It is an odd question, but it is one that you are not asked enough. Let’s say you are walking down the street and you realize your money clip is missing. Thankfully your id and credit cards are all in your wallet, but you have lost about $400 (not including the value of your money clip). Are you upset? Of course you are! Question is, what are you upset about? Are you mad about losing the 6 or 7 sheets of green paper in that we define as currency? Probably not. You are most likely mad because you had made plans for that money to make your life better in some way.

Now here is another scenario; there is a hole in your pocket and you are continually losing about 2 dollars a day. You wear these pants every day (because apparently you don’t like to shop) and you never figure out that there is a hole. Does this cause the same reaction? I am sure many of you were upset but far less than in the first scenario. However, when you look at the numbers, you would lose $730 a year in the second scenario which is twice as much as that random large amount of money you dropped on your way to work in the first.

The negative reaction we have from quickly losing a large amount of money and slowly losing a small amount of money is human nature. We tend to notice large impacts and grow complacent to small losses. I argue, however, that we tend to lose more money on continual small losses because we ignore them. When we lose big, we tend to investigate and resolve the problem.

Why do we do this? Let’s go back to the scenarios listed above. Why did we not care about the pants having a hole in them? There are two reasons:

1.       People generally don’t pay attention to what they wear or use everyday

2.       Because we don’t think the money was enough to worry about it.

In many business scenarios, professionals let money go down the drain because they don’t understand or recognize there is a problem.  They simply let money filter out of their pockets because they figure the problem is not large enough to worry about. In the long run, some businesses let these scenarios get so bad that they end up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars! So please, for your business, go to a seamstress. Find an expert that can fix your issues and stop your from losing money. That way you can work confidently knowing that you are doing everything that you can for your company.

Limitless Technology ~ CRS

www.limitlesstechnology.com

407-330-4466

Ten Dying Technologies Still Supported by the Help Desk

Even though the PC was declared dead last year, I still spend most of my day breathing life into this aforementioned, flat-lined tech. In a manner of speaking, tech really has a way of hanging around long past its prime. Businesses, often seeking to gain utility beyond a tech device’s complete depreciation, fail to realize it can sometimes be more expensive to support existing tech than to simply buy something new. At the same time, is there really much to gain from replacing something just because it is old?

In many cases the answer is no. Plus, even with the new year upon us, many companies are still finding ways to keep costs low. So, even though it is 2012, a time to embrace the future, all you need to do to see the past is take a trip to your local help desk.There, like a forced trip down memory lane, you can still see archaic practices like the ghosting of XP machines, or the instruction of users on how to set favorites in IE 7.

Given the relevance of old tech, we thought we would use our first official post of the year to take a look back. Listed below are ten items we commonly see show up on a list of current assets (or services). Have you managed to get rid of any of these and given them a proper burial, or are you like most help desks, and handing out back braces to your team so they can lift those fifty-pound, twenty-inch CRTs used by the design department?

1. Desktop PCs

Laptops have almost replaced these completely, and the tablet BYOD revolution may seal the deal. However, a few of these still remain, making desk changes a bit more cumbersome than they should be.

2. CRT Monitors

Local public schools likely have more of these than they know what to do with. Even with most organizations choosing to donate old CRTs, I have yet to find an office that doesn’t have at least one.

3. Printers

Just look to Dunder-Mifflin to see how a decrease in printers can affect a paper company. Once these were a staple machine in any office. Today, getting assigned to a request that involves a printer means you drew the short straw.

4. Land-Based Phone Lines

The sound of modems handshaking, and the coolness that comes with telling people about the benefits of “copper-pair” just can’t compete with the modern convenience and scalability of IP Phones. Of course, there was also no chance to mistakenly dial 911 from UK. Getting a call about a land-line means someone is getting a new phone.

5. Trackball Mice

While most help desks just keep these around to initiate the new guy, there was a simple sort of satisfaction that comes from cleaning a mouse and seeing pointer response improve.

6. Software Installations

The Cloud is here to stay. Though, a quick trip down to your help desk will show you that software installation is alive and well.

7. Hard Disk Drives

This one is a bit of technicality since solid-state drives (SSD) should see an increase in implementation. With entire databases now being written to memory, HDD are being supported on borrowed time.

8. Removable Media

“Five and a Quarters” and “Three Point Fives” may be things no help desk utters today. However, DVDs and CD ROMs haven’t been put out to pasture yet. The Cloud should help with this though. Until then, the warm glow of multi-burning DVD and CD devices will be a sight of nostalgia.

9. Non-Smart Phones

Every help desk that has customers in the field knows non-smart phones are the technology that can’t be killed. Often when they come in “for repair” everyone gathers to view the relic in all its glory.

10. Tape Backups

The Cloud seems to help with this one too – remote backups and all. However, many companies still depend heavily on the daily delivery and pickup of “today’s” data. Hard to believe any business could survive on hours-old data – maybe they couldn’t.

Image: Flickr | Andrew Maiman