21 June 2011

My Monday Adventure

Some of my past jobs have included desktop support, which I actually quite enjoy.  I don't enjoy it nearly as much when my mom calls me from Missouri and wants me to do remote desktop support from 1,500 miles away, especially since I switched to Macs.  It was easier when we were both on PCs and I could at least get on my machine and see what she should seeing.  Now I have to do it all from memory - eesh.
Yesterday, I get this call from her.  To make a long story short - she had a virus on her machine.  Oops.  She has some kind of virus protection software, but she never runs it (helpful).  And she doesn't know what it's called.  And it's not an icon on her desktop.  So I gave her a few options for looking for it.

Then she calls me a few hours later.  "I went to Office Depot, and it'll cost me $170 for them to take the virus off.  But they also have some laptops on sale for $249.  I may just do that.  What do you think?"  We discuss the computer and she said they actually had a few, she tells me about them, and we discuss it.  She says she's not making a decision today, anyway, but at least she has some information.  Okay, great.

Then I get a call several hours later.  "I'm at Best Buy.  They have a computer for $349.  It's got XYZ and blah blah blah.  What do you think about that?"  I tell her that it definitely sounds a lot better for her than the Office Depot deal, but I have some questions about it.  She asks the salesguy my questions, then relays the answer to me.  I ask a few more questions, and the literal game of "Telephone" continues.  Finally, she asks the salesguy if he would mind talking directly to me, especially since I was starting to get a little heated (he was trying to sell her a machine that they didn't have on display because they "don't usually sell it, to which my reply was something along the lines of, "Oh, really?  So the child wants to sell my mother something he usually doesn't stock and won't let you even see before you drop several hundred dollars on it?").

Well, it turned out that he was actually a pretty nice guy.  We straightened out the issue.  He had another laptop there that was essentially the same (same weight, size, screen contrast, etc.) except the processor was a bit faster (he gave me the specs, and it really wasn't a huge difference).  So I finally approved the sale on her behalf.  Then we discussed what else my mom would need.  I asked him to sell my mom the MS Office Suite, and we worked out a deal so that mom will go back in two weeks and he'll install it on her machine for her (after she's sure she's keeping it, which she will, but she's always scared she won't - don't ask).  I also asked him to show her external hard drives that he had on sale and discuss with her the importance of them and how easy they are to work.  I told him he was absolutely NOT to sell my mom any anti-virus stuff because I was going to walk her through the free AVG, and he said that's what he uses.


Then Mom got the phone back and proceeds to tell me that he's cute, he's a computer science major, he works to pay for school at Maryville (part of the University of Missouri system), and he's drinking Monster Energy drink (is that supposed to be a selling point?).  I told Mom to make sure to get his name because if he did her wrong, I WOULD find him next time I was back in Kansas City.  He actually gave my mom his full name (which I won't divulge here).  Although I will say that he said his middle name is Noland, named after Noland Road in Independence, which is the main drag, akin to Broad Street in Philadelphia.  He was named that because that's where his parents met.  I laughed and said, "Is he sure that isn't where he was conceived?"

My mom died laughing and said, "I am NOT repeating that to him."  Of course, he overhears this and wants to know what I said.  So my mom ends up telling him.  He said something, which my mom didn't repeat... until she called me from her house later.  His reply was, "No, actually, I was born in Blue Springs [the next suburb over]."

Mom said she tried REALLY hard not to laugh when he said that.  But she reiterated that he IS really cute.

2 comments:

  1. So the smart funny guys are only out when you're not around??

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  2. Did you google him just for kicks?

    ReplyDelete