fireflier
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join:2001-05-25
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| reply to Wills
Re: Why?
Your dilemma is pretty much why I've stopped touching other peoples' PCs when they have issues. I'll give them advice on apps to use and web site addresses to check out, but physically touching the PC? Forget it. Trying to train the average user on what they should and shouldn't do is a waste of time in most cases if there's no financial incentive for them to learn. I stopped working on people's PCs 3 years ago after helping someone set up home networking. I set it up on saturday. On monday they called and said "when you set up networking, it screwed up Excel". I went over, checked their event log and found that the error they were experiencing started on FRIDAY. This kind of cause-effect behavior happens all the time. After my experiences, I believe in the adage: "Do someone a favor and it becomes your job".
As far as going back to help the friend resolve the same issue time and time again, another adage comes to mind: "People can only take advantage of you if you let them." I'd rather have them pissed off at me than have to spend all my saturdays cleaning up after their blissful ignorance. In the days of DOS, issues were usually easy to resolve and seldom had complications. These days, you touch someone's PC and something completely unrelated screws up 4 months later, and guess who gets blamed? I'll advise for free, but I won't touch someone else's system.
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Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk? |
