I am one of the knuckle dragging apes that you talk about
i think people are being short sighted on the sales people here. I am currently working in currys as a sales person and i hold a degree in computing , and currently working towards my comptia A+ exam. the reason i am working there as a sales person is it the only computing related job i could get into becuase my degree didn't offer enough experiance.
anyway that aside that not every one in DSGI is trying to sell you more then you need Matthew Macdonald-Wallace many a time i have people walked into my shop and asked for a computer for £800 ish becuase that think that is the running price for them becuase the last one they purchased was pre 2000. But instead of sending them striahgt to the £800 machine me and my colleages will take out time to work out what the customers needs are and 7/10 times most people walk out the door with a 400 machine that is everything they need it for and change in there pocket. Also i spend a lot of my time training new members of staff on computer related issues. I have also answered questions on my days off when a fellow college phoned me at home and asked me a techie question that he had been asked by a customer .
yes i can see where people's views on staff can come from. but its not as plain cut as people think . And seeing as how all the commision structure has changed and most people aren't getting anything more for their troubles then basic wage and pressure from higher up.
tbh it swings both ways. customers can be as bad as the sales people selling to them , and the worst bit of my day is when people like most of the people on this board come in and treat me like a idiot before even speaking to me for more then a minute, though it is funny when the "uber" techie people come in ask questions to try and trip me up and i give them the answer and correct them becuase they are wrong.
saying that i have one bad experiance in pcworld with a sales person telling me that you couldn't buy non wireless routers . to her credit when i told her other wise she appologised and said that she was new and was still getting up to speed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
