There's a medium-small cardboard box on the bed in Bob and Eileen Gaudet's warmly homey St. Pete master bedroom. On the box is a picture of a diminutive and deceptively simple-looking piece of electronic equipment, along with a convolution of letters and numbers strung together in such a way as to excite and intimidate those who can't tell what the damn thing is. It's the kind of box that houses something small and expensive not in spite of its compactness but rather because of it, something cool and techy and obviously designed to help make life in the 21st century that much more convenient.
The box is, more or less, the reason why a reporter, a photographer and a roving computer technician have invaded a jovial middle-aged Canadian couple's inner sanctum on just the sort of Tuesday morning that undoubtedly brought the Gaudets down here from Ontario.
The technician, Jim Pennington, opens an even smaller box than the one on the bed, and withdraws a conspicuously contemporary plastic gewgaw equipped with a stubby plastic antenna. The gewgaw closely resembles the picture on the bed-box, only it's black, not blue, and even sleeker.
"You're not even going to need that router," says Pennington, motioning toward the bed-box. "Most of the modems the DSL providers are sending out these days come equipped for wireless networking. You can always return it."
Then he drops to all fours and half-disappears into the cranny under the couple's desktop computer, to see how everything's wired up. The Gaudets' two cocker spaniels wander back into the room for the 10th time in 20 minutes, attracted by the presence of strangers and the possibility of more attention.
The Gaudets are part of an ever-expanding subset of contemporary tech-culture — households of a generation that didn't grow up with PCs, but are learning to incorporate them into their daily routine. She keeps up with family goings-on and sends out photos of the grandbabies via e-mail; he plays pinochle online and listens to Internet radio. The information superhighway has become enough of an integral part of their lives to warrant graduating from dial-up America Online service to a broadband DSL connection, and the purchase of a laptop computer for ferrying back and forth between their homes in Florida and Canada.
They bought the laptop at their local Best Buy. Questions about sharing an Internet connection with their desktop PC facilitated an appointment for Pennington to come to their home and install a wireless network, which will allow the laptop to utilize the Gaudets' new high-speed Internet account from pretty much anywhere on their suburban property. While Mr. and Mrs. Gaudet are a little more computer-savvy than your average grandparents, hooking up a wireless network is the kind of thing that might cost even a fairly intuitive amateur a day or so of manual-reading, cursing and support-hotline hold music.
Pennington, on the other hand, gets the two computers talking in under an hour. He then encrypts the network for security purposes (after showing the Gaudets, on their own new computer, the presence of another, insecure wireless installation nearby), walks them through the registration process for their new DSL system, and reconfigures their AOL account to eliminate annoying pop-up ads, all the while providing countless tips and bits of helpful information.
"Oh yeah, I got it, I'll remember all of this stuff," says Bob Gaudet with a laugh, tummy-rubbing one of the Cockers into submission. "Right up until he leaves."
Other than a few passwords, protocols and file locations, most of the stuff isn't that important to day-to-day use, anyway. Pennington, an instantly likeable guy who seems younger than his 32 years despite a full, dark goatee and softening middle, is just being thorough. Checking your e-mail on a wireless laptop isn't too different from checking it from the computer that's plugged into the phone-jack. The work is in the setup, and Pennington — a member of Best Buy's stylized, customer service-intensive computer fix-it corps Geek Squad — is here to deal with that, at $159, so the Gaudets don't have to.
After double-checking the network and optimizing the desktop PC's performance, Pennington sells the Gaudets an application designed to keep the latest scourges of the Internet — sneaky, ubiquitous information-ferreting programs known as spyware — from defiling their system.
He retrieves the CD-ROM from the packed trunk of his company car, a new-school Volkswagen Beetle painted black and white to vaguely resemble a happy-acid-trip version of a police cruiser. Finished, he logs on to a secure portion of the Geek Squad website to close out the Gaudets' bill, to which he adds copious, detailed "field notes," and signs off "Case Closed: Agent Pennington." He prints out a copy, places it in a nifty folder stamped "Top Secret," and hands it over to the Gaudets, who are effusively thankful.
"That's the best part of the job," Pennington says, as we hop into the Geekmobile and, guided by directions from a Palm Pilot-type mini-computer mounted to the dash, head toward his next mission, "making people comfortable with their technology."
