Someone referred a lady to me in April, she wanted me to look at her PC and see if it was a) worth repairing and b) upgradable. So I look at it, a late P2 w/Win98 and a Quantum HDD with gobs of bad sectors. So I start singing the backup-your-data now blues and suggest a new PC. She goes all out – awesome – I get to play with new toys!

So I get everything loaded up & restored and deliver it. The family is tickled pink.

‘Bout a month later they call and there’s some weird crashing going on, I later determine that I’d screwed-up the order of installation of software – and one of the sticks of RAM was bad. So I reload the machine and deliver. (Completely for free!) Everything good again.

Then in mid-August I get a voice-mail; she’s very distraught, frustrated and upset. She describes what to me sounds like a total HDD failure… or a floppy in the drive. But then she complains about Norton not being happy. I don’t understand, she’s confused and can’t describe the problem adequately. I call back and leave a message describing what to do, and a pile of other suggestions and questions, expecting to hear back a couple hours later.

I never do. Till today. Apparently she called the the PC shop I buy everything from and was asking them for help… and as I talked to my sales rep/buddy, he tells me all the things I’ve apparently done to her… “didn’t take care of us”, “made things worse”, “left us high & dry”, “stole our invoice” and so on. Right. You don’t return my calls, and I’ve left you high and dry? *sigh* … Stealing invoices? WTF? I accept that maybe I misplaced it when I reloaded the machine after the bad RAM incident… but I can’t say I’ve seen it here – I remember having to describe to her the (motherboard) box that had all the drives & manuals in the first place.

So I tell him I’m glad she’s their problem now, we have a chuckle and I think ‘good riddance’ to myself.

Till about an hour ago. She left me a voice-mail complaining that a printer that someone else setup on her PC isn’t working and how frustrated she is with this system and why can’t things just work… wants me to call back – book a time to drop by.

Right. I’ll get on it immediately.

Makes me kinda happy I don’t have a vehicle right now. (More on that later)