I’ve been through some interesting experiences with my clients over the years, many of which I’ve previously related here at DCT. However, possibly the most frustrating clients are not actually the clients themselves but rather the clients’ spouses who think they know a little about computers.
None Too Helpful Hubbies
I had one particular lady client who was forever breaking her laptop in some way or another. Problem was that when she handed it over to her hubby to bring to me he always thought he’d “have a go” at it first. I swear, 9 times out of 10, if he’d handed that laptop straight over to me instead of trying to fix it himself first, the problem would have been a far simpler fix.
I distinctly remember this one time he brought it over, having already applied his own “fix”, and everything on the screen was jumbo size. I mean “MASSIVE”, like a simple run dialogue box was more than double the size of the entire 15″ of laptop screen. It was impossible to access any settings, or anything, for that matter.
I looked him square in the eye and asked him, “Was it like this when your wife handed it to you?” He shook his head “no’ and chuckled quietly. I also shook my head, minus the chuckles. In the absence of any backups, the only way I could possibly fix it was to start all over again with a clean install. Needless to say, his lovely wife was not too pleased.
By the way, the lady in question still holds the record for the largest number of junk files I’ve ever cleaned from a single machine, well in excess of 40 GBs. At one time, that same lady also had more than 20,000 emails stored in her local email client and, despite numerous warnings from yours truly, she ended up losing the whole lot all due to a single corrupted email.
Watch That PC Burn!
Another client, a male this time – to give the ladies a break – thought he knew enough about computers to attempt to build his own desktop machine. How hard could it be? He did not ask for help and I did not try to dissuade him. In fact, I somewhat admired his adventurous spirit. About a week after completing his build he rang me to inform me that it kept shutting down for no apparent reason and asked me if I could take a look at it for him. Sure, no problem.
I brought it home, plugged it in and the system booted up okay, so I headed out of the workshop to make a cup of coffee. Less than five minutes later, I heard this almighty bang emanating from the workshop and hurried back only to find his pet project in flames, beyond saving. Apparently, he had forgotten one rather important ingredient – the thermal paste.
It was immediately apparent that the constant shutting down he’d been experiencing was due to overheating but, why oh why, did it actually have to explode while it was in my hands? Isn’t it always the way?
My wife and I looked after our grandchild’s pet parrot just this one time while she was away, and guess what… yep, it died. So, if you ever think you’re the only one this sort of stuff happens to, do think again!
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Very sorry for the parrot and the computer.
Well, thank you Gloops. Appreciated.
I remember being told in the days of DOS, the worst thing one can do in front of a computer, is become bored. I learned that the hard way and had the joy of seeing nothing on the screen but some nice bright sparkles and great grief which followed afterwards. In other words, I did things I suppose with the Config.Sys and the fascinating Autoexec. Bat file, like just putting a period in the wrong place and watching the computer do nothing.
That is right, I remember having seen documentations to teach MS-DOS to beginners, that were typed with such care, that typing a command the way it was typed would have been sufficient to make the computer completely unusable.
So, to have a chance not to arrive to such a result, there was one absolute condition : that you were already enough at ease with the system, that this documentation was quite useless.