Everyone here at PACE Technical Services would like to wish our clients a happy and safe Halloween! We'd like to share a couple computer and tech support horror stories to set today's spooky mood!  Get out your flashlights and gather around the campfire for these chilling tales that could happen to any small business.

You Should Have Backed Up!

It was a dark and stormy night (don't they all start out that way?) Catherine was typing feverously to wrap up a couple of sales brochures for a vendor fair coming up. She had been working from home, since there was no time in her typical day-to-day at work to get these done. They were almost complete when suddenly a howl of wind and crack of lightning left her without power for a few seconds. Frustrated but not defeated, she went to boot her PC back up. Before Windows could begin loading, an error appeared on her screen... "NO ROM BASIC - SYSTEM HALTED" She tried again. Same error. And again... The power outage must have caused corruption on her hard drive, making it unreadable. Sometimes at night, you can still hear the screams of terror from the loss of Catherine's data.

Caught Red Handed

Jared was a great employee. Punctual, professional, hard working; he was always thinking outside the box to solve problems, streamline the organization, and drive business forward. Everyone knew him as an A-player. He even installed some great productivity software on all the workstations that helps the team stay organized. One day, Jared mysteriously vanished (just kidding, the company sent him to a training seminar)! On that very same day, a threatening letter came, addressed to the business. It was a cease and desist order, claiming the company had been pirating software, the very same software that Jared has been setting up for everyone! You see, the company wouldn't approve of the purchase of the software licenses, but now the software company is asking for ten times that!

The Eternal Call

Derek's new workstation was rebooting on it's own. His manager asked Derek to get on support with the manufacturer to deal with the haunted PC. Derek called the computer manufacturer, and sat on hold for 20 minutes. After getting a human on the line, Derek supplied all of the information and was put on hold once again. Eventually he was asked to reboot the computer, confirm it was plugged in, run Windows updates, reboot it four more times, and finally, after being escalated to yet another technician, Derek was asked to reinstall Windows. After spending the entire day with the manufacturer, Derek finally had his workstation back up and running. The next day he experienced the same rebooting issue. Frustrated, Derek got back on with tech support. They made him wait on hold, reboot his computer, run Windows updates, confirm it was plugged in, and asked him to reinstall Windows. This cycle repeated a few days, but at least the company wasn't being charged for support! Exhausted and unwilling, Derek pleaded to his manager to put in a call to their IT support. A quick remote session resolved the issue by updating a bad driver that came with the install disk. That wasn't so bad, right? Tell that to accounting, who still had to pay Derek for several full days despite him not being able to do his job because of a simple computer issue.

Want to prevent these spooky IT horror stories from happening to your company? Give PACE Technical Services a call at 905.763.7896 and we'll keep your IT safe from ghosts, ghouls, malware, and all of the other scary elements that can haunt your technology!