Rant to follow:
A few months ago, a family member from my wife’s side of the family tried to put in a good word for me to one of her friends and stated that I “fix computers” and am very good at it. Now I appreciated the gesture and never turn down the opportunity to make some extra cash on the side, but I regret having dealt with these friends of family who have turned into more of a nuisance, as I’ll explain further.
These friends were retired doctors, and even though they don’t actively practice medicine anymore, they’re still heavily involved in the medical community and collaborate with other doctors. Anyhow, I show up at their home at was immediately inundated with so many things to fix on their PC that it made my head spin. First of all, this doctor had loads of spyware and other junk on his PC, so I cleaned that up and optimized his PC, got paid, and left for the day. Not even a week goes by and he calls me back, stating that his 10 year old HP OfficeJet’s scanner died and he needed a new printer. OK, so I recommended a new HP multifunction printer for him and he places the order for it. Not a day goes by and he calls me again, stating that he wants to buy a new computer as well because the one he has is running XP Media Center Edition and he wants XP Pro, so I recommended a PC from Systemax and he placed the order. He finally get’s all the components in and calls me up to come in to temporarily setup his new printer to his old PC and at a later date, transfer his old files and applications to the new PC. Before I decided to stop by and do the data transfer, I had asked, or more on the lines of demanded, that he clean up his old PC of any files and other junk that he doesn’t need anymore because I was going to run migwiz to transfer the data. Needless to say, I finally come in, assuming that he did all of that and he assured me that he has. I start running migwiz on the old PC and realize that it’s going to take longer than I had expected. This doctor had over 100GB of ripped movies from DVDs’in DivX format sitting on his hard drive and of course, migwiz picked it up and started to process it. Realizing that he didn’t clean up his machine as I asked, I told him that it would be best for me to take the two PCs’ home so that I could complete the process and have the machine ready the next day. He stated that he was leaving on vacation for 2 weeks and would follow up and pay me after he gets back. Now this angered me because I expect to get paid for my time there and even offered to do this while he was away, but he was stubborn about it and told me that he’d pay me when everything is completed. I don’t know about you, but I bet if his former patients didn’t pay him on the day of the procedure, he’d be quite furious at them too. Nevertheless, he comes back from vacation and calls me up again, leaving a message. He is angry at me because I “misled” him into a buying a printer that can’t accept faxes of over 1,000 pages as the paper tray only holds 250 sheets. He started claiming that he gets such large faxes (yeah and I’m Santa Clause) and that he was under the impression that the printer had memory and could store incoming faxes if it ran out of paper. I had responded to his email that if he wanted such functionality, he’d have to spend $15,000 on an office class multifunction device like a Cannon Copier with a built in hard drive, and that a $300 HP OfficeJet wasn’t going to do it for him.
Needless to say, I got so angry that I decided to simply avoid him and let go of the fact that he owed me money for the time I spent fixing his problems and catering to silly requests. I’m not saying that dealing with all customers is like this, but this guy was truly strange in that he had some grand illusions of setting up his system to do more than it was capable of.
