And another thing...

I am sorry, Sir. We cannot continue this conversation until you are wearing the tinfoil hat.

"Thank you for calling the Undisclosed Technical Support Team™ my name is blah blah blah..."

"Ya, I just installed your product and someone hacked into my computer and added stuff to the disk."

"You mean the disk your product is on?"

"Ya, there are things on here that I don't recognize."

"On the actual CD?"

I make sure he has an actual retail copy of the software. He does.

"Sir, I can guarantee that no one has burned anything to that CD. It is impossible for anyone to do so. It is not a writable CD."

He ignores me. "Ya. I will read them to you, you can tell me if they are supposed to be there." There are over 6 thousand files on the CD with about 40 million lines of code. He thinks I should recognize every one of them.

I tried again. "Sir, there is absolutely no way that anyone can possibly burn anything to that CD. With or without your permission. It is just not possible."

"I know it sounds crazy." You think? "Just let me read some of them to you." And he babbles on and on giving me names of files. "There are files on here that are definitely not from your company." And proceeds to name them.

"Dude, (I am losing patience)those are drivers. We put a lot of drivers on there from other companies."

"How can you be so sure."

"Ever plug something into your computer and the product says 'hey, you plugged something in, would you like me to install it for you?' It can do that because the drivers are on the CD." Again, he ignores logic and continues on with his case.

"I bought this CD in August and some of these files say they were modified in February." He thinks he is on to something.

"2007? or 2006?"

"Ya, ok, its 2006. But I can see that the disk has been altered. It is all swirlly." His word. "It looks like it has been burned, you know what I mean? But here's the thing." Big dramatic pause. "Its on the top not the bottom. You know, where the logo is."

Ya, they would have more luck burning that onto his forehead. It was on the tip of my tongue to say so but he probably would have run to the mirror to check.

The call goes on for an hour and a half. He is saying stuff like, this time when he installed it, it looks different from the last time. Colors are different, slightly faded. In the task manager some of the processes are in all caps now, before they were lower case. Who the fuck pays attention to that sort of shit? He is looking through permissions and for some reason someone called 'OWNER' has full control of all his files.

FUCK ME! This dude is as crazy as a bag of hammers.

There is no convincing this crayon. I gave him the number to get a replacement disk.

He'll be back.