Monday, October 4th

Today I managed another virus removal. The virus is one I have seen multiple times and watched it kill 2 computer from neglect. The virus itself will stop all programs from starting up by interrupting them with a warning "suchandsuch.exe is infected, would you like to start up your antivirus?" If you say yes it forwards you to a website which will try to convince you to pay.
**never buy anything from an untrusted source, they WILL take your credit card info and RUN with it**
I have customers that have bought the software and then had a few thousand dollars charged to their accounts.
---if you do fall to this, cancel your credit/debit card asap and get a new one issued so they cannot use it.

On another note, I've had requests for customer horror stories, which I happily only have a few.
Of them there are 2 I can remember right off.

One of my customers was a nice lady in her 40-50's. Her teenage daughter had recently got a laptop and needed a huge data transfer and the family computer needed a severe cleanup. One of the major tasks to be done was setting up a system for backing up her pictures(roughly 10gb). She decided to go with DVD's and we started the process through picasa(which has a standard backup system). The process itself would take roughly 2-4 hours so after my work I packed up and instructed her on how to finish this which included swapping discs. Later that day she called my boss asking for another appointment because the backup would not work and that the software was having trouble. The next time I went out there I suggested using one of the external drives she had purchased, but she was intent on using DVD backups. So I worked through the software and attempted to solve the problem and packed up again, having sold her a DVD burning drive because her old one was acting up. Again later that day she called back again and had the same problem. This time I strongly recommended she use an external drive to do the work and she refused again. I tried again and explained that there was little I could do if it did not work again unless she had some software for data burning because the program we were using was obviously not working. So again I left(not charging her this time) and she never called back. A little while later my boss got an email that we assume was from her, it only had her initial on it so we cant be certain and the message was extremely vague. Then a few days after that my boss got a message from the BBB saying a complaint was lodged against us. We were completely dumbfounded by this until we considered it might have been her....

My second interesting customer was a compulsive coupon cutter that needed appointments right at 5pm, any tardiness beyond 5 minutes was considered to be too late in the day for a technician to come over. The first part of my description comes from the fact that he had about 5 coupon programs on his computer so he could download coupons for anything he bought and he also hired us specifically because we offer a 5$ discount if you sign up for our email program through the website(also known as a coupon). The second part was amusing, because the first time I had him scheduled I was going to be there by 6pm and not 5pm because I had already done 4 appointments that day and had fallen a little behind. I called to tell him I was going to arrive late and he promptly told me to reschedule because it was going to be later than he wanted. This had been the second time we rescheduled him because of time and he always specifically asked for times after 5pm, so his complaint about an hour later being too late is really hard to deal with after a full day of work. The last thing I can recall from him was again his strong desire to save money which is how he got blacklisted from us. During the appointment he asked me if I would be up to working on his computers for him on my personal time and not company time. Anyone that's worked for almost any company knows that agreement to that sort of thing could result in losing your job. I was not the slightest bit interested in losing my job over this guy and made sure to contact my boss and get him blacklisted before he could schedule another appointment. The guy eventually called my personal cell phone(from caller ID) and I quickly told him he had to contact the office and that if he wanted an appointment he had to call them, not me. My boss chewed him out over the phone and told him to not harass his employees/offer them work on the side. It made me smile.

Not horror stories really, but certainly cases in which the customer is not right.