My career is in IT. I spend my days answering phone calls ("Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?") rebuilding systems, monitoring system functionality, resetting passwords, installing new hardware, software and ordering up new machines to replace ones that have kicked the bucket and are not economical to fix.

This means that people assume I do it outside of work hours, too. People at work and outside of work, socially and otherwise call up or come sit next to me at the bar and ask advice, or how to fix something, or could I fix their laptop/desktop/home theatre/cell phone/toaster or whatnot. Nine times out of ten I'll say OK, and usually I'll enjoy helping someone out.

What gets my goat is when people call for help, ask for advice, and then question it. If you knew better, why the fuck did you call me in the first place? I was recently asked to help spec out a laptop for a friend of a friend who had been agonizing over the myriad of choices out there, and then the HUNDREDS of configuration options available once you decide on a course of action. I left my house and went to that person's office and had a little consult with them. What are you going to use it for? School work, but also for photos, music, watching movies, etc. What's your budget? About $2000. OK no problem, we can work with that.

I then proceeded to help spec out a 17" laptop with a nice screen on it, 100gb 7200RPM SATA hard drive, 1gb of DDR2 SDRAM, Dual-layer DVD burner, discrete video card with 256mb of memory, wireless G+ Bluetooth... a pretty smokin system. With a coupon code, it came in at about USD$1500. Since $2000 had been set aside, we were $500 short of that, so what could we upgrade? We went back through the configuration pages. Bumping up to a Core Duo T2600 from the T2400 would be a $325 upgrade, but not worth the extra expense, in my estimation. I'd have gone for more ram for half the price, rather than drop the $$ on the next processor up. Scratch that. We already had discrete video and a dual-layer DVD+R and the largest hard drive available.

"Well what about that?" was the question...

"Windows XP Pro? Do you really need an upgrade like that?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what the difference is between XP Home and Pro?"

"No."

"Then how do you know you really need it?"

"Because it's the Professional version"

At that point, I tried to explain the difference between a managed system and an unmanaged system, what Remote Desktop meant (with regards to Home vs Pro), what Group Policy was, what a domain was... None of it was registering.

"But I might need to join it to a network to use a printer"

"You can do that with Home. You won't need to join it to a domain, or they would have given you a laptop to use, suitably locked down, group policies applied to it,  EFS enabled and Remote Desktop configured."

"What does all that mean?"

"It means you don't need Windows XP Pro, you can use that $79 to buy a nice high-quality webcam if you want."

"You're SURE I won't need the Pro version?"

(sigh)

Next up was Productivity Software. In other words, Office 2003. There was an option to bundle in Office 2003 small business edition that had Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint and Publisher for $279. I unchecked that.

"I need that, though."

"Yes, I agree,but look at this:"  (clickety-click to Amazon) "Microsoft Office 2003 Student and Teacher edition. Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint, everything you need AND you're buying this for school, so you don't even have to feel guilty about buying the cheap student version. And it's only $119 instead of $279."

"Oh, they're exactly the same?"

"Not quite, they both have Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint, but Small Business has Publisher too. The only real difference is the license."

"What's Publisher?"

"It's a goofy desktop publishing program. It's like Word, but has a few more things you can do with it, as far as page layout goes, and it has a bunch of templates for greeting cards and signs and stuff that no one ever uses anyway"

"Well I might need that in the future."

"Is it worth $150 to buy a program that probably only costs $99 that you MIGHT need one day in the future? You could take that $150 and buy a nice leather case for your laptop, or even the rolling laptop case that has room for your books and papers as well as the laptop, instead of some software that you might not even ever use"

"Well I don't want to be without it if someday I decide I need it..."

Man I don't have to deal with that kind of stress when I'm at work and getting paid to take abuse!