One of the guys at work is a grandfather that is a retired surveyor. He has it set up pretty nice where he only works three days a week. Keeps out of his wife's hair. Has a little extra money coming in. Plus I think he still enjoys the work.

Anyway, he is about the nicest guy I know. I put him in the same category as Jake, for those of you that know how I feel about him. He never bad-mouths anyone else at work. Always happy to see you. He is usually smiling. Brings pictures of his grandkids from desk to desk occasionally. Just super nice. You can't help but smile when he says hello even if you are in a grumpy mood.

So anyway a while back he was having problems with his home PC so I volunteered to help him out. I was able to fix his PC, and then a few weeks after that he ran into another problem so he took me home during lunch and I fixed him up again. I noticed that he was using AOL so I mentioned to him that instead of $22 a month there are a ton of local ISP's that would cost less than half of that per month. He seemed interested so the next time I was at Fry's I picked up a flyer for their web service for $9.88 a month and dropped it off at his desk.

He went ahead and signed up but was not able to make a connection. He called their tech support number a couple of times but still wasn’t able to connect. He asked me today if I would mind stopping over again after work. How could I say no?

I turned on his PC and clicked to connect to the Fry's ISP. His modem must not have a speaker because I couldn't hear the connection sounds. I picked up the phone so I could hear what it was doing and their was the recorded telephone company voice saying that he "must first dial a one before placing this call." Well that was easy! I entered a one in the dialing string and tried again. This time a person answered. Whoops. Wrong number. So we connected via AOL, went to Fry's web site and got the local access numbers for his city. Plugged the right one in and it connected first time.

I am glad I am able to help because I can imagine how frustrating it is when you just want it to work but you feel helpless to do anything about it. I like helping the good guys.