I got a panic message last night, after business hours. “I’ve got a virus! Help!”

Sure, drop it off now, we’ll take a look and fix you up within 24 hours. OK. Agreed.
So I wait. 6:30, computer gets dropped off. Time passes… 11:30 that night I get another call. “Hey, a friend said they know how to fix this and will do it for free. Can I get my computer back?”

Where do I start? Being available after hours? Almost midnight and I’m still on call? No charge for any of this. Making arrangements the next day to be available? And when the person turned up late, letting them come to my partners place of work, pick up a key for our home and let themselves in to pick up their computer so they can take it elsewhere to be fixed for free? No charge.

What if I had done what I normally do, jumped right in and fixed it up? Would I have got paid? What if I had been working on it for four hours when that call came in? What would you have done? I think we can agree that giving the key to your home is above and beyond normal customer service levels.

I hate being messed around like this but it goes with the territory. I can deal with it. What I can’t deal with, is the irony. The same person we’re doing this for walks in to my partners place of work to pick up our key and proceeds to rant that they can’t make a living in their own profession any more because everybody is jumping in as an expert and working for free. Exact words, I’m told.

That part I found a little hard to swallow, given what the person was standing there doing to us. No charge.

As I advised, from the description of the virus that was given over the phone, a simple System Restore will appear to work, but it won’t. If this is the virus we think it is (and a small wicked part of me hopes it is), we have seen it before. It will be back within a week, the next time the computer restarts. Sure as apples. Second Tuesday of the month, regular as clockwork: Patch Tuesday. God bless Microsoft and their automatic updates. Tick tock. Five days at most to that restart. And counting. That’s why you pay for stuff like this. And next time, believe me, up front.