Terror and Unhappiness

Let’s get the bad ones out of the way. The biggest challenge I face is my own fear that I will screw something up, and it will cost someone (and/or myself) greatly. I find myself tensing up when the phone rings, and depending on the caller, getting quite nervous on the phone. My inner critic gets really loud when I describe what I can do for a potential client because, of course, my inner critic knows my sales pitch is just a sales pitch and has no REAL weight behind it.

So I’ve worked for free a lot. In a situation where I don’t feel very knowledgable, I’ll spend a lot of time working on the problem without charging the customer for it. Some people may think this is a mistake, and I guess it might be. But my conscience just won’t feel comfortable with charging for all my time until I can be more efficient with it.

Most of my clients receive my policy quite well. I’m sure it depends, though, on the outcome. One recent client, for example, came to me with a trashed hard disk. I ran a utility to recover as much data as I could, but the disk is seriously F’d. Though I spent at least 3 hours working to get his data of his disk I only charged him for half. Part of that was because I did a lot of research into options for recovering data in such a scenario. But I know deep down that part of it was guilt for not being able to resolve his problem.

When I ran into this guy at the grocery store a week later, I asked if he was able to get any further with his data recovery. It could have been a bad day or something, but he seemed disturbed that I even approached him. He complained that basically he hadn’t gotten anywhere except to learn it’ll just cost him more money. This is when I realized that some customers will not see me as a person after I work for them. They’ll see me as someone who serves them, and if my service doesn’t achieve what they hope, I can expect a few to treat me like I disappointed them.

So as I go forward I realize I need to find the balance between how much of the problem I own, and how much of the problem the customer owns. I’ll also need some thicker skin!

Praise and Success Stories

I’ve received a lot of praise for my work, which is absolutely required for me to do this work. I wouldn’t be able to do it for the money alone. If I didn’t see people genuinely pleased with the outcome it just wouldn’t be worth it to me.

Just yesterday I helped a client learn how to burn photos to CDs, and I installed a webcam and installed Skype for him so he could have video chats with his family (some of which are overseas). This customer is a retiree, and readily admits his simultaneous amazement and frustration with technology. But after a few minutes of instruction and testing he seemed to have a real handle on everything. He told me, "Well if anyone asks I’ll be real happy to recommend you Mike. It’s just like your card says – friendly and patient!"

Another client has said the same thing after I helped her migrate from her PC to her Mac. So far she loves it and is enjoying her Mexican vacation, apparently Skyping and emailing her friends and colleagues with ease from her palapa near the beach.

I gotta say, it’s pretty gratifying to have some successes to brag about!

This week I learned that my favorite part of this job is the tutoring. Chalk it up to my crazy childhood with a brain injured father, or my dedication to making sure people understand information they want to know, I have a facility for helping people with technical stuff. That’s how I got into this business in the first place – I was doing it anyway (for free) for friends and family. So, I may end up focusing the business more on tutoring and resolving minor or moderate configuration problems (like network issues or OS upgrades), and do less of the hardware work. I imagine the best scenario is for me to just be of assistance on whatever comes up, and be willing to be careful and fair as I do it.