Computers and the weather

As a computer consulting/service company, I have 4 extremely busy times of the year. At the beginning and ending of the years, both fiscal and calendar, I have customers who are either trying to use up the rest of last years budgets at the end and then buying new toys for themselves when they get their new years budgets. Those are generally very busy, but fun times since there generally isn't too much that is going wrong with the hardware. That is for early fall and early spring. When the weather swings back and forth with greatly changing temperatures, computers generally start throwing fits at this time. Rapidly fluctuating weather and temperatures will cause the components of the systems to move around as they the metal on them is shrinking and expanding. Usually a quick preventive maintenance takes care of any problems, but every now and then, a few of the systems just decide to take a crap and really make my days miserable. In this past week, I had 2 notebooks and 1 desktop for customers decide they were going to annoy me (as well as my customers). On top of that, I'm now helping a new client out of a miserable mess caused by another computer business where the techs there knew just enough to shoot their foot off and wound up wiping out a server. To top that off, they didn't check to see if there was a proper backup of the server before they started goofing with it. After blowing off questions from the client about the errors they were recieving from the backups, they proceeded to go in half cocked and wipe the drive out. After shooting their foot off then, they proceeded to reload the gun and shoot the other foot off by trying to save the situation by reinstalling the operating system. If they'd just stopped after losing one foot, I could've saved things, but now the customers data for the last year is a 75% loss. They told me to be billing them their emergency rates as they know I've been taking time from other clients to get them back up and running so it's going to be a well paying repair, but it's really eaten up alot of my time. I haven't been on the bike since Saturday and it's really getting at me now. The worst part of it is, the other company is acting all indignant that the customer didn't have a working backup. Well, that was the techs job to make sure one existed before he started fucking around with the server. I really hate the passing the buck on responsibility that we have going on in this country today. The ol' 'I'm a screwup but it's someone elses fault' theory that is being pushed in schools, courts and workplaces is really out of hand and something has to be done to reign it in. Maybe Singapore has it right on their justice system. Beat the hell out of some of these people and maybe they'll start thinking twice about how they do things. Maybe this is a bit extreme and I'm advocating something that might not be the best solution. I'll blame that on the fact that I haven't been able to ride my bike this week. It's certainly not my fault that I'm this wound up...