To us, what we’re looking for are technology consultants who:-
(1) Have an ordinary email address really available – not one of those dreadful email forms.
(2) Have set out very clearly somewhere that we can easily access details of what they claim to be able to help us with. (To us the obvious way of doing this is for them to have a blog or a website – it can be very basic costing almost nothing to set up and maintain and costing about $2 a week to host.)
(3) Provide reasonable responses to reasonable emails
(4) Preferably have proficiency in using TeamViewer – see this post.
To us, those who don’t meet (1) and (3) above, at least, are seldom worth bothering with.
Nearby Nerds claims to have 2485 Nerds – people and organisations who can help us with our technology questions and problems – registered across Australia. You would think that it would be a “gold mine” when it came to finding people and organisations that met our requirements. But, as far as we’re concerned, over the years they’ve become worse and worse in this respect – amongst other things, they use every trick in the book to prevent you finding out whether any of their 2485 have an ordinary email address, or, in fact, any details about them.
We’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has found them other than a complete waste of their time.
We’re not getting very far with our dream are we!