Ninety-three hours
It happened — 2026Computer Weekly, 2026
No breach, no thief — just this year's UK workplace research: the average employee loses 93 working hours a year to IT issues, with connectivity now the biggest single cause, and 49% losing one to five hours every week. Plus the number nobody invoices: ~92 hours a year of the “tech-savvy one's” time, spent doing a second, unpaid job.
Your version doesn't have an IT department — it has Tom, who's good with computers, and whose actual job quietly loses a day a week to printers, passwords and the accounting package that needs reinstalling again. Every problem gets solved from scratch, because nobody has ever counted that it's the fourth time. And nothing here would ever justify an emergency call-out — which is exactly why none of it ever gets fixed.
This is you if There's a Tom, and everyone knows who Tom is; the same three problems come back every month; “We don't really have IT support” is the honest description.
How we run it
A person answers.
Phone, email or chat, nine to six on weekdays, with a two-hour response promise. From that moment the problem is ours to chase, not yours — and not Tom's.
Most tickets end where they started — remotely.
With your say-so on screen sharing, the fix happens while you watch or quietly after hours: sign-in loops, mail that won't flow, printers, VPNs, the folder that stopped syncing. No van, no visit, no “sometime Thursday”.
When it's physical, hands arrive.
A failing disk or a dead screen can't be fixed down a wire. An engineer comes to you across central London, and repairs run through the Fixfactor workshop. Remote-first keeps the price down; it has never meant remote-only.
And patterns get killed at the root.
Every ticket is logged and tagged, so the fourth “Excel crashes on the big file” becomes one cause, found and removed. Once a month you get a single page: what broke, what we did, and what will not be breaking again.
Made boring by: Core — the helpdesk is the product here. The honest arithmetic: 93 hours a year is more than two working weeks per person, and at twelve people even halving it buys the plan many times over. Core · £39/user/month
Real research: Computer Weekly / Unisys, 2026. Tom is illustrative — though every firm has one.