Saw this on slashdot (which was found on a newsgroup), but it's pretty funny. I've experienced most of this shit, you? Anyway, here goes:

- As you've mentioned, folks whining for help before even attempting to solve their own problem

- When they stop offering any kind of token reward or payment (some never offer anything in the first place), regardless of whether you normally accept such gifts. It's not so bad if it's a two minute job, but some of these morons are so convinced of your passion for IT problem-solving that they think it's perfectly reasonable for you to spend half a day in their spare room without so much as a cup of tea and a biscuit

- When they start recommending you to their friends and handing out your number

- When they start with "my neighbour's brother is having trouble..."

- When the "problem" is clearly a veiled request for you to obtain a pirated copy of AutoCAD for them

- "My graphics card has gone faulty. You must have done something to it when you upgraded my hard drive in March" (i.e. they want you to buy and fit them a new card, cos it's your fault that it's busted)

- Asking for advice and then ignoring it ("don't buy it at Dixons", "You'll need more memory than that", "D-Link sucks", "Ethernet is better than USB for networking", "You should really have some Antivirus", etc.)

- "Selective memory" when, after ignoring your advice, they experience an expensive problem

- When they call you at 21:30 on Christmas Eve with a computer problem

- They decide to save money by building their own system, except that they want you to spec it up, price it up, order the bits (they'll pay you back once it's working), take delivery of the bits and, of course, build it

- You get into the office and find that some ancient filthy hulk of a home PC has been deposited on your desk chair - with a note vaguely describing a problem, specifying the day that it needs to be fixed by, and warning you against losing any of their (unspecified) data. Lots of exclamation marks, and a smiley face at the bottom

- When they happen to be a millionaire but they won't upgrade their Amstrad 1640 and dot matrix printer

- They start forwarding every hoax virus warning to you, merely adding a "?" to the top

- They want you to arrange for them to no longer receive any spam

- They show up unannounced at the front door brandishing a laptop that they found at some car boot sale or something. They invite themselves in and won't leave until you take a look at it. It almost seems to be your fault when it turns out to be missing some vital part - you know, like the charger or the battery. They get mad at *you* when you tell them how much the replacement part is likely to cost for their lovely "new" £10 laptop

- They haven't got a CD burner, but they know that you have

- They *have* got a burner, but can't be arsed to learn how to work Nero

- They have access to at least a dozen spotty little geeks who are capable of hooking their new Deskjet up, but they still come to you

- They have a novel requirement - say ripping-off audio tapes to CD and scanning, resizing and printing the case inserts. You know that if you listen to them, it'll suddenly be up to you to do all the research on the hardware required, pirate the software, make it all work, write step-by-step instructions, and be available on the phone the first ten times they try to do it

- Describing an apparently easy-to-fix problem in order to get you to visit, then revealing the true, massive, extent of the task once you're onsite

Link (although I pasted the whole thing)