No More Mr Nice Guy

Ever since I was Tech Ed on PCW (1991?), strange people have beaten a path to my door with a their domestic computer problems. Solving them was, for ten years, a good source of material for my column but that was in the 1990’s. Yet still them come. And still I help them. Why? Well I know if they took their precious data anywhere else it’d either cost more than they could afford, or they’d be ripped off and lose their data too. And I’d rather recover it before the mobile phone unlockers on the High Street made it harder.

So why is it that when you’re doing some people a favour they feel they have the right to telephone you for progress reports? Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth,

One recent example is an elderly lady who’s PC World special laptop threw a shoe. I don’t know her, but a we had a mutual friend who asked if I’d help her out. This is not uncommon.

So along I go and take a look at it. Standard stuff – Windows is a mess and it won’t boot. After about an hour of trying, it almost boots but I opt for a System Restore as I really can’t stay any longer. “Call me in the morning and let me know what it says.”

I make it a rule NEVER to have a freebie fix in my workshop. People used to turn up and leave broken kit on my doorstep for “when I have time”. I also have to figure out what’s wrong with it the hard way. I don’t mind making the odd house-call for a worthy cause, but the kit stays with its owner. Period.

So what does she do? Call me in the morning? No! It turns out she’d get around my rule of not taking freebies back to base by leaving the laptop with our mutual friend. Then some time later she called me to see how I was getting on. Eh? First I’d heard she left it.

At the next opportunity I picked it up, against my better judgement, an spent an overnight session trying to sort it. I then had my proper work to do. And she called again. And after I’d spent all that time and effort on it came out with the immortal words “Well I don’t want to take your time up so why don’t I just take it to the [mobile phone unlockers] in the High Street. In other words, I know this is a freebee but so I’m going to use emotional blackmail to get you to hurry up.

I’m fed up of this game. I’ve seen it often enough. So I called her bluff. Let our mutual friend sort it out – I’m not touching it again with a barge pole. I’ve wasted about ten hours on it, I shall waste not a second more. Except I couldn’t help myself; someone told me she’d been unwell in hospital and I went soft.

And today she called me again. I could feel myself losing my cool, so I ended up asking her to sort out out with our friend and hung up before I blew. Ironically, her disk had been on the analyser, in place of paid work, for the last couple of days (as you may or may not know, data recovery systems can take long time to run if the disk is trashed).

And as I write this, she calls again (perfect timing) with more emotional blackmail. I apologize she caught me at a bad time earlier, but that she needed to understand… Then she gets down-right rude. I point out I’ve spent ten hours working on her machine and she might consider she’s out of order; she says “I beg your pardon…” so I just have to hang up. Her attitude is not pardonable.

I really don’t need all this. So if anyone is thinking of dumping some kit on my doorstep for a freebee, think again!