Letting a stranger into your home to look at something you already feel uncertain about is not a small thing to ask. A fair number of people put it off for months for exactly that reason. So here is precisely what happens, from the phone call to the notes I leave behind, with nothing left vague.
Before: the phone call
You ring, or you send a message and I ring you back. We talk for five or ten minutes about what is going on. You do not need to know the right words for anything. “It has gone funny” and “there is a box that keeps appearing” are perfectly good descriptions and I will ask the questions that narrow it down.
Three things can come out of that call.
- It is something I can talk you through there and then. This happens more often than you would think. If it takes five minutes, there is nothing to pay. I am not going to drive to your house to charge you fifty pounds for something I could have said on the phone.
- It needs a visit. We agree a day and a rough time. I do not give four hour windows.
- It is not really my job. If what you need is a broadband engineer, or a warranty repair, or your bank’s fraud team, I will tell you that and point you at the right place. There is no charge for being told you do not need me.
What to have ready
Not much. The device itself, obviously, and its charger. If you know any passwords for it, have them somewhere to hand, though a great many people do not and that is a normal part of the job rather than a problem. If the trouble is with email or an account of some kind, the email address it uses is useful.
You do not need to tidy up. I have worked in a great many front rooms.
On the day
I turn up when I said I would. If I am running late you get a phone call, not silence.
We start by sitting down with the thing that is not working and you showing me what happens. I would rather see it than be told about it. Then I explain what I think is going on, in ordinary English, before I touch anything. If you would like to watch what I do, watch. If you would rather make a cup of tea and let me get on, that is fine too.
What I will not do is talk over your head. If I use a word you do not know, stop me. That is not you being slow, it is me being lazy, and I would genuinely rather be corrected.
What the money actually means
Fifty pounds an hour. No call out fee, so a one hour visit costs fifty pounds and not fifty pounds plus a charge for turning up. After the first hour I charge by the half hour, so you are not paying for a whole hour to cover ten minutes.
No fix, no fee. If I cannot solve what you asked me to solve, you do not pay for the visit. That is not generosity, it is confidence. It also means I have no reason to spin a job out.
If it takes five minutes, it is on me. Some jobs turn out to be a setting in the wrong place. I am not going to charge you an hour for that.
I will not sell you a new computer you do not need. If your machine genuinely is finished I will say so and tell you honestly what would suit you, but I do not sell hardware, so I have nothing to gain either way.
Afterwards
Before I leave, two things happen.
You get shown the fix. Not told about it, shown it, with you doing it yourself once so you know it works and you know how to do it again. If the answer to your problem is a sequence of steps, you do those steps with me sitting there.
And I leave written notes, on paper, in plain English. What was wrong, what I did, and any passwords that changed, written down where you can find them. If somebody else in the family looks after this sort of thing, those notes are for them too.
The jobs that come up most
- Setting up a new phone or tablet and moving everything across from the old one
- Printers that have stopped talking to the computer, which is most printers, eventually
- Email that will not open, or has started asking for a password nobody remembers
- Video calls with family, set up so they work without help next time
- Smart televisions that have lost their apps or their sound
- Photographs that need getting off a phone before it fills up
- Checking whether a message or a phone call was a scam
- Broadband that keeps dropping in one particular room
- Making the text bigger, everywhere, properly
There is a fuller list on the what I can help with page, but the honest answer is that if it has a screen and it is annoying you, it is worth asking.
Booking one
I cover Corsham, Chippenham, Bath, Melksham, Devizes and Trowbridge from Wiltshire, and Burnham, Slough, Maidenhead, Windsor and Beaconsfield from Berkshire.
Ring me on 07816 970 768 or send a message and describe the problem however it comes out. You can also read more about how home visits work.