"No good deed goes unpunished"

Tweet

"No good deed goes unpunished" - Oscar Wild He originally implied that beneficial actions often go unappreciated or are met with outright hostility. If they are appreciated, they often lead to additional requests. I have always thought this was a very cynical view. Until, I run into such a case recently. An older relative of mine has been struggling with her PC. Believe it or not, she was still using windows XP! The performance of her PC, needless to say, was slow as snails. In addition, it was heavily infected with a variety of spyware. As I was getting ready to upgrade to a new laptop, I thought it would be a nice gesture to give her my old laptop. It was a couple of years old, with a newly formatted hard drive and virtually trojan free. I swing by her place and promptly dropped off the laptop. I also helped her with setting up the new laptop just the way she liked. By the time I left, she could stream movies, use messaging systems, send emails, visit forums etc etc ! I left her place feeling quite happy. Until I receive a call from her, she was wondering why the new laptop takes forever to start. A bit of back 'n' forth later, I realised she'd set a lot of the programs to automatically sign in when the PC starts. No wonder it was taking forever to boot up! I did the best I could to troubleshoot remotely and wasn't able to make much progress. So I promised to drop by the next time I was in the country. Next thing I know, I got an angry call from my Ma. She wondered why I'd given a broken piece of junk to my elderly relative. Apparently, she called my Ma just to complain about me using her house as a junkyard. Needless to say, I was quite speechless at this turn of events! Oscar Wilde was right in this incidence, "no good deed goes unpunished!". Have you ever experienced something like this? Or know someone who had such experiences. Please do share your thoughts. p.s. This incident taught me, give generously but wisely! p.s.s. Erm.. what should I do with that laptop? Any idea anyone?