Wild and wacky day

I began my day with an early service call and a customers site where basically it appeared that his computer had died, I take that back it wasn't appeared the computer refused to boot up at all, it ignored his hard drive, his cd rom drive any attempt to use that PC was met with a system reboot. I removed the cover, and the extra airflow allowed me to boot to the CD-rom but not boot to the hard drive, so I did a visual inspection saw some bulging capacitors and gave the customer the bad news. I tried to reboot it again in front of him no dice.

Now like many of my customers this man was a muslim(he says devout, I'm just restating what he said I'm not judging the depth of his faith), he pulled out his prayer beads, told me that with the current economy he could not afford a new system, or even a refurbished one, and that if there was anything that could get him an extra 2 months of this system working he would gladly spend the money it took to get a new system in 2-3 months.  He had said that before with empty hands, but now that he said it(as well as a vow to his deity) with the prayer beads in his hands I rebooted it one more time because he asked me to, I even removed my boot disk as not to stress the system any, and



We saw the welcome screen(had seen that before and it crashed and rebooted)
He walked away
I saw his desktop and heard the windows chime
I saw his camera system come up
And I saw it start recording like it hadn't just ignored 35 minutes of me attempting everything I knew to get it to work.

So when he walks back in the door I tell him he has the luck of the irish, and that in 2 months he better buy a new computer. I don't believe in coincidence, he asked the universe for 2 more months to be able to gather up the funds he needed for a new system, with the beads of his faith in his hands. His system started working, I don't know about you, but thats a deal I'm not going to try and renegotiate. I collected my fee, freed him up some hard drive space, told him DO NOT MESS WITH IT(I'm just saying when you go from total devastation to "OMG it's working" don't tempt fate) and suggested on St. Patty's day he get a green milk shake(he's muslim I don't know how valid the line was but in 13th warrior Antonio Banderas said "no fermentation of fruit or grain shall touch my lips" and he was playing a muslim, so the green beer was out) and I walked out the door.

I get to my next site a similar situation, dudes system is dead I move his card over, I get it working in a new computer there are some issues with a few cameras being out, and if we touch the cable or the external hard drive it shuts off. So I give them the same don't touch it warning, or the option to buy a new drive(internal or external) which is going to cost roughly 200 for a 2 TB drive. Time to collect waiting around for dude who is going to pay me, can get my Boss(my father) on the phone pretty much the whole time, finally somebody who is authorized to have the cash doled out to me shows up, I give him a slight discount, he asks for a deeper discount(cash in hand is better than me standing around, and it was close enough to my don't take any less price I am always given so I was about to accept it), money is in the guys hand, it's counted out, and right before it gets handed to me, my Dad calls so I hand the phone off and the guy doubles his discount by talking to the boss. I laugh my behind off because at any other time I'd have to wait 20 30 minutes for my Dad to call me, and this time he calls and costs himself money. We both chuckle and I head off to my next stop.

This one is just a courier run, I pick up a monitor, talk to my cousins girlfriend's cousin, and drop the monitor off on the other side of town. I talk to a good friend on the phone for a few minutes, because it seems insanity is running rampant on social networking sites, and I head of to a customer who is having a network issue. Well I don't DIRECTLY head off I stop at subway for a footlong oven roasted chicken(what it's been a while since I had one and I was hungry) I pump my old school funk/soul music while I eat in my car, finish off my cookies and drive off to the customers site. Okay somehow his computer has crashed again and he has reloaded it. Thats fine, he even reloaded the camera software(looks like he loaded the wrong camera software the first time but I digress) but for some odd strange reason he can't get the internet to work. Hey I don't mind hard times you do what you gotta do, but somehow it seems it's more than just the software that was reloaded, because I try to change some settings in his router because they are off. Oh well I fight with it for about 45 minutes to an hour decide that I have somewhere else to be and make arrangements to either return later on tonight(as I am typing this now from the house that ain happen) or come back tomorrow at 2.

Pick up my uncle(since I was using his car), meet my coworker to get our other vehicle, ride back to the house and here I sit laughing about a weird day gone by.  My take on the day: Watch how you make deals with the universe sometimes it is actually listening to you, and will give you what you want you just better remember the terms of the deal. Make sure you talk to your folks first when a business deal is going down, you can cost yourself some dough trying to smooth things over that ain rough. And regardless of if you want to spend the dough or not, pay the folks you know can actually fix ya problems to handle it, a dude you hand a case of beer to ain ya friend when you need ya equipment working. If he's working for a case of beer thats ya warranty right there however long that case lasts him is as long as he's gonna wanna fix ya car, computer, AC etc. And it may seem cheap at first but when it don't work and you've spent all the money on parts and bought all this beer, you can't get ya beer back from him, but if I can't fix ya problem, you can get either a discount or part of ya dough back(you still gotta cover the gas it cost me to get to you if nothing else).