have worked in months, that means webcams don't work either. They were shut down for a week, couldn't somebody stop by there and do the updates during this time?
FIX: Sign in as administrator for an hour, have the internet duty people help you download and install messengers on all the computers
3) Over the past two to three months, a bout a chair a week breaks, instead of getting replacement chairs, they had about half of the people either on their knees or sitting on broken chairs that are ready to break at any second, how ghetto is that? Chairs are cheep and plentiful, even out here. This should have been considered a quality of life issue but no one seemed to care.
FIX: Take a truck around base an pick up all the lawn furniture sitting around, cost price of gas.
4) How come we're the only base out here that won't let you plug your personal laptop in? Well I'm not sure if we're the only base. With the cooling problems I'm not even sure if I would want plug mine in anyway. This is a slacker issue is with the administrator.
FIX: Write up a one page SOP (Standard operating procedure) to place in the internet duty binder for proper procedure of setting up IP addresses on personal computers, doing a virus scan with a software disk and making sure user turns off P2P software that might be running. Cost nothing and shorter lines
Do I even have room to bitch? Sure I do, I just quit smoking, got to do something with those excessive creative energies. Besides, I'm leaving soon and all of the above should be common sense, but I know that's not issued. These are all easy fixes and I have talked to the guy that runs the place about them and he gave me a remarkable show of indifference just a couple of months ago. I don't like being made into a non-entity so for that alone it gives me reason enough to write this and added to the fact that they shut the place down for a week for somebody stealing or misplacing a computer that was likely fried in the first place takes the cake. Why didn't they send it in to get fixed, they're only a year old and probably still under warranty? Instead they break and just sit there taking up a slot at the internet cafe, occasionally the slacker computer "guru" with much complaining, gets one up and running but the broken ones just stay there and collect dust. Okay that was my bitch for the day and now stepping down from my rant.
No comments:
Post a Comment