Upon its nationwide rollout this past summer — and the accompanying big-time advertising campaign — Geek Squad gave residential on-site computer installation and repair a recognizable brand name. It also gave the service a hip, ironic aesthetic. Those Beetles you may have seen cruising the Bay area are driven by "double agents" outfitted in black shoes, black socks, black pants, white short-sleeve dress shirts, and black clip-on ties. They also each have individual badge numbers (Tampa Bay agents haven't yet received their actual cast-metal badges, but they're on order), adding to the tongue-in-cheek dork-authority image that company founder Robert Stephens has perfected over Geek Squad's 10-year existence.
Stephens was the only geek in the squad back in 1994; he started the firm in Minneapolis, as a way to put himself through college.
"It was a campaign against my own personal starvation," he says. "A lot of my friends were doing dot-coms, forming web page consulting companies, and that's what I thought I would do. But most of those businesses failed … so I decided to go the route of the plumber."
On the phone, the garrulous, 34-year-old Stephens is given to repeating Geek Squad's eminently quotable press-release phrases ("you can't have an ego wearing a clip-on tie") and dropping big names (Mick Jagger and the inextricably iPod-associated U2 are clients). Listening to him, it's easy to reconcile his quick mind and pop-culture awareness with the fashionable, wholly formed marketing ploy that visually defines Geek Squad.
It's also easy to wonder if the presentation might be more important to him than the package. But once he runs out of soundbytes, rock-star anecdotes and approximately 2 million historical statistics regarding Best Buy, he moves on to the subject of customer service and satisfaction, and stays there.
"We're gonna sit down with you," he says. "I'm not just going to fix the problem, I'm going to show you what you have, what you can do. People ask me about 20 other questions while I'm [in their house]. Will Apple be around in 10 years? What's spam? I am now the family's geek, they've adopted me. They invite me to stay for dinner. I do the one thing no human wants to do — I read manuals."
Stephens stresses that sociability is as important as technical know-how in a double agent. (They're called "double agents" because they play a double role, performing on-site service as well as staffing the Geek Squad repair centers that now exist in most Best Buy stores. Geeks who work the centers exclusively, and don't make house calls, are called "counterintelligence agents." Get it? "Counter"-intelligence?)
This balance of image, knowledge and amiability worked well for Stephens from the start. Twin Cities alternative newsweekly City Pages retired the "Best Computer Service" award from its annual best-of issue in 2001 after Geek Squad won it five years running, and by the time of the Best Buy merger, the company — which Stephens famously started with $200, a mountain bike and a cell phone — had field offices in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Geek Squad has an excellent record with the Better Business Bureau, and complaints about service are hard to find.
But that doesn't mean everyone is happy with Geek Squad's success. Resellerratings.com, a website that compiles user experiences to grade various products and services, features one extremely dissatisfied customer's story about being overcharged for ineffectual repairs to a computer that was taken in for service, and an inability to take the complaint farther up the chain of command. (According to many retail-ratings websites, including www.bestbuysux.com, the latter is a serious problem with Best Buy's customer service in general.) The San Francisco section of online city/community-information network Tribe.net, which posts ratings of local businesses, gives Geek Squad only one out of a possible five stars. Two acid-toned reader reviews of the rudimentary tome The Geek Squad Guide to Solving Any Computer Glitch on Amazon.com go out of their way to disparage every element of the Geek Squad identity, including its agents' abilities.
Stephens' manipulation of a caricatured image (which he says was inspired by the stereotyped look of NASA scientists in old movies) has also offended some die-hard computer types, who can be every bit as snarky, superior and anti-corporate as the worst music snobs. So has his deal with Best Buy; though the chain was founded on the same Twin Cities turf as Geek Squad, and Stephens has said in interviews that he made joining forces with the monster company a possible goal extremely early on in Geek Squad's rise, many still view the pairing as a deal with the Devil. But Stephens refuses to see it as selling out, instead describing the union as an opportunity to parlay Best Buy's size and power into better customer service for all.
"If I hadn't done the deal, that would've been selling out," he says. "I was king of my puddle and to stay there would've meant respect, but it would've meant being afraid of taking a chance — can we be great in service and huge in size? The challenge was to go right to the Death Star itself, instead of making it David versus Goliath, make it David and Goliath.
"Yeah, I struggled with it myself, because I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing for Geek Squad. But we dated a few years before we got married. And I didn't start dating Best Buy until after eight years."
Cruising the Treasure Island Causeway en route to his second service call of the day, Jim Pennington sums up the Best Buy/Geek Squad marriage much more succinctly.
"Somebody had to do it," he says with a shrug. "People are always telling me that they didn't know who to call before. Now the service is attached to a big brand name that people know and trust."
