Interesting files

One of the fun things about working tech support is getting to see all of the weird things people have downloaded on to their computers. Why am I bringing this up now? I don't even work on Sundays! Well, a friend of mine called me and told me that he'd bought a computer at a Goodwill store, and whoever had it before forgot to wipe the hard-drive. Thankfully, there was nothing really bad on there- just about a million saved articles about Katie Price (a British celebrity) and some essays that looked like they were written for a high school government class.

While that particular hard drive was full of pretty innocuous items, others I've come across were not so harmless. Once, someone came to me in a panic because their laptop was full of viruses and they had to turn in a term paper the next day. I took a look at it, and apparently this person had been downloading everything they came across on the Internet. Their computer was full of online video game free trials, weird little desktop gadgets (I personally despise those things, so I've never understood people who download them), Youtube videos they'd downloaded with a converter, and all sorts of other little innocuous-looking things. The problem is, the sites you can get all of that stuff off of are full of viruses. No wonder this person had a problem...

One of the more bizarre things I've ever seen was the former library circulation desk computer that needed a tune-up. The person brought it in, and in a fit of boredom I decided to go see what they had on the hard drive. Big mistake. Someone had installed a hentai game, which makes me wonder exactly what kind of library this PC was from... I'm not sure I really want to know about that one.

Although I probably have to say that my favorite case was the time I had to explain to a customer that Compaq was not a version of Windows. Normally, I wouldn't mind, or even notice. The thing that made me take notice was that when I explained to this lady that Compaq was a make of computer, and not an operating system, she got extremely angry with me and started threatening to call the manager on me for not doing my job. I finally told her to do so, my manager came over, heard the story, and promptly started laughing like a loon on loony tablets. The woman was so offended that she stormed out threatening to never come back. Three weeks later? She was back with another computer problem.

I'm not sharing these stories to sound like a bad person. Most of the people I end up working with are very nice people, but occasionally I get the random nutter. It happens to the best of us, I think. We've all dealt with that person at the grocery store, electronics store, religious institution, government bureaucracy, shopping district, etc that just... fails.