Why have some of your fellow copy techs been fired?

[atwageman]

At a former employer I had a boss that treated the techs like they were 4 year olds that couldn't tie there own shoes.......He was a full time alchoholic. I left the the company for better opprotunities. Eventually he got fired because he forgot to pick up some clients at the airport for a trade show. He was hung over I guess.

This is where the story gets good. A year and a half go by and me and the owner of the company i now work for decided we needed to add a tech. (I had the power to hire and fire). I hold interviews and guess who comes into my office for an interview.....yep you guessed it, that asshole who I used to work for. The look on his face was priceless, without me saying one word....I had his lunch and then some.

I wanted to hire him just so I could return a few favors.

[10871087]

We had a customer with two HVC's, the tech advised them to renew the service contract on only one of them and he would work on the other one "on the side", free toner and parts, they pay him cash for labor. Well that worked OK for a few years until he smoke checked a booard from both machines while troubleshooting. The customer was pertty pissed that they had two dead machines and called the company to complain that the tech smoked their "on the side" machine and hasn't been back with the part for a few days.

Tech Fired, Customer fired (with two dead high volume copiers)

[Guest]

Another one bites....

Well, I must say thee opposite. Techs never get fired where I work. In two years I've seen 8 techs come and go. They never last long enough to get fired, they usually quit or disappear or never come back. The dispatcher is a bit crazy and the boss is a bit cheap, but I'm always treated well, can't complain. I guess its because, its hard to find responsible well trained technicians.

As I said before techs don't get fired here they just quit.
Another one bites the dust.. That's #9

[Stirton.M]

Not many people get fired from my office.

Most of the turnover is in sales...no surprise there.

But on the tech side...man, the amount of rope given and given and given and given....we still have techs who aren't up to snuff.

Unfortunately in the colour department, we hired a young lad who talked the talk, but couldn't fix a copier if his life depended on it. Sent him on a training course, he failed that. Sent him again and he barely passes it. These are open book exams for crying out loud. I've been on at least a dozen followup calls to machines he went to fix but could not. Basic dog problems in many of those machines he could not fix. He throws many parts at the problem, yet doesn't fix the problem. Of course, all the parts he is doing are NOT related to the problem he is supposedly fixing.

Dirty transport and sync rollers. Dirty or worn pickup and separator tires. Worn out torrington gears and pullies, dirty sensors. He even put in a damaged fusing unit (I put it on a counter in the shop, marked damaged and for parts only) into a customer machine. Customer called five minutes after he left to complain about that. I arrive and find the fuser I had already written off, with MY HANDWRITING on it right there on top. Drive gear was split on it. He didn't even wait for the machine to initialize, he just popped it in, tightened the screws, turned on the power and left before the machine was even passed the hourglass.

The most recent, customer called in for constant jams out of tray one, he blames the customer for excessive staples found in an area on the finisher and now the finisher cannot work, he says to the customer and my co-worker that he needs clutches for the finisher and leaves. I take the call, find that he screwed up a turnover gate in the finisher, it was in the wrong position. Incidently, there are no clutches in the particular finisher he was working on. Everything is direct drive. Staples were never an issue.

Worn pickup and sep tire in tray one, dirty transport tire, doc feed tires filthy and worn. Counters showing jam history would have told him EVERYTHING he needed to know.

I really really want this guy gone, but my boss says we need the help. Customers call in and specifically mention not to send him. He is rude to them, mostly women. He cannot shut up when he should be doing his job. He dresses like a slob, is often late for work, never does the job properly or up to standard and.......he is not helping me, that is for certain.

Man. How much crap can a guy get away with before management says enough?????

I am considering a baseball bat and a request that he meet me behind the dumpster.

[banginbishop]

The problem is good engineers are in short supply - lets face it, was you directed to your current job when you left school? i wasn't i had never even heard of a photocopier engineer i wanted to be a mechanic with cars. We put up with sub standard "engineers" because we struggle to find good engineers in the first place.

[leo34staffs]

The problem is good engineers are in short supply - lets face it, was you directed to your current job when you left school? i wasn't i had never even heard of a photocopier engineer i wanted to be a mechanic with cars. We put up with sub standard "engineers" because we struggle to find good engineers in the first place.

I guess all the good engineers leave for better paid IT style of jobs after becoming disillusioned with the copier industry. You learn to fix the machines (mostly without formal training) learn the IT side of the job and read bulletins/copytechnet in your spare time and the rewards are.......not much!!!

