Laptops and our nomadic workers

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how we're not your usual IT Department because of the type of people we support.

We help all sorts of Wycliffe people out, not just those working in our offices, but people passing through from all over the world. 

Today I'm writing a bit more about those sort of people. We have a mixture of management types who are working with teams who span the globe and linguist/translator types who are working with language projects in a different country to the one they live. Sometimes we have couples where one partner is here for a specific reason and the other is coming along with them so they don't have to be apart, and because they are able to continue their work away from their normal work location.

These are highly mobile people, who have one thing in common - a laptop. (No sign of tablets being the primary work machine yet.) Here's a picture of the inside of one which came our way last week:

This amount of dust is more than we usually see, but not surprising. We see a number of common problems with laptops - broken screens, broken backlights, liquid spilt on keyboards and corrupted hard drives. I say "we", but in fact its my colleagues who do this stuff. We are able to do so without charging commercial rates. One of the local suppliers we order parts from charge £90 for hardware repairs, and £144 for a screen replacement. We just charge the cost of spares + 8%.

Laptops are a vital part of the nomadic Wycliffe worker's luggage and we are pleased to be able to help them with their problems. In case you're wondering what we recommend for international travellers - Toshiba.