Agent Anski, M.D.

So, my girlfriend bought season one of House on DVD. We've been watching it a lot lately.


And then I came to realize something...


Working in a Geek Squad precinct is like being on that show... only we work with computers and not humans.

Now, I understand some people may be questioning this. How can you compare two seemingly completely different things together?
Well, it's like this: House is a show about a doctor in a hospital. A hospital that gets tons of patients all the time with the mundane things, treated, released... except those few that come in that has everyone scratching their heads.
Now, back to my job... we get a multitube of sick computers in every day. The majority are the easy, mundane things. But every once in a while... I think you get my point.

Just yesterday (Sunday) I spent nearly my entire shift (between dealing with all the stupid people that came in, but that is another story) working on one computer that was one of those special cases. The customer needed it by Monday, and no one really had any idea what was causing the issues (bluescreening, ect... I won't get into details because it doesn't really matter). The customer had also approved over $350 of work on this one computer. The agents that worked on it before me came to the conclusion that it was a software problem, we did a restore on it. Yess.. it work good. Wait.. nope! It's dying again! Bad harddrive, even though it tested fine? Swap it out with a test drive and reload it! Working fine, working fine... dead again. Okay.. old harddrive back in. But, I finally know what is causing it (by killing it a few times I obviously deduced what was causing it). It all traced back to faulty WLAN hardware. Since the customer needs it tomorrow, I call her up, tell her what it is, and how to not make it happen (I left the drivers off so that nothing would try to access the hardware). Recommend she brings it back in when she has time so it can go to our service center (unfortunately we aren't equiped to do internal laptop repair in-store).

Anyway, you can sort of get a taste of the similarities... the misdiagnose, the treatment, the situation getting worse - but with new clues... and finally.. proper treatment.

At least I thought it was interesting.