Almost 60

Growing

Growing...

I have hired office help to tame that scary phone.

   

My new office girl's name is Margaret and her main duties at first is to answer the phone and greet the customers.
She does not know how to use Office or Quickbooks but I will teach her.

During the 2 weeks that she has been here, she has already learned a lot which allowed me to give her more responsibilities.

So at this point I have her do the following tasks:

1. Answer the phone (I forward my cell phone calls to her desk phone). 
2. Assign jobs a repair time
• Assist customers when bringing in repairs.
• Assist customers that need remote service.
• Assist customers that need onsite repair.
3. Check out repair to customers when finished.
4. Organize customers folders.
5. Work the online workbook for Office Word 2016

She is doing very well with her tasks and the workbook.

I have high hopes for Margaret.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So what am I doing now???  TAXES

I have 

 

more business taxes to file.

I think I am going to pack up and take my work with home since it is already 6pm and a bad storm is coming.

Hopefully I get it all finished tonight so I can come back tomorow and move 

 

the office around to make more room for me and Margaret.

 

 

 

 

 Margaret

 

 

Maybe Me, tomorrow.

 

 

 >>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Later~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<<<

 

 

 

 

Slow week

Yes it business was very slow..turtle slow.. this week but ....

I still work like a Ninja on all the other stuff that gets backed up when I do the repairing.

One of the stuff that gets backed up or neglected is my Webpage.
I know it sucks and it has 10 errors in it but I am about to fix that. I am going to put up an entire new site and pay very good attention to my kewords.

I also still have 250 post cards that I had ordered but never send out, heck I even already have the postage for it.

So even though I am not busy...I am very busy.

Going home and be back on Monday.

Enough with digital streaming advertisement

I let myself talk into paying for digital streaming radio advertisement.

I was told that even though it was digital streaming and not the normal radio advertisement it was just as effective. Well it is not very effective, 

Actually for me it was 100% none effective. I received not one single call from the ad.

When I put out about a 100 advertisement flyers I gain about 3 new customers for the cost of about 5 dollars. The digital advertisement cost me $100 a month and got me zero calls.

I think this is a no-brainer. No more digital streaming.

Tomorrow I am setting up Google ad. Google is offering me $150 free advertisement if I pay $50. we see how this goes.

Jobs that are currently waiting to be completed:

• A laptop with a bad motherboard. 

• A laptop where a 10 year old set a BIOS password, a user password AND a hard drive password and now doesn't remember any of them.

• Several tablets with different problems.

• Putting a proposal together for a lady that needs me to help her with all the online advertisement and getting her name out there.

• Logging in remote to a customer to finish setting up her cox email in windows 8.

So today is going to be a busy day because I also have a customer come in for an appointment to teach him how to use his laptop.

 

You never know what walks through the doors

I am always needing parts for laptops so I thought about all the times someone has a laptop that the screen went out or the thing just don't want to boot up anymore. So...

I posted an ad on Craigslist stating that I am looking to buy laptops for parts that either have their screen broken or the motherboard failed. 

A guy called and told me he had a laptop for sale that the screen went out. He said that he still uses it by plugging it in to a monitor and that it is nice and fast but he needs money so he wants to sell it.
I told him OK I can come to him or he can bring it to me and I take a look at it and see what I can give him for it.
He said he was coming from Milton and he only had 7 dollars in gas but wanted to come now and sell it rather than waiting on me to come to him later on today.
An hour later the guy shows up. At this point I wish I had taken a picture of the laptop to post it here.
The laptop didn't just have a broken screen it had a "missing" screen. I plugged it in through my monitor and I kid you not when I say I waited five minutes for it to boot. Once it got to the welcome screen I selected one of the login and waited another ten minutes when I gave up because it never made it through the complete boot process.
I forced a shut down and rebooted, taking it into Safe Mode. Now it should boot rather quickly since the PC is only loading very basic drivers. I call it the fail proof method.
Well once I started the safe mode boot process I was greeted with the big blue screen of death.

