I got a call from my girlfriend to come over and help her brother fix his pc.
He's a young guy who knows how to do most of your normal things at the time.

For context, this is in the Windows XP/Vista days. It's not like today where
everything is an online service or an electron app.

He told me the computer just stopped booting up "for no reason." By this point
he was used to my standard questions of what did you do last? Did you install
anything new? Did you uninstall or make any changes to the system? Of course
his answer was no.

Remember Safe Mode? That's something I've not had to touch in years, luckily.
So I boot up there and make sure there aren't any issues with the hard disk or
weird things going on with the file system. All seems to be in order except
the files strewn all over the place like a messy teenager's bedroom. Nothing
that would case a BSOD on startup.

The first rule of tech support is the user always lies. Maybe. I'm not sure and
probably just made that up. Whatever.

Win+r -> appwiz.cpl -> sort by date...

"Hey Andrew... (name not redacted, screw the guilty)"
"What's this game that was installed yesterday?"
"Is that about the time everything went belly-up?"

"Oh yeah, I was trying to install that when it stopped working."

"..."

"Sorry, I forgot"

*Sigh*

I really wish that was the first or last time that ever happened but even if
you have never done any kind of tech support, you already know that's nowhere
near true. Andrew didn't outright lie, he just left details out... Details that
would have saved both of us a bit of time.