Mike brought his “computer” into the shop because they’re spying on me
I had a customer, Mike, who seemed somewhat challenged and a was challenge to deal with when it came to computers. Mike called me up one day and said that they were spying on him when he was on the internet. When I asked what made him think that, he said that there was a little eye at the bottom of his web browser and it was watching him and he want me to fix it so they couldn’t watch him. Now, this was the time before remote support programs, so I asked him to bring his computer into the shop so I could scan it for viruses and malware.
A few hours later he comes walking in with his monitor. When I asked where the computer was he said that it was right here, meaning the monitor. I said no, the black box under his desk was the computer. I told home to take the monitor back home so he could shut down the computer to bring it in. He said that wouldn’t be necessary as he just unhooked everything before disconnecting his “computer”, meaning he just yanked the power.
I sent Mike back home to get the computer so he could show me how they were spying on him. He come back with the computer, I set everything up and turned it on. The first thing it wanted to do was a chkdsk because of his abrupt shutdown. He complained that it was always doing that check thing. I explained that because he wasn’t turning off the computer properly, he was seeing the disk check. I told him that I would show him how to keep it from happening.
After Windows came up I asked him to show me how they were spying on him. He launched Internet Explorer and went to his home page. He then pointed to the bottom of the screen and said, see there is the eye and they’re spying on me. What he pointed to was the old privacy setting symbol that they used to use in IE. When I tried to explain what it was, he was pretty adamant that he was being spied upon. (Well, he probably was, but back then we didn’t know how much data was really being slurped by web sites).
I told him that I would put a different web browser on his computer that wouldn’t spy on him and I loaded up Firefox. Mike didn’t see the eye anymore and felt he was safe and secure. I was somewhat frazzled by my experience with him, but several dollars richer.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
