It was the 3rd of June.
I remember because that’s the day the office entirely fell to pieces. But it had some help… I’ll explain.
I had come into work expecting a pretty calm day. After all, it was a Saturday. Most of the staff was off for the weekend, and so I thought I would get a few things done in the quiet of the office.
One step in the door and I realized that I wasn’t the only one working on a weekend.
The entire place was disheveled.
Someone had been there through the night – and up to no good.
Drawers from the secretary’s desk were on the floor, filing cabinets had been pushed on their side, and every piece of glass in the place – including every computer monitor and television screen – had been shattered.
Pretty confident that I was alone, I walked further into the facility to see the same scenario played out to one degree or another throughout the complex.
I walked back out into the disarray of the lobby to call the police.
Then I saw it – a dagger and what looked like a fork that had been hastily spray painted on the back of the entry door.
Because I had pushed the door open earlier and had been distracted by the mess in front of me, I hadn’t turned around to look at the door I had just walked through, but there it was.
What it meant, I had no idea.
911 dispatch sent out a cruiser, and the officers that showed up took my statement, snapped some pictures of the damage and the spray-painted image and said, “We’ll see what we can do. We’ll let you know what we find.”
With that. I was left alone in the disaster that used to be my office getting angrier by the moment.
Knowing that anger wasn’t going to get me anywhere, I turned my attention to the task at hand.
The second call I made was to our insurance company.
Yes. Thankfully everything was insured.
The third call was to my four business partners to let them know what had happened and the steps that I was taking.
With everything under control, I nearly walked out of the building and back to my car, but reality grabbed me and spun me around.
“There’s no way this can be cleaned up by Monday,” I thought. “And even if it could, how are my employees going to work without their computers?”
“Their computers…”
Those two words bounced around my mind until I realized that there was one more call I had to make.
I picked up the phone and called CTECH, our IT support company here in Calgary.
A few years previously, I had done a Google search. I had typed in “Who provides reliable tech support in Calgary?”
There were several companies offering tech support, and I started to call around.
It was interesting…
I got several responses to my questions on the telephone.
Some just had answering machines.
Some phones were answered by outsourced answering services that didn’t know much about computers.
Some were answered by guys that were either too busy to talk to me or too “salesey.”
I had nearly given up when I dialed the number for CTECH.
That day, the calls to CTECH were being directed to Carl Fransen, the company owner. He took the time to listen to my questions about reliable tech support, and he seemed to understand where I was coming from.
Two days later, I signed a managed services contract with Carl and CTECH became the tech support partner for my Calgary business.
But that was three years ago.
Let’s move back to that Saturday and the ransacking of our facility.
As I said, the words “Their computers…” had triggered my realization that I needed to call CTECH if I had any hope of getting back up and running soon.
Even on a Saturday, my call was answered, and emergency tech support personnel were dispatched.
Fortunately, Carl Fransen had convinced me to invest in what he called a “business continuity strategy”.
Basically what that meant is that his IT support personnel would do backups of my data, applications, operating systems, and personal settings on a regular basis and monitor those backups to ensure that they could be easily recovered.
That’s what I needed now.
I needed to recover so my people can get back to work and we don’t lose momentum in our ongoing projects.
The CTECH IT support guys showed up within two hours of my call and went to work assessing the damage.
In the end, we lost all our monitors, fourteen of twenty-seven computers, and one of our servers.
(They had poured oil from the maintenance shed into it. Can you believe it?)
So, with our facility trashed and most of our computers out of commission it was time to move to plan B.
The CTECH team salvaged what they could of our IT system, and we moved everything to a rent-by-the-month office complex here in Calgary.
About that time, the insurance adjuster got to our trashed facility, assessed the damage and gave us clearance to buy the computers and server we would need to get going to our new temporary location.
Carl Fransen heard about our mess and stopped by the new rental facility to check in and see how he could help. He even brought us coffee and doughnuts from Tim Hortons!
“That,” I thought “is what I was looking for when I searched Google for ‘reliable tech support in Calgary’ three years ago.”
In a crisis, Carl and the CTECH team had stepped up and hit a home run.
Before my employees walked into the rental space on Monday morning, Carl and his staff had set up the new and salvaged computers, ensured that all our data and applications were downloaded from the cloud, and double checked to make sure that the network was functioning as it should.
It was a long and frustrating two days, but CTECH made the transition to a backup location as seamless as is humanly possible.
If you’re looking for reliable tech support in Calgary, give them a call.
Oh, I almost forgot to tell you…
The police got back to me a week or so later. The symbol spray painted on the back of my facility’s entry door – the dagger and “fork” – was actually a dagger and a trident. It was the symbol of a local fraternity that had a long history of troubling initiation requirements.
Fortunately, the corner store across the street from my office caught the culprits’ car on camera as it turned into my parking lot, and the police picked up and charged six young men. We’ll see what comes of that.
One thing that is certain, I won’t soon be switching tech support companies! CTECH has been such a help.
Monday morning came, and except the odd feeling of a different facility, everything went back to normal.
Thank you CTECH!
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My passion is to make my mark on the world in a positive and lasting way. I want to set an example for my son that his father can compete with integrity in today’s world, be very successful, and leave the world a better place for him.
Combining my technical/business-based education with a long career steadily progressing up the corporate ladder, I decided to build a company that held true to my values. So, I founded and designed the next generation of IT support firm: CTECH Consulting Group Inc. We are a completely automated, cloud-based IT company designed to compete against any other IT firm without the overhead. We promote a lifestyle to all our staff where they can work anywhere, at any time, access any information on any device that is relevant to their job, and collaborate with anyone they want to.
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