The World According to... Boring John

and against my better judgement, I did my brother a favour. I visited his friend and tried to 'fix' his computer.

Now if you know anything about personal computers then you now that fixing them can be as easy as turning the plug on and as difficult as writing the software in the first place.

Anyway, I 'fixed' his computer, for free (obviously: these people never want to pay to get their bloomin' computers fixed!) -- he hadn't deleted any of his temporary files, and compuserve (remember her?) just wouldn't load.

I was in a hurry, obviously and the allotted one hour was quickly used up.

But.

I was careful to not delete anything I shouldn't do on a computer that I had never seen before, and I switched off and switched on again and everything seemed fine.

Turns out I got it wrong, made things worse.

Turns out my brother's friend, my brother's boss, was non-too pleased.

But what could he do? I'd told him that I might be deleting files in haste.

What could he do? Well, a few years later when I just wanted to use his computer to quickly check my email in a minor emergency (note: use, not fix!), he flat out refused saying that I bust his computer last time I used it.

Exasperating. Simply exasperating.

What can I do?

Well, apart from write about it in my favourite vent-place (not pink, alas, but still a good place to hang!) I can resolve to do the following in future:

1. Never offer to fix someone's computer for free (or otherwise)

Now you might think that's a reasonable conclusion to arrive at, given the circumstances..

Will you, I wonder, agree when I add the following items to this 'what I will do in the future' list?

They have nothing to do with fixing computers, but they do belong to a group of activities that I like to call 'thankless tasks, you CAN still get wrong!" And they exist because I did something once, twice, maybe more and got my hand bitten in return.

I like to think that you shouldn't judge current situations by previous ones, but sometimes, just sometimes, you have to make a rule and there has to be a pretty darned good reason for changing it.

So, let's start that list again:

1. Never offer to fix someone's computer for free (or otherwise)
2. Never offer to lend a book to anyone unless you're happy to give it away
3. Never offer to be a friend to someone who wants more than that from you

Number 3. is an interesting case that I have much experience of, especially in the last few years.

Once upon a time, I befriended a woman from Brighton (as you do when you go internet dating).

In eight months we never met.

But in that time I suffered both personal insults (based on her experience of men, and not her experience of me) as well as personal praise. In that time I offered what wisdom I had, and what friendship I had to help her meet a suitable man, and I tried to ignore the insults as much as I could.

We never met, and we still have not met.

She found her man, and we don't talk anymore.

Finding her man was much more important than meeting me for the first time.

I wasn't only offering friendship but we had never met, so what else could I offer a fellow human being in pain?

I do like having women friends. But, like with the male variety, frienships take time and how you meet someone might influence how likely it is that you can become friends.

So maybe I should also add a fourth item:

4. Never try to meet women friends on a dating site!

Hey, I'm not moaning here.

I'm just trying to explain why I have very recently added 3. and 4. to my list of Don't Do's.

Because, like the Murphys...

:-)