Tales of Tech Support: The Photos

After delivery driving proved to be a dead-end in Miami I decided to help my friend with his home based business of in house computer repair. It was a sweet scam and I say scam because much of what we did could be easily done and sometimes done for free.

This was about 1999 so not everyone was a wanna-be tech just yet. What we would do is go to people’s homes and offer them our Computer clean out special. Basically what we did was run scan disc, defrag, and check their task bar for useless programs, run a disc clean up and a virus scan.

We would charge people 49.99 and they thought it was a steal. We ended up with a large list of people who we would visit from time to time for small tasks like installing programs or a full format or installing some new part they purchased.

But there was this one lady whose house we hated going to. Her name was Gloria and she was about 77 years old. She has a nice house in Pembroke Pines but she never turned on the air conditioner. She wasn’t poor so that wasn’t it; she just didn’t feel the need for it.

Now this was in August which means it’s almost 100 degrees here and the breeze does not help and the humidity is awful. She called us over because her system was running slow. All the windows were open and she had the ceiling fan on low.

We get there and all she wants to do is talk about her son who is some kind of business man in New York who never visits her. She tries to give us this tea that was red looking and when I tasted it, it tasted like swamp water with a box of sweet n low in it.

She tells us the computer was slow ever since the last pictures she had uploaded to it, which was strange because I never new she uploaded pictures or even knew how to. So my friend and I go looking through her files to see what the problem is and we find a folder called Fun with Henry.

Inside were about three hundred pictures of her and this guy having sex, needless to say I had no interest in seeing this and quickly closed the folder. I still couldn’t find anything wrong with the system, it wasn’t running slow and there was no virus or anything.

Then she walks in with a smile on her face with her arms behind her back. She asked us if we found the folder. We tried to play dumb and just said we didn’t find any problems yet. She said that she was sorry for tricking us and that there was nothing wrong with the system and asked us what we thought of the photos.

I said we try not to look at customers personal files and that we did open it but once we saw what it was closed it. She looked at us disappointed. Ok, she said I will just come out and ask. Then she put her hands in front of us revealing a camera and said will you boys photograph my husband and I, we are willing to pay, our last guy quit today.

My friend and I had no words to speak. Gloria just smiled. I am not asking you to join us. We just like to keep record we have been doing this for over twenty five years now. It’s no big deal we only take about 15 to 30 minuets max and only once a week except for special events.

I wont lie to you I considered it but my friend was grossed out. He said sorry and that he had to go then grabbed me pulling me out the door. You guys can rotate she yelled so you only doing this twice a month, it’s like the reserves.

My friend and I were out of there in a flash and he wouldn’t take her calls anymore. I really doubt I would have taken the job but damn I wanted to at least find out how much it paid.

Visits: 62