4.5 hours of OS X Hell

After work yesterday, I made my way over to a coworker's house for an after-hours house call. He had contacted me a few weeks ago asking about installing OS X on his 4 home computers: 3 iMacs and a Cube. I suggested that he buy the OS X family pack (which allows you to install the OS on up to 5 computers in your house) and that's what he did. I knew from previous experience that you should allow about 2-3 hours per OS X installation, mostly because of all of the updates that need to be run afterwards. I knew getting 4 computers up and running on ten would take a good while, so I had been mentally preparing myself.

Needless to say, I didn't get home until 11PM last night. And the bad part is that I'm not really done with everything that needs to be done at their house. But the whole thing puts me in a difficult place because while I'm sitting there waiting for software to install and updates to run, I know the client is sitting there watching the time. Tick Tock Tick Tock. Asking questions about how their software is going to run once they're up to OS X. The reply is always a grim one: "Well, you see, the software you currently have isn't OSX-native, so you should probably upgrade your copy of Photoshop and Microsoft Office." Yeh. That'll be at least another $500 in software and then if you want me to come over and install it for you? More dough. I sorta feel bad because I think if I were them, I would feel like I was being taken advantage of. I hope they don't think that, because my intentions are good. It's just that sometimes things can't be as simple or inexpensive as people would like for them to be.