Pennington has loved tinkering with computers for as long as he can remember, and had been a tech at Best Buy for seven years when the Geek Squad rollout made him a double agent.
"We thought it was crazy," he says of the employees when word came down that a switchover was going into effect. "You know, people wearing the uniform, driving around in the black-and-white Geek Squad bug."
The majority of now-agents were already working in the service departments of Best Buys across the country, and basically still are. The name, the look, and a few of the customer-service guidelines might have changed, but when you pay for a Geek Squad job, you make the check out to Best Buy. And most Geek Squad members, at least in the Bay area, remain in the store; each location around town currently has only one road-working double agent. Still, they try to make every at-home appointment within a couple of days of the call (there's a 24-hour "911" service for emergencies, but it's much more expensive). Which, with constant and steadily increasing business, means that Pennington, who is based at the St. Pete store near Tyrone Square Mall, may end up driving as far as New Port Richey or Spring Hill, depending on who has the day off.
But he's not complaining.
"I'm basically doing what I enjoy doing regardless, so it's kind of like the perfect job for me," he says, adding that he sometimes gets together with the double agents from other stores at a restaurant to talk tech. "After hours, when we're not doing this for a living, we're doing it for fun."
Stories of strange or otherwise memorable house calls inevitably find their way into the shop talk, as well. When asked for some particularly, er, interesting anecdotes, Pennington pauses, thinking.
"Well," he says, finally, "we've all noticed that a hand towel in the bathroom is a very rare thing."
That's it? No pet attacks? No dudes offering up a bong hit as a tip? No awkward come-ons from desperate housewives?
"No comment," he says, smiling.
Eventually, Pennington does provide a hilarious and scary story for the record. It allegedly happened to another local double agent, James Butcher, and involves a customer who offered Butcher cocaine before proudly displaying his new handgun. Shortly afterward, the customer called Geek Squad to complain when Butcher excused himself to get something out of his car and never returned.
Pennington also cops to stumbling across a fair amount of pornography while rescuing or transferring files — occasionally while the computer's owner has left his or her significant other in charge of making sure Pennington gets the job done. He says he's gotten pretty good at guessing what a file might be before anything incriminating pops open onscreen, and at nonchalantly diverting the attention of anyone who might be in the room if it does.
"I usually try to protect everyone's privacy, even if it's the husband's privacy," he laughs. "We're not going to go searching through files unless it's required, that's not our job."
His second job of the day consists of nothing more than hooking up a new computer, monitor and printer, bought at Best Buy, for the new Treasure Island Chamber of Commerce. Denise Webb, the volunteer who meets Pennington at the tiny office, asks the kind of informed questions that make it obvious she could do this job herself. But the Chamber paid an extra $129 for the service, so she stands by and inquires politely about the vagaries of Geek Squad work while Pennington opens boxes, color-codes Geek Squad brand cables, tests the printer connection and installs Microsoft Office on the up-and-running machine.
Less than an hour after arriving, we're back on the road, aiming to grab a quick lunch before the final job of the day, one for which a large chunk of the afternoon is blacked out. It's probably going to be something a little more complicated than plugging in and firing up a new desktop, which just about anyone could conceivably do, depending on their amount of free time and threshold for frustration.
"I know how to change the oil in my car, I have that knowledge, but I'd rather just have somebody else do it," says Pennington of convenience-oriented calls like the one he's just finished. "Sometimes it's just easier to pay somebody else to do it and get it right the first time."
He doesn't reckon there's any one type of service he performs more often than any other, though these days most of them involve a broadband wireless network like the Gaudets', or removing copious amounts of spyware from computers whose performance has begun to suffer. These two problems are common enough to justify specific sets of package rates on the Geek Squad price sheet, and can take anywhere from one to several hours. The simpler gigs are still fairly frequent, however, and give lie to the misconception among Pennington's generation that everybody's got a computer in the house these days, and knows how to use it. In fact, on one job Pennington installed a system for a man who had "literally never touched a computer with a mouse, was completely unfamiliar with the point-and-click method of interacting with a computer," he says.
"I would say most of the stuff is easy for me, but it's not easy for the customer," he adds. "I definitely try to let them know, 'Don't feel bad if I get this solved for you really quickly — it's just my experience.'"
At the other end of the spectrum, he still comes across problems he doesn't immediately know how to fix.
"There's always going to be something you've never seen before," says Pennington, "but I'm not going to leave a customer's house until they're satisfied."
