I was scheduled to receive a new laptop on Monday at our Concord, MA facility which is a fair bit of a drive from my home in NH. I met a co-worker partway there and we drove down together.
We were told to drop off the laptops by 9am and that they'd be ready by 5pm. We resisted the urge to stay local and pester them every hour for a status. That was a big mistake.
When we showed up at 3:30pm it was apparent that the four laptops that hadn't been touched yet were those belong to the four people that don't have desks at that location and didn't spend the day dropping in looking for a status.
I kept asking what I could do to help and finally just took over the keyboard, asked to see the cheat sheets, and got it done. I also had to help the contractor solve the email connectivity problem (logged in as wrong user) and find the PST files from the other system (search didn't find them and they didn't know what directory to look in for them) for my co-worker's system. We didn't get out of there until 7:30pm.
Another co-worker got her laptop today and asked me to go down to the location with her and do the transfer. I did the whole process and finished her laptop in around three hours after having to wait 30 minutes for them to let me use the IDE to USB hard drive connector to transfer her files from a hard drive she had in another system. They weren't done yet with the systems they had going when I walked in the door.
The whole time I tried to be helpful and pleasant but they looked at me like I had three heads.
Bob: Did you know that you can get all the virus updates by right-clicking on the icon and selecting "Update Now..."? (they downloaded each update separately)
Contractors: *blank look*
Bob: Did you know that the browser responds faster if you put in the proxy information first? (last thing on their checklist)
Contractors: *drool*
Bob: You have to look in the Outlook directory to be sure you found all the PST files that have to be transfered. (hey, the cheat sheet says...)
Contractors: *chewing on their cud*