We've all done it

Good story on the BBC of someone who wanted to see the scale of home users ignorance about computers. We've all been called upon to help friends and neighbours I'm sure and I've said in the past there must be a reasonable business opportunity for someone with above average technical ability in computers. I'm not talking about formal qualifications, nothing beats experience and we must have 1000s of hours of it under our belts. I've just spent the morning hacking around inside a Windows 2000 registry to solve the problem of account passwords not being stored in Outlook. Certainly not a task for the inexperienced and something I'd do only for myself.

I live in a small town and every couple of months an advert will appear in the local paper offering their computer skills for hire. They never seem to last long and I've long surmised it's because they're usually young folk with as much business acumen as the Women contestants on The Apprentice. If they took their time and built up some word of mouth, advertised every week and kept their rates reasonable I'm sure they would succeed. I know someone who erects TV aerials around the local area and he's raking it in. Everybody knows he'll do a good job for a good price. Likewise the Window cleaner, good job, repeat business, word of mouth = car worth more than my house.

Anytime someone asks my advice on buying a new computer I give them the stock answer "Buy a Dell". Hopefully that should keep them out of my hair for a few months. Lesley has now shown all her pals my iPod mini and a number of them want one. Fine, but they want me to order it for them!??! No thanks, you can't afford to pay for my time, simple as that. In my review of the iPod mini I highlighted the essential nature of having your music collection ripped and properly catalogued on the computer. Who do you think would end up doing that for them then? Years ago, I did have an idea there was a business opportunity to rip CD collections for cash the first time I ever set eyes on Winamp. There are now a number of services available which will do that for you at approximately £1 a disc.

Despite what Microsoft may tell you things are going to get more complex as time goes on and the calls from family and neighbours will continue. But their attitude will have to change, the increased time required to diagnose, fix and secure the problems are going to demand that it is done on a business, rather than favour, footing. Fire up Word and design a nice little "quotation" template and an even nicer "invoice" template and sit back and wait for the next time your phone rings. If everybody was made to pay for the time wasted repairing virus/worm/spyware/trojan damage they might take an interest in how to stop it, and I might be more inclined to spend four hours helping them.

Family/Neighbour: "Oh yes, I update my virus software every day."
Me/You: "So why is the .dat file dated 2001 then?"

Bastards!

Category:

• Computer