Wednesday, January 3, 2018

How much should I charge these dingbats?

I’ve posted here before. I installed an IP/POE 10 camera system for a small hotel/casino in the Caribbean. Later I returned to install a POS system for their restaurant. 2 months later the whole island was destroyed by hurricane Irma. The config was simple, LTE modem, netgear router, 2 unmanaged switches. Someone knocked the switch off it’s self onto the floor and then the hotel flooded with 9 inches of water. The switch was submerged. After a couple weeks they plugged everything in again and tried to get the pos to work. They couldn’t get anything to connect to the router WiFi. The password wouldn’t work, despite it being entered correctly.

All of he components were shipped back to me in the US and I couldn’t find a thing wrong, even the flooded switch. I was planning to buy duplicate equipment and head down there to troubleshoot the whole system. They are on limited power and backup generators. I just found out the owner doesn’t want to send me down, instead he is sending his ‘smart enough to be very dangerous’ brother. I will assist him remotely to get the whole thing up and running again.

My concern is many fold. I don’t know if any of my cabling is damaged, is the power quality sufficient? The brother is the only guy down there and every call is interrupted by some ‘other business’ that comes up. “I’ll call you back in five minutes” is his response. This becomes twenty or thirty minutes. All with my waiting by my computer. We can only work at 6am, because the traffic capacity is so limited and saturated by 8am. I’ve tried to remote in, but the connections only last about 45 seconds.

If I was down there, I’d have the whole thing tested, fixed and figured out in a half a day or less. I hate working like this. If you were me, how much would you charge these guys for fixing this remotely? Also are there other tests I should be doing on the flooded switch? I just plugged my laptop into all the ports.



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