So the "good" engineers have had the sense to get out of the industry and apply there skills to a different job. Someone said this was a career, but wheres the progression? You can learn every machine made and all the IT that goes with it but it does not seem to benefit you financially.

To the previous posts mentioning techs that were rubbish and smelly, i guess this would not be the case if there were barriers to entry to the job. But, if there were i guess there would be very few engineers to hire.

Perhaps going off on a tangent there, BTW i have never been fired!!!

[Titan1969]

Inspect what you expect...

I was a tech for 10 years then promoted to manager. I turned a blind eye to what other techs did when I was a tech in the field...minded my own business and did my job. Ive seen techs drunk on the job, stealing parts, not working at all and closing calls anyway, doing 5 calls by noon and then fudging paperwork to go home for the day...on and on.

Then I got offered to be in management. I had to think long and hard about "would I be able to clean up my team I was about to inherit?" I accepted the challenge. Fired 3 techs the first month, after I had written them up and they continued to do the same inappropriate actions. The remaining techs thanked me for getting rid of them, since the former manager just didnt want to deal with it.

[banginbishop]

I guess all the good engineers leave for better paid IT style of jobs after becoming disillusioned with the copier industry.

So the "good" engineers have had the sense to get out of the industry and apply there skills to a different job. Someone said this was a career, but wheres the progression? You can learn every machine made and all the IT that goes with it but it does not seem to benefit you financially.

Unfortunatly for some IT people, the first people out of the big companies are the IT staff - look at the banks loads of job cuts and big cuts on IT. Not long ago it was "not enough people are doing IT you can earn 80k" i'm happy doing what i do. 2 positions came round at my company looking for field supervisors but i said no because i didin't want the added responsibilities or pressure of the job - i'm relaxed and stress free and thats what i like - others love it but it's not for me.

[RRodgers]

Because they make more work for other techs. Ever fire a tech and have the call load DROP!??!

[blackcat4866]

I remember a particular tech (let's call him John). He had certain favorite customers that had weekly calls for what you might consider to be questionable issues. John created far more work than he actually finished.

Do you remember the straw-man from the Wizard Of Oz? He sang "...if I only had a brain." The lyrics of this song would play in my ears as I reviewed John's service calls.

[fixthecopier]

Because they make more work for other techs. Ever fire a tech and have the call load DROP!??!

Wow I was just commenting this morning about how since someone at the shop has not been there for 3 weeks, the calls have gone down. Everyone agreed including the service manager who was doing his clean up.

[Jules Winfield]

I guess all the good engineers leave for better paid IT style of jobs after becoming disillusioned with the copier industry. You learn to fix the machines (mostly without formal training) learn the IT side of the job and read bulletins/copytechnet in your spare time and the rewards are.......not much!!!

So the "good" engineers have had the sense to get out of the industry and apply there skills to a different job. Someone said this was a career, but wheres the progression? You can learn every machine made and all the IT that goes with it but it does not seem to benefit you financially.

To the previous posts mentioning techs that were rubbish and smelly, i guess this would not be the case if there were barriers to entry to the job. But, if there were i guess there would be very few engineers to hire.

Perhaps going off on a tangent there, BTW i have never been fired!!!

Amen, reverend. After a lot of "atta boys" with no financial rewards, IT is the next logical step. That's what I ended up doing, thank God. In fact ,the last few years I was a field tech I actually made less money (even with the pitiful "raises" they were giving) due to policy changes with regards to vehicle expenses and benefits packages.

[mjarbar]

Wow I was just commenting this morning about how since someone at the shop has not been there for 3 weeks, the calls have gone down. Everyone agreed including the service manager who was doing his clean up.

The way things are going at our place at the moment I may get empirical evidence of this in the near future.

[Tom]

I know we've all worked with bad techs before. I've seen so many come & go, I can't remember half their names. It seems the company deserves part of the blame. When you pay squat, you get squat. I don't know how many years I heard the same ole story from management that if we all pulled together & worked harder for the company, the money would trickle down. It never seemed to trickle down to the techs, though. Just the owners bank account. The bad part is it's the customer who suffers through bad service and down time, even though they've paid their contract up front. Some companies charge a fortune & just don't deliver, others charge less & have great techs. In the end, the market seems to take care of the bad companies.

[Shadow1]

Ricoh seems to be hanging on to the idea that somehow having CompTIA A+ and Net+ certifications qualifies someone to work on a copier. They pretty much insist on having it before they will hire somebody as a tech. As a result, they have hired several people who don't know one end of a screwdriver from the other. Fortunately they are no longer with us.