There were three of us in the room and that's the first we had heard of it. Still, ever eager to satisfy the masses we all smile and offer our assistance.
"My laptop has loads of viruses" she says. "I spoke to someone yesterday."
We all have blank looks on our faces and we are all thinking the same thing about the "loads of viruses," format c:, die, viruses die!
"It may be quicker to just swap your laptop out" I suggest. I may as well have suggested open heart surgery as the woman did a double take and hugged the laptop bag tighter.
The other guys quickly made themselves scarce and it was left to dutiful me to sort the woman out. Lucky me!
"Let's take a look" I say and the woman unpacks her laptop bag with the greatest of care.
She reaches in to the bag and retrieves a laptop that is about 7+ years old, the model we decommissioned over 3 years ago. We boot it up... slowly, as it only had 256mb RAM. We then found the woman was logging on with a local user and not her domain user account, turns out she never has. The laptop was so old it didn't work with our wireless system and she hadn't figured out how to use a cable. To top it off, all of her work for the past 7 years was stored on this machine and the hard drive was making a clonking noise.
I didn't find any viruses, but I wouldn't have been surprised if I had. It still had a version of anti-virus on there that we upgraded and eventually got rid of 6 years ago, as well as hordes of out of date (and in some cases useless) pieces of software. I doubted that an OS service pack had ever touched the machine.
"OK, first thing we need to do is copy all of your work off. Do you have a memory stick." I ask her.
"No." She says abruptly, pursing her lips.
"We need to get your work off to swap the laptop over. Also it's not a good idea to store everything on here in case the hard drive dies." I explain, reaching for a spare USB key.
"I don't need a new laptop, there's nothing wrong with this one" she blurts. Clearly there was or she wouldn't be here.
"We decommissioned these over 3 years ago. It's old and out of date. It won't run any of the latest software."
"Well what are you going to do with this one? Scrap it I suppose." She snarls indignantly. I was a little taken aback. Here was a laptop that was clearly dying and running slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter. I was offering her a more than reasonable solution and for some reason she had the hump.
"No, it will be given to special needs, they are calling out for laptops." I tell her quickly.
"hmm..."
I began to copy her stuff off, which was painfully slow. I boot up a brand, spanking new laptop and she looked at it with distain as she logged on for the first time. From her snotty attitude and the look of her face I may as well have handed her a nuclear bomb. I mean this was a rocketship compared to the paper airplane she had been using.
"My names wrong" she says. "It confuses everyone when they email me."
"How do you mean?" I ask.
"I got married and changed my name, now my name is wrong on the address list. HR changed their records."
"Well did you inform us?" I ask.
"No!"
"Then we wouldn't know to change it. When did you get married?"
"2006."
"Ah! Well if you had told us, we would have changed it."
"It causes no end of confusion..."
I gave up the argument and quickly went through her account settings, changing her surname everywhere I saw it. Problem solved!
With many grunts and groans from her, I finally got her all set up and the appropriate paperwork all sorted out. I got her email and printers setup, and explained what her homearea is on the network and that she should save everything there.
"I can't use this at home, like I can my old one." She says.
"Yes you can, it's no different in that respect."
"How can I, if all my work is here?"
"Your work is synchronized every time you start up and shutdown so that you can use it offline at home." I explain.
"Hmmm..."
We pack her new laptop into her laptop bag and she looks longingly at her old laptop, on the pile, ready to be wiped and passed on to the next unlucky sole.
She grunts again and walks out, without as much as a Thank you. Now there's gratitude for you!
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