No deed ever goes unpunished.

I finally learned that I need to keep my computer knowledge inhouse. I have vowed to never help anyone, anywhere with their PC again. Why you ask? That is OK, I don't mind telling the story of why I quit.

You see, several of the membership of my Ward (Church) had caused me so much grief with working on their computers, that I have given up helping anyone with their computers completely. I even had a member tell me "I think this has been the worst day of my life" when his PC crashed while I was fixing it. That is when I called bridget to the room and told her, "I am to never going to help anyone to fix their computer again. I want you to remind me of this from now on." Being how much grief this caused to help people, she had no problem doing this.

Here is the story on this one. I was helping a person with their out of date laptop. The thing was not able to run properly due to programs loaded improperly, maintenance never being performed (probably ever from his description), and a virus problem. I did the standard free antivirus checks and repairs. They would not buy anti-virus but I thought I was doing the right thing by helping. Thus, after the virus checks and fixes, I tried to do a windows update since it was two years out of date, the whole OS crashed (probably due to bad sectors that were present on the drive). But the lack of knowledge of the owner prevented him from understanding the problem. So, me being the dumbass I am, I volunteered to fix the thing. I then spent the next 8 hours reworking the laptop back to it's original status. The hard part was finding legal software for the system since the owner either didn't have the licenses or what ever. So after wasting half a day on the system, I took it over to him (yes, I delivered it so I could get it out of the house).

Since then, I have refranied from assisting anyone with their PC. I figure, if they need help, they can take it somewhere local, and get screwed like the local computer stores normally do. They screw you for price and do a half-ass job. Or, they can take it to a place like Microcenter or BestBuy and get it fixed and dropped back in their lap without any explination on what happened or what to do to prevent it from happening again. I doubt that (a member of my ward that is) a Lawyer, Auto Mechanic, or Realtor, would do work for a church member for free. Matter of fact, I know they won't. So, why should I?

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