Tutorial: The Most Dreaded and Awkward Computer Repair Question

How to Avoid the Awkward Silence After the Question:
Have you Backed up your Files?

As a tech, I try to be as sympathetic and friendly as possible to my clients and hate to see them stressed or feeling awkward. Especially since by the mere fact I'm talking to them means they're going through the consideral strain of computer and internet withdrawal. Their hands may not be twitching, their eyes may not be glassed over, but underneath the withdrawal is making them desperate.

All kidding aside, I do try to be as gentle and diplomatic as possible and ask in the most lighthearted tone while I pop the dreaded but crucial question, knowing all the while, this is going to be painful. Painful because the client then has to confess that while everything under the sun that is important to them, their photos, music, videos, accounting data, resume, important documents and emails--their whole life essentially or at least the part which keeps their day-to-day existence more pleasant and less humdrum is on this very computer,which they realize is only a bunch of fragile and flimsy components and circuitry, and now is in fact broken, and that no, that while being dimly aware somewhere in their psyche of all of this, they did not take the time and energy to buy the exterior hard drive and back up their files.

And also there is an implication in the question of my superiority with comptuers which the clients are all too aware of already, that their life is in my hands, so to speak, and the speed with which their life will return to them, and also since I am a techie, the suggestion that I must back up my files every other second.

My company Ducktoes Computer Repair is of the don't-reformat-unless-all-other-avenues-of repair-have-been-thouroughly-exhausted-school-of -computer-repair but sometimes we have to. And also since at any given moment your computer can be drowned by a spilled glass of lemonade or stolen while you get up to buy a muffin or surged out of its memory in a lightening storm or lost when you walk off without it at the airport or bumped by a vacuum or climbing toddler and all your important and beloved files are then gone forever.