Oh my god, it's real?!

Yup, they're real all right. For the longest time, there was one parked outside our local Best Buy in west Los Angeles. I actually didn't know what it was for. It was only months later that I saw a commercial for the Geek Squad. My friends and I were thinking what a racket it was -- charging large amounts of money just to come over and fix your computer, which, in our jobs, is pretty much just a job requirement. You know, replace a hard drive, get a few hundred bucks. We laughed that we were in the wrong business. So maybe it's a little disturbing, then, that the word "Geek" is being used as a way to market what must surely be an overpriced service! Just the same, though, just the implication that "geek" stands for something positive -- that can only be good. People really are helpless when it comes to their computers, anyway :-P

There are competitors too, not just the Best Buy guys. There's an outfit I've seen around a lot in Northern Virginia (also with "Geeks" in the name, I think) where they drive PT Cruisers. And judging by what I see in my Google ad space on the left side of this very page, there are lots of smaller competitors too. So competition should lower prices here (though, in an interesting conundrum, the people most likely to need the service are least likely to be able to comparison shop on the Internet....) But in any case, every person has their own areas of incompetence. I wouldn't dream of paying the Geek Squad to replace the power supply on my PC, which I did recently for the first time but without significant incident or pain. But I wouldn't dream of *not* paying professionals to do an oil change on my car, because I know the price in dollars is far less than the cost to me in time and frustration would be. And a lot of people would make exactly the opposite judgement.

I think Circuit City has some people called the IQ Crew that are similar. But don't take your computer to the Geek Squad. They may dress funny and drive interesting cars, but they totally broke my computer after I paid exorbitant amounts of money to get it cleaned of a persistent virus. They aren't actual geeks--they're underpaid non-tech people who apparently think the best way to fix a computer is with magnets. At least, these particular ones were.

Best Buy doesn't require any real formal training for the Geek Squad, so it's sort of hit and miss. You might get help from the smartest man alive, or someone that doesn't know how to install RAM. Seriously, they've hired people that couldn't install RAM. That said, the whole idea is cool: the outfits with the skinny ties, the proprietary Sprint phones and the VW bugs. They just can't back up the hype with smarts.

Geeks are Cool. Just wanted to say that... We have a service like that here in Charleston - they're part of the "Geeks On Call" franchise (they're freakin' franchised! I did not realize...). Actually, I been contemplatin' part-time, supplemental income... I may have just found it (Barnes & Noble was about to receive an application, but I've been there before, and the whole "the customer is always right" thing gives me pause... since they're usually just angry idiots). I mean, I do this same stuff at my current job all the time (and I'm not IT; just a regular "Joe"), and they think I'm a freakin' genius (which tickles me to no end, since I know I am definitely a low-level type, in the Geek society).

Yeah, these guys are at BestBuy, but seem to have the technical expertise of every other BestBuy employee.

They were their own company before Best Buy bought them out. I used to see them at our office in Minnesota all the time, and I wanted to work for them so badly. Cool name, cool company car, cool rep. But, then, like everyone already said, Best Buy assimilated them.