Fortunately, all 6,000 or so Geek Squad agents communicate regularly via online message boards — if Pennington doesn't have the answer, he knows where to find it.
Geek Squad may currently be the most high-profile repair service to target computer users where they live, but not even Stephens, the Squad's innovative founder, can claim to have invented the concept.
"I'm personally aware of that market being around in the '80s," says Randall Palm. "People needed help with their Commodore 64s. As long as there have been home computers, there have been people who've needed help with them."
Palm is chief technology and information services director for CompTIA, a worldwide business-advocacy association for the information technology (IT) industry. According to Palm, while in-home service has never gotten much national exposure, it's always been there, and can only get bigger in the wake of something as far-reaching as the Geek Squad/Best Buy merger and ensuing marketing blitz. He doesn't think Geek Squad and the similar services now offered by retailers such as Circuit City and CompUSA will squeeze out local and independent outfits, however.
Neither does Stephens, whose lead has also been followed by national and regional firms with names like Geek Housecalls, Geeks on Call and Gurus 2 Go (whose tagline reads, "more than just a geek").
"I always wanted to eat them alive myself — they had their chance," he jokes. "No, a rising tide lifts all boats. Geek Squad is the best thing to ever happen to independents. Geek Squad is going to spend a lot of money raising awareness of house calls. That's going to increase demand. I'm doing them a favor."
David Lindie is president of PC Paramedics, a two-year-old Tampa-based troubleshooting and repair company for which residential calls now account for about 40 percent of business. Like Geek Squad, PC Paramedics spends a lot of its in-home hours cleaning out spyware, and Lindie agrees that the national company's exposure will be good for everyone in the long run.
"I think as people become more aware, whether it's through Geek Squad or typing the words 'Tampa computer repair' into an Internet search engine, it'll spread like wildfire," he says. "It's been non-stop, and it's been growing every year."
'I can foresee us needing more than one [double agent] per store in this area," says Pennington, "because people love the service."
Should Geek Squad need to go on a hiring spree, it would be able to cast a wider net than some of its competitors, because the company values experience and people skills over degrees and certification. Pennington, for example, isn't certified by any of the industry's several standardized technical-competency testing programs, like A+ or Microsoft MCP. He took classes in computer engineering at USF, but never graduated — like many gifted, able computer techs, he's largely self-taught.
(There's no law mandating certification, but many companies, such as the aforementioned PC Paramedics, require it of their techs.)
Pennington's final stop for the day is a familiar one to him: a large, elaborately appointed house out on Tierra Verde where, between owner Karen Barber's two home offices and her son's playroom, there are six or seven computers scattered over three floors, networked together. Pennington has been out here a couple of times already, first to fix what he says was a haphazard network set-up job done by another outfit (Geek Squad doesn't limit its domain to products bought at Best Buy, though a large percentage of its business is currently generated inside the store), then to troubleshoot, clean out some spyware and install a security program to keep from having to do it again.
He's not exactly sure what today's call entails. Upon arrival, he gets a list of sundry little problems from the obviously preoccupied Barber, who promptly disappears. He follows the leopard-print carpet up the stairs to Barber's personal office, where a printer won't talk to the computers and an ancient laptop with a broken hinge sits in decrepitude. The agent starts with the printer, sliding it out of its cubby to discover that the connecting cable has pulled out of the back of the machine at some point. (That's right — essentially, the thing's come unplugged.)
"I don't think we'll have to charge her for that," he deadpans as he reconnects it.
A quick look at one of the desktops reveals that the anti-spyware program has been disabled. Pennington loads it back up. The laptop presents a more difficult problem. It's a brand previously sold by, coincidentally enough, Best Buy, but long since discontinued, and this one seems to have been wiped clean of programming. He'll have to put in a call, and hope there's some basic software still lying around in a warehouse somewhere.
In the meantime, he goes downstairs to the playroom; there's another rebellious printer, and Barber isn't sure her content-screening CyberSitter software (the Internet version of the V-Chip) is working properly. After a lengthy period spent trying to divine the current CyberSitter user password — during which the newspaper reporter uses the guest bathroom, and discovers there are no hand towels — both problems are solved easily enough. Pennington puts in nearly another hour on the telephone, however, refusing to leave until he's located the software for the ailing laptop, and has been assured it will be mailed out directly.
Finally, Pennington updates another online invoice, again adding detailed notes for the client's edification before printing out a copy. Then he makes his way back through the labyrinthine house to the front door, exits, and hops into his Geekmobile.
Case closed.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2004.