Dont Be Afraid To Turn Down Certain Computer Technician Work

As a self employed computer technician, you shouldn’t be afraid of turning down certain computer technician work. I have turned down a handful of jobs in my time as a technician but one particular time I remember was when I was called out to a courier company that has a central base about 1.5 hours away from me and they called me out to de-dust some computers.

I drove out to their location and once I arrived onsite I found out that these computers they wanted me clean are actually 4 servers. In the end, I had to turn down this job. Heres why:

In order for me to get the sides off these servers, I would need to power them down and take them out of the server enclosure.

Now, I am obviously not going to start shutting down servers until I find out what role they are currently filling. I asked the manager and apparently this courier company has about 400 trucks driving around the city picking up and delivering various items. The dispatchers in this building assigns “jobs” for the truck drivers saying that they need to pick an item up from one address and drop it off at another. These jobs are assigned various tracking numbers with information about who the client is, whether they have paid etc.. All of this information about these jobs is kept on one of these servers.

At the same time, there is a staff member watching a big map of the city where there little truck icons with numbers on them moving around the map. Apparently all of their delivery trucks are GPS tracked and they know where any of them are at any given time. This allows the company to be more efficient as they can assign a delivery job to a truck actually in that area. Again, all of this data is routed through another one of those 4 servers. It appears that some of these servers are also running a custom Linux build (or at least something I have never seen or heard of).

I asked the manager about the technician who usually manages these servers and it turns out their usual technician is away on a holiday in Cambodia. This is why they called me to clean the machines otherwise they would have just used their usual guy.

My last question to them was how long has it been since these servers were last rebooted and the manager said “a long time”. Now, I could shut down these servers, remove them from their rack, take the sides off and give them a blast with compressed air, but what happens if they don’t boot up correctly into their custom Linux OS?

Can you imagine the damage that would be done to the business that currently has 400 trucks driving around town with all the data about what they have and where its going on these servers? They couldn’t even call in their usual guy to fix it in a timely manner since he is in Cambodia. They would be well within their rights to sue for some serious loss of income.

I wasn’t confident in my abilities in getting those servers up and running if there was a problem so I told them that I wont be able to do the job and why. Even though I would have lost money because I have spent 3 hours getting there and back plus the cost of petrol, its just not worth getting sued if something went wrong.

If you are out of your depth, don’t be afraid to turn jobs down. Sure, you may take a hit to your ego but if you explain why you have to decline, the client will most likely appreciate and respect the fact that you are looking out for them. Besides, its much better than getting sued into oblivion.