A blue screen in safe mode? Now that is bad.
I than proceeded to boot it into the BIOS just to take a peek to see what this PC has on power.
Looking it up previously on Dell website by its model number I know it should have a 2GHz CPU, 1Gb  Memory and 40Gb Hard drive space.
Well it did not have those specs. 

Someone had stripped it down. It had a 1Ghz CPU and it had only 512mb Memory

So let me see...the thing has no screen, it only has 512mb memory, it crashes trying to run XP in safe mode....Now I get it....he thought I was the graveyard for old dinosaurs laptops.

I really hated to send him away empty handed since he spend his 7 dollar getting here but he tried to screw me over so I guess I am still OK. LOL

What should I do?

I have my office which has two rooms upstairs on the 5th floor in the Plaza Building. 

I received an offer from the owner to move to the office that is located downstairs on the right side of the building. This office is a store front with lage glass windows and the total space is twice of what I have now but so is the price.
The rent I would pay for this store front is still a really good deal but I don't know if I should do it.
The pro is that I can advertise out on the road and on my windows and the con is that just anyone will be walking in of the street. 
(Considering that a lot of stragglers roaming these streets)

I would really enjoy the extra space because I am a little cramped now. 

Than I am thinking about the way I am conducting business at this time...I am in the office from 8 to 12 but after that I am out doing service calls or whatever I choose to do. So I really only need the office space for the morning hours.
Than I think, well being able to advertise out front might just cause the business to really grow and than I can afford to hire someone to sit at that front desk when I am gone.
As far as the double rent goes...I could cancel that radio advertisment that is bringing me absolutely no calls and stick that money toward paying the extra rent.
Decisions, decisions....
I have prayed about it last night and this morning and the answer I been seeming to get is to do it. 
I will see how things go.
I am just scared to rock the boat by putting on more of a burden on my business now but also don't want to miss out on a great opportunity.

We will see what happens...

Didn't get much done today. That PC from the other day is waiting on a new video card. A bad video card was its problem all this time. The video card it has now is an onboard card.

I think I am closing and head on out to the beach for Bands on the Beach night.

April, 17th 2014

 It is 7 pm and I am still working but......... having fun. I have my sound bar mounted on the wall and every evening when I work late I jam very loud to all my favorite music.

Yes you can dance while sitting in a chair and repairing three computers all at once.

One of the repair is a pain in the rear. It is an older system that still has XP. For some reason it keeps freezing. I know its one of the drivers causing this mess because the PC behaves very nicely in safe mode.
Here is the thing......I did a factory reformat, which means it should run great but it isn't. So I am thinking that one of the old drivers that came originally with this PC isn't compatible anymore. I am leaning very strongly toward the graphics driver so I tried updating it but don't you know it doesn't want to be updated. The dumb thing thinks it is as updated as it is going to get......well, little does this card know how persistent I can be to get my way. 
One way or another this card will get updated. LOL

Another repair I had earlier today was so infected with viruses that I wanted to wear gloves and a mask. Normally a PC being that sick doesn't bother me but this machine has windows 8. Now the reason that is a problem is because in windows 8 we no longer have the ability to get into safe mode by pressing F8. 

I found this out today after restarting this machine over three dozen times pushing the F8 so many times that the key probably has a permanent indent of my finger now. 

Well at least I learned something new. Well anyway so I need to get into safe mode and every way to get into it requires me to be in windows. Dude if I could get into windows I wouldn't need safe mode on this machine. I did found out a work around to get to the command prompt in a pre-window environment and than typed in some instruction telling this machine to reboot into safe mode. The first six times it didn't work but eventually I got it to do what I wanted it to do and the machine had to bow down to my wishes. It is now once again a nice fast virus free, healthy machine and I have a happy customer. Martina the PC slayer wins again. LOL

Well that first machine that was behaving well in safe mode just crashed. Grrrr.

Pull the plug and go home for today. Tomorrow is another day.