I have just come off the phone having been talked at for 20 minutes by someone who called me for help and advice - none of which they seemed destined to hear or even listen to.

A little bit of recent history first.

On thursday they called to tell ,me that I had never gone round and sorted out their PC for them. Didn't I? Oh deary me, what a shame.

Anyway apparently their PC now wasn't booting at all and he wanted to bring it round the next day. I said OK and we agreed that he'd be there at noon. First stupid move on my part was to assume that his noon was the same as mine. Silly me - I should have realised that he meant 4pm my time!

Anyway he arrives with just the PC, no keyboard, mouse, monitor or leads meaning I had to demolish one of mine to even power his up. I did so and sure enough it got partway through booting, came up with an error window (which looked suspiciously non-Microsoft) and hung up. The mouse worked but not even ctrl-alt-del did anything.

So power down and reboot in safe mode . "Oh what's that then" was the first comment that proved my guest had any vague interest in what was going on as he'd just been blathering on and on about the state of world finances etc etc.

Long story short..... Booting the PC in safe mode I found a suspicious looking registry optimiser program which I managed to get him to stop blathering long enough to tell me his wife had downloaded it from the net "because it seemed a good idea".

With more hope than belief I restored the system back 1 week before the installation and - praise be - on rebooting the machine worked fine.

All during this the blathering continued.

I asked him (several times) what anti virus software he had installed as I couldn't find any. Eventually he admitted there was none as he'd not thought it mattered since he didn't use that machine very often (?).

There was also no firewall and no anti-spyware. And what was this PC used for? Browsing the web what else.

I had no intention of putting his machine on my network to set it up with these missing necessities so I gave him a list of the 3 primary free-ware packages he needed to install and he left.

And so we get to this afternoon when I get a call to tell me that none of the download addresses I gave him worked and the one he did download was telling him....... well I don't really know what it was telling him as he just kept punctuating the information with things like "It says it's found Blah blah blah" and "Need to download yadda yadda yadda". And yes he was actually saying blahblahblah and yaddayaddayadda.

So I was getting nowhere.

I tried to get him to shut up and listen but he was intent on adding his tenpennorth and then some.

Bit by bit I became aware that what he was describing bore no resemblance to any of the software packages I had told him to install. Eventually I realised he was reinstalling the registry optimiser I had removed the day before. He even gave me the name of it and then swore blind he'd downloaded it off of AVG's web site.... or perhaps it was ZoneAlarms..... or maybe SpyBot...... but it was obviously not his fault as he'd done what I'd told him.

Oh no you haven't..... Oh yes I have......

Despite my telling him several times what I needed him to do, I could hear (over his interminable waffle) the sounds of keys being clicked and assorted system bleeps and quite plainly he was doing nothing that I was suggesting.

He was constantly adding things like "Now it says blahblahblah. So I've clicked ok and now it's gone to click ok to accept, so I have......" and so it went on and on and on.

Finally I heard his wife in the background and suddenly he decided that he had to go out as he was already late (so why start doing something on the PC if you're going out anyway?.)and now his machine was telling him it was downloading "yaddayaddayadda.exe" and would take another 15 minutes.

And so he said he'd have to go (Like I cared!) and he hung up.

I have no doubt that either later today or at some point tomorrow I will receive yet another call where I won't be listened to while he vents his spleen about the damn PC.

So I've vented my spleen and feel a bit better but WHY do some people find it totally impossible to shut up and listen when they're the one who asked for advice and help in the first place? And why do they always act as if it's the adviser's fault that they still have no idea what to do about their problematic equipment?

Ok everyone - Naq's stopped whingeing - back to your own beds.