A while back this client calls me to check out his computer and make suggestions on what needs to be done to make his system faster, stable and fix some problems. And to talk about things he wants to do.

But I should have seen this coming, all the signs were there…

We kept playing a major case of phone-tag, and when we could finally reach eachother - we couldn’t schedule time in his busy calendar, and when we did - he kept changing it. At one point he even complained to the person who referred him to me… uh, WTF??? How does HE have ANYTHING to do with this?

I was very annoyed at this point, but I shrugged it off and continued since it meant $.

We agreed we needed to replace the tiny hard drive with something much bigger, among other things, but he had a very busy schedule and couldn’t afford to get everything at the time.  So for the time being, he just needed the computer to work for his kids’ homework and convinced me to just do some housekeeping, remove viruses, get it somewhat stable, get the printer working right, etc. This is actually a decent Windows PC, but with only 256 MBs of RAM with viruses and other problems it slows down like molasses.

Once I started working - things quickly escelated into the nightmare I had forseen, and since I wasn’t able to take the computer to my office to work on it, he was constantly there to interrupt me.  I would fix something, then he wants more, and more - all the while acting like a 10 year old having to have things his way!  Sure, I’m just a PC Tech - what do I know? And he didn’t allow me to uninstall/reinstall software to fix problems while saying “that should not be necessary, it was working fine until recently.” That is when I realized I was neck-deep in molasses… wait… that’s not mollasses! Ewww!!! 

I wasn’t as annoyed with the computer as I was with his attitude, he really seemed like an immature 10 year old - but that’s insulting his 10 year old that was acting a hell of a lot more mature, not to mention the kid knows Windows 100x more than the dad - yet the dad would keep blaming everything on the kid.

Finally frustrated with both the client and the slowness of the computer, I threw up my hands and refused to go on. Instead I printed out the information he needs to pick up the hard drive and RAM, and refuse to touch again it until then.

The worst part about this is that I had already quoted him a price, which I thought was fair at first. I don’t know how I’m going to do it but I’m going to have to change that to either a higher price or an hourly rate.

Moral of the story? Never quote a flat fee when you don’t know the person you are going to be working with.