When you know about computers, it can be nice to help others if they are having a problem.
What would you do if your friend was constantly asking you to fix his daughter’s laptop after he breaks it downloading games and other things?
That is what happened to the tech-savvy guy in this story, so he finally got sick of it and locked the laptop down so he couldn’t break it again.
Check it out.
Hey, can you fix my daughters laptop for free? Multiple times…
A bit of backstory/personal beliefs: I’m willing to help my friends, but we all know someone who has or have themselves a friend who is the group mooch.
The kind of person who knows you’re getting together and just shows up nothing in hand and expects to be given free food/booze the entire time.
Yet sadly you put up with them till it gets to the breaking point of wanting to beat them senseless with a shovel.
This story is about said friend whom I finally got to the breaking point with.
My moocher friend isn’t tech savvy, like at all.
Why respect it when he has someone to fix it for free.
He has zero respect for tech and constantly uses me as his go to man when stuff goes sideways, almost always his doing.
This is from the olden days of Windows 8 being a fresh hot mess that was the next big thing everyone hated.
It took the standard windows interface, beat it over the head with a bat, tossed the bloody corpse into a wood chipper, then proceeded to light the remaining slurry on fire with military grade napalm.
(I hate windows 8 incase you didn’t pick up on that)
He had recently bought a laptop for his daughter since she was starting to need it for school and he wanted a mobile pc to use when he felt like it.
Pretty sure he just wanted it for himself but needed to convince the wife to ok the expense.
Instead of asking me for input, he decide he was just going to go to big blue multi story and by cheapest laptop model that rhymes with hell.
It took less than a day of him fighting with it to call me ask if I’d put windows 7 on it because he hated windows 8.
I asked why not return it and get a windows 7 model, to which he responded: big blue doesn’t have any windows 7 only 8 and my daughter really needs this computer.
sure she does…
I agree and he drops it off within an hour.
I should note that this happened just after windows 8 dropped and there was no classic shell programs out that simply said “get off new piece of trash tablet design we’re using the old one everyone knows and can use.”
So my options were limited.
Did an initial look at what I was getting myself into and lucky me, Dell had only put out drivers for windows 8 for this model.
Yay!
I do about 6 hours worth of hunting/downloading/tweaking drivers, and praying/cursing the tech gods as I installed windows 7.
I had to cherry pick working drivers for most of the hardware, the rest I got to work through sheer trial and error.
I made a restore disk, backed up and labeled every driver for this system in individual numbered folders in case I needed to redo anything on this piece of trash.
My friend is notorious for messing up his computer’s operating system.
I give him a ring and let him know it’s good to go and he picks it up the next day.
Some people just can’t keep a computer working.
Less than 2 weeks later he texts saying something’s wrong with it, it won’t do blah blah blah or I can’t get it to do what I want.
SHOCKING, I know…
I just restore from the disk I made and give it back same day.
Let’s see how long this lasts…
Almost a week later, same thing…
Again a quick restore and I give it back.
This time it took almost a whole 3 weeks till I got a text.
Now I’m mad, what the heck is he doing to this thing to mess up the operating system.
I finally took the time to look at the system and see what was going on.
He had a bunch of cracked games downloaded and was trying to run those, a bunch of virus/malware on it, oh and a bunch of shady **** sites in his browser history.
I’m livid, the only reason I kept fixing this thing was because it was supposed to be his daughter’s.
I got ahold of his wife to see exactly who was really using the laptop and for what.
Turns out he told her it was having issues and he was constantly trying to “fix” it at home and even took it to work to mess around with it when he had time.
He was a manager at a Hut that sells pizza.
He’s one of those real hands on managers who let everyone know what needs to be done then relaxes in the office.
So I get the evil idea of fixing things my way.
My first step to fixing things my way was to make an admin account that only I had the info for and limit the other account to a limited user.
When I talked to his wife I got a good idea of what his daughter really like as far as shows, games, etc.
I then proceed to pimp this laptop out for a 10yr old girl.
The little girl is going to love this.
My little pony wallpapers (about 100 on rotate), the entire my little pony cartoon show stored directly on the computer, bratz, barbie, the works.
I even redid the icons to a my little pony theme and tweaked the user interface to be pink/purple colored.
I made sure there was a parental lock on the browser’s to prevent anything adult related from even showing up on the laptop.
I installed TeamViewer and locked in my personal credentials so I could get on anytime I needed.
And just for good measure I installed a handy program called deep freeze.
For those unfamiliar with it, it snap shots the drive as is and restores the drive to that exact image every time the power cycles.
Only downside to this program is you lose anything you save on the computer when the power cycles, not a problem since I had gotten a bulk pack of thumb drives that were multi colored and came with lanyards.
I even went a step above and beyond and got a my little pony skin for the laptop lid in case he thought of taking it to work again.
I personally delivered the laptop this time when the wife and daughter were home, the girly high pitched squeals of joy that nearly ruptured my ear drums made it all worth it.
