The Joys of House Calls (Part I)

(I'm confident there will be follow-ups on this topic even though this is the first posting.)

WinXP on a p2-366mhz w/ 256mb is painful. There's no other way to put it. Every time the user clicked on IE it would open up and then blue screen. Turns out she had the full M$N messenger suite installed and it was the M$N toolbar that was ironically causing the BSOD's. How did i figure that out? Simple. Remove any and all toolbars. No mercy. Never met a toolbar that i liked (excluding Google because Google is our lord and savior). Removed it and machine runs... er... walks just fine now.

Did i mention that i'm EVENTUALLY going to get $20 for this mess?

Later in the same day i went on a call to another house. Nice guy and very easy to work with. Not afraid to ask questions or call for help if he thinks he's even getting close to breaking something. Basically all i had to do was swap a networking cable with a known good one. Fired up FireFox afterwards to make sure the global interwebs worked and weren't clogged.

"Firefox did not close properly in a previous session. Would you like to restore the session?"

"Sure!" i foolishly said and clicked accordingly.

There's a naked dude on this dude's browser window. Well. At least it was artistic. As he's looking over my shoulder i just grab the mouse and click on HOME right away and don't say anything about it. Mutter a couple comments about various widgets popping up with the weather and how i would find them annoying and didn't say jack shit about the naked dude i just saw.

Sigh.

No charge for the networking cable swap because it didn't wind up solving the problem. Modem is probably dieing and so it's someone else's problem. I don't fix the problem means i don't get paid.

Sigh.

These two calls in addition to everything else that happened that day made for a very very odd day. Why the hell am i doing this kind of work again???