I’m Here to Help You.

You answer the phone and a person with an accent you know is not from Texas or Alabama or even Boston, tells you his name is Fred and he is ready to assist you with a major problem you are having with your computer.  If you’re like me, you didn’t know your computer had a problem.  You can live with the fact that it sometimes doesn’t know how to spell, or can’t figure out what you are trying to say and there was that time it sent a message about you know what to you know who by mistake. Oh, well if they let a little thing like that upset them to the point they never speak to you again and un-friend you from all their sites, it’s their loss.  But I digress.
Fred says it’s come to their attention that the framistat in your computer is not running to full speed. You have no idea what a framistat is, so you listen.  Mistake number one.  He says if you will just give him the password to your computer he can re-thrum the framistat and make it work with the throckinwhistle.  Huh?  It’s computer language and the best you can do is “alt, control, delete,” so you take a chance and give him the password.  Mistake number two.

By the time you get to mistake number five, he’s got your SSN, the password and account number for your checking account, the birthday of your grandmother and the name of the person you had the hots for in junior high.  The next morning when you go to The Royal Tea Pot to get your daily fix, all four of your credit and debit cards have a message on the screen to confiscate the card, place you under citizen’s arrest and only sell you bread and water so you can get used to it.

Now for a true story. I know you were waiting for this. I kept getting a call from a gentleman from the Indian sub-continent named Richard several months ago.  His story was he worked for Microsoft and they had detected a virus in my computer.  I immediately hung up.  Two weeks later, he graced me with yet another call.  This time I listened a little longer. All I had to do was allow his to remotely access my computer and he could cure it from the virus, constipation, ingrown toenails, acne, several STD’s and baldness.  I asked for his number so I could call him back, because I was in the middle of painting my toenails and this time he hung up on me.
And then….one dark and stormy night he called again.  This time I told him how happy I was to get is call.  I told him I realized he did not know who or where he was calling, but this was his lucky night.  “Why is that?” he asked in his delightful accent.  Because you have reached the county sheriff’s office and we have been having terrible problems with our computers.  Before he could stammer an excuse, I told him to hang on because I was going to connect him with the Sheriff and he could tell him how to fix all of our computers.

Richard is no longer my phone buddy and my computer still doesn’t know how to spell without help.