She went off on a joy induced tirade as I show her and her mom everything I did.
Including all the shows and games I put on just for her.
I then gave her a bright pink thumb drive with purple lanyard and explained that when she wanted to play the games or save anything the drive needed to be plugged in.
I set the save path for all the games to the thumb drive and added a shortcut to the drive itself on the desktop to make sure she wouldn’t lose any school work she was doing.
I made sure both her and her mom knew the thumb drive had to plugged in otherwise things wouldn’t be saved.
I didn’t mention the parental lock I setup or deep freeze, I wanted it to be a surprise for my friend later.
Both her and her mom thanked me, I got a big hug from the daughter who was still flying around on cloud 9, she was begging her mom to watch my little pony with her before I even left.
I knew it was only a matter of time till I got an angry text/call from my friend as soon as he got a chance to use the laptop I was waiting with gleeful anticipation.
I had dropped the laptop off on Monday and I knew he wouldn’t get a chance to use it till Friday when he got back from a trip he took.
Cut to Friday night and I get a call around 8pm, which I ignore and let go to voicemail.
I get 3 more calls every 5-10 minutes which I also ignore.
Then I get a bunch of texts which I ignored till about 11pm when I figured he had ample time to try and mess with the laptop to only be shutdown at every attempt.
I call him up with an especially snarky attitude, acting half asleep just to annoy him.
He has the nerve to get upset at this?
Mooch: Finally where the heck have you been?!? I tried calling you and texting but you never responded.
Me: Yeah I had a long day so I took an evening nap, what’s up?
Mooch: What’s up?!?! This laptop is busted that’s what’s up! I cant get anything to work right. I downloaded a game and tried installing it but it says I don’t have admin rights. I restarted it and the game files were gone completely so I redownload it it but still couldn’t install it. It’s not even letting me browse the web! I thought you fixed this. WHAT THE HECK!!!
Me: Calm down, I’m sure it’s something simple. Let me remote in.
Mooch: Wait you can do that?
Me: Yeah, I got sick of having to have it dropped off so I installed remote software. Let’s see… first thing I do is remotely restart the system.
Mooch: IT DID IT AGAIN!!!
Me: What?
Mooch: The game I downloaded is gone from the desktop!
Me: Oh yeah, I put software on the laptop that restores it to a default setting, anything not saved on an external drive gets removed. I gave your wife and daughter a thumb drive. Didn’t they tell you it was needed?
Mooch: No! What the heck! Why’d you do a stupid thing like that?
Me: Well I’ve had to fix this thing 3 times already and I got sick of it so I made sure anything you downloaded or tried to install would be deleted and blocked. You don’t have admin rights, I do. Last time there was over a dozen viruses/malware from your games and the games you were trying to run would barely run on this laptop even if you had legit versions.
Mooch: WHAT THE HECK!!! Insert 15 minute rant I didn’t pay any attention to because I don’t care Well why won’t it let me browse the web?
Me: Are you sure? Let’s see… I bring up Google and start browsing standard sites, hit a few cartoon sites I favorited for his daughter. Everything looks fine to me. Could you be referring to the porn sites that were in the browser history on YOUR DAUGHTERS LAPTOP!?!?
Mooch: Um…
Me: Yeah, I thought so. See, me being the upstanding guy I am, I turned on parental controls to keep web browsing safe for your 10yr old daughter. The heck is wrong with you?!?
Mooch: But…
Me: No, no buts. It took a lot of work to get this thing working for your daughter’s sake and then you use it as your personal play toy which I had to fix 3 times.
I’m done with it, I made it so your daughter can use HER laptop when and how she needs, if you want to get your own laptop and mess it up beyond repair that’s fine by me, no more freebies if you mess something up being an idiot.
If you think this is unfair I’d be more then happy to let your wife know exactly what the issue with the laptop was including screen shots of your browsing history.
I don’t mind helping but you go above and beyond being a mooch a lot of times.
Anything else you need “help” with?
Mooch: No…
Me: Have a great weekend! click
Having spent over 18 years in customer service/Tech support so I went a bit nuclear on him but I had had enough of his messes.
Reminded me of all to many times the problem isn’t the hardware/software, it’s the meat puppet smashing their face against the keyboard and wondering why stuff doesn’t work.
So I simply removed that part of the equation.
Why am I not surprised?
Amazingly enough he didn’t have anymore issues with that laptop.
Wonder why?
Only time I was gotten ahold of was by his wife asking me to update some things and install some software the daughter needed for school.
Which I was more then happy to do.
This is a great story of well-deserved revenge, and he was able to help the young girl as well. Perfect.
Let’s take a minute to read through the comments from some other people.
It was perfect.
This person wants a laptop like this.
This is how things should be handled.
This is a classic.
Getting a pizza or beer is the lease one can do.
A perfectly executed story of revenge.
It’s great that at least the daughter can be happy.
If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.