Daily Remarks

A customer drops off their computer to be diagnosed. They say that it is running really slow and it is impossible to use this way. So we check it in and diagnose the computer. We call the customer and explain that they have viruses and malware on the system. The question they ask is “How did that get on the computer?”. I feel like saying, ‘how do I know what you did to infect your computer, I wasn’t there at the time!”.

We tell them that they should be careful of what websites that they go to and that they should be careful of opening email attachments also because they can re-infect the computer. We also tell them that they should remove Limewire from the system or we can do that for them because you can get viruses from the files that you download from that p2p software.

We clean all of the viruses and malware off the system and tell them it is as good as it can be without a full reload of the operating system. We tell them that Windows updates need to be done to protect the computer and we took care of that for them, but in the future you should make sure that they are done. We also install a free anti-virus like AVG Free anti-virus.

Sometimes the customer takes the system home and they re-infect the system again within a few days. They call us in a huff and tell us that we didn’t do out job right. We explain that they went to where they were supposed to go on the internet or that they opened an email attachment with a virus attached. The funny thing is that they go home and check their email and click on the same attachments or go to the same websites and re-infect their computer all over again doing the exact same thing that caused the problem the last time. It is a viscous circle. The customer doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand. Have you been on either end of this?

A customer actually came in the store and tried to claim their equipment that they left with us 9 months ago for service. We looked back at the notes and we had called them every month for 3 months straight. They never called us back. We left numerous messages. Our policy which is on the wall and is also on our service tickets states that equipment left with us gets donated or recycled after 30 days. We didn’t discard the equipment until the 4th month just to be sure. The laptop which the customer left was 7 years old and it would have cost more to repair than it was worth. We were very nice about it and told them that the equipment had been discarded according to our policies. The customer then became extremely angry and used a few choice words. We just kept repeating what the policy states and that we tried to contact them. We finally had to ask them to leave because they were becoming verbally abusive. I personally wouldn’t even consider getting my equipment back after that period of time. What do you think?