Reddit reviews Upgrading and Repairing PCs

>Tech call - a call about tech goals. I expected it to be different than what it was.

Yeah that's always been done by the SM in my experience, but I guess different DM's handle it differently.

>It's not just that he's a dummy; I have no problems coaching and training people. But this dude is starting at less than zero with his knowledge base but is the kind of guy who will just keep babbling tech terms in the hopes that something sticks

As for this associate of yours...although these mistakes sound absurd to people like you and I, who are pretty computer savvy, a lot of them are relatively common. Getting RAM and HDD mixed up happens all the time, and restore points/system restore mix-up is a really common mistake for newbies to make as well. I could even see where he'd mistakenly reformat the ETTB's instead of updating them, given the options it gives you on the ET dashboard. The Chrome and W10 things are a little more puzzling, especially the Chrome one, but I can kinda see where he might say something like that depending on his knowledge base and how he interpreted something he might've heard or read in passing about Chrome/W10.

>I taught him how to clone a hard drive, and for some reason THAT took and he remembers how, but now he suggests a new hard drive to almost every single customer complain, just because he knows how to do it now.

As for this, in all fairness replacing the HDD is a pretty surefire way to get a customer's computer running better. Even if it's not failing yet replacing HDD that's more than a couple years old will almost always make a noticeable difference. I recommend it to most of my customers who complain about speed issues (generally with an SSD rather than an HDD), or on most diag and repairs for computers that are more than a couple years old.

>And when you try to explain something to him, he gets really defensive and thinks you're being condescending.

Maybe you need to adjust your approach? You had success in teaching him how to clone a hard-drive, so try to think back and determine what was different about that interaction with him from your typical coaching/teaching interactions where he gets defensive. It could be as simple as using a friendlier, kind of nurturing tone of voice, or maybe with him it's better to coach pre-preemptively rather than correctively. That could mean pulling him aside when you've got a couple free minutes and just teaching him stuff - any stuff - or recommending some books on PC repair (here's a really good one I just started reading, it goes over the basics really well, while also getting more in depth, so it's great for both beginners and experienced technicians looking to understand more of the why and how). Either way, if you were able to teach him how to clone a HDD that shows that he's coachable and willing to learn, it's just a matter of finding what he responds to and adapting your approach to fit that when dealing with him.

>When I first came back to the store and started working with him, I would laugh all the time because the stuff he'd say was so outrageously wrong and uninformed that I thought he was messing with me. I know that something is going to go horribly, horribly wrong if he's given any kind of reign behind the bench, and it'll come back to my doorstep.

Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that barring him from working on computers is not a good solution and opens up a whole new can of worms. It means that tech work is (presumably) only getting done when you're there, if and when you get more associates it could create a sense of favoritism ("Associate X isn't certified either, how come he can work on computers and I can't?!"), it makes him doing pick-ups tricky if he doesn't know what's been going on with the computers, and he might as well not be allowed to do in-takes at all if he's not allowed to work on the computers either. It's really just a matter of building his skill-set and knowledge-base as it pertains to how computers work and how to fix them, which is a lot easier than teaching him how to sell stuff.