C Obsession

I’ve had a long time client who’s a retired CPA, who’s been doing people’s taxes literally since JFK was in office, and he always seems to call/email/text at the most inconvenient times about largely insignificant things. Full disclosure, he does occasionally have legit issues, but those occur for him perhaps once every 10-12 months, if that, and are almost always easy to fix.

The other day, out of nowhere, he asks me to find where his C drive was located, since it had “gone missing.” I remote in, only for him to show me that it went missing from the side bar in Windows Explorer, and he was used to seeing it there. I showed him where it was quickly under the “My Computer” icon pinned there and went on my way. Then today (which if you’ll note, today is a Sunday) he emails me at 4:30 PM telling me his CD drive has 20 GB less than the other day after he installed a tax software program, then emailing again, saying he recovered 15 when running CCleaner.

He has a 1TB internal drive on top of the SSD being used for his C drive, as well as no less than two external drives attached to his all-in-one computer, which was designed in such a way to preclude anyone from upgrading the internal drives to a higher capacity. Yet, saving files to the other drives is inconsistent at best for him, as he can be somewhat forgetful where he saved something. I even wonder why he has Carbonite, on top of the backup software I already have for him, which has been working far better than the Carbonite backups have proven to be.

I just let him know I’d keep an eye on it, since he’s raised a big stink about it in the past on more than one occasion. And only once was it even remotely close to a legit issue. I even told him that things filling up the C drive is usually such an insignificant issue, it’s not worth anyone’s trouble to even mention, let alone do much about it since other than occasionally run CCleaner or other temp file removal program of choice, the scripts I do remotely usually take care of things to keep temp/unneeded files from cluttering it up. I even showed him how to run CCleaner himself so he wouldn’t need to bug me every few days about it while I tried to work on more important items which could net me significantly more income for my business than the $100/month he’s paying me to mind the proverbial store.