If your house is on fire, would you text 9-1-1 to report it?

A growing number of 9-1-1 dispatch centers are now equipped to handle public safety emergencies via text because there may be times when it’s the only way to report the emergency. But you can still get a faster, more accurate response when you talk to a person. Have any doubts? Think about how frustrating it is to have an online chat for customer service.

Here’s the best way to work with us: Call 973-433-6676.

Here’s why it’s important: We have a 24/7 answering service with a trained live person taking all calls. They take information about your problem, and we have given them parameters about prioritizing your problem in relation to its severity and other problems we may be dealing with. If necessary, they can interrupt something I may be doing – fixing somebody else’s emergency, for example – to help you.

The phone call gets immediate attention, regardless of whether I pick up the phone personally or if our answering service takes it. A call to my cell phone won’t get the same response because I may be doing something else. I cannot respond to text messages while I’m driving or when I’m engaged in a service call or a conference.

Here’s another reason why it’s better to call: We can pinpoint the problem faster. Either the answering service or I can ask questions to narrow down what’s happening with your technology and start to explore the best remedy. We are in real-time during a phone call. A text message takes time to type – especially if you want to type it accurately. Then there are time lags until it’s received and read before responses are sent. This can happen several times over, and the emergency may escalate.

Here are two examples, one of how a text exchange failed and the other of how a phone call worked.

The text example happened a while ago. A client with a serious problem tried to reach me by text, but I was in a meeting. It took a half-hour – maybe more – until I was able to call them, but they were not available. It took more than an hour until we finally connected by phone, and the problem had worsened. Had they called initially, my answering service would have known it was an emergency and would have interrupted my meeting. We could have taken action right then.

On the other hand, a client had a problem on a Sunday morning and called our office line. They said it wasn’t a dire emergency at that time, but they had discovered the night before that they had access to all their Office files and Outlook on their computer. Because they had a subscription to OneDrive, they were able to use their phone to see the files were intact. On Sunday morning, they had started to rebuild Office but thought there might be a serious problem. They thought they had a hard drive problem.

When we got the message, we called, and it was immediately apparent to us that their Windows user profile was corrupted. We fixed the problem remotely, and that restored all the client’s Office and Outlook files as well as all their Firefox bookmarks. We also used the call as an opportunity to do some hard-drive maintenance to improve the computer’s performance. It saved the client a whole day of restoration work.

Tip: If you lose your desktop or if your desktop launch seems out of sequence, it may be caused by a corrupt profile. The easy way to check is to follow this sequence:

• Right-click on the Windows icon in the lower-left corner of your taskbar.
• When the menu opens, click on Windows PowerShell
• If the last line of the screen that opens up has Temp instead of your profile name, your profile has been lost.
• Call us.

If you try to follow all the steps to recover your profile, it will take you a long time. One mistake could create a more complicated restoration process. Trying to rebuild your profile manually is a long, tedious process.

You can prevent major headaches from less-than-major malfunctions by keeping your systems well-tuned. All sorts of electronic junk can accumulate throughout your system, bogging it down and eventually causing a huge inconvenience or a serious problem. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to set up a tune-up appointment. It will save you aggravation at the least and possibly prevent a serious breakdown and loss of data.