So I must be getting old. A few months ago I bought a new pc and it came with Norton AntiVirus pre-installed. Not only did I leave it running, but I just decided to renew it since the free 3 month trial was up in March. The old me would’ve snorted at NAV and continued to live life on the edge…taking the ‘eyes and ears open to signs of trouble’ approach to fighting virii, rather than put up a sturdy (I hope) fence.

But now I’m old and tired, and the the $30 for a year’s protection sounded a lot more appealing than a weekend spent rebuilding my system because I slipped up and let one of the little varmints on to my system. (I should note that my PC is a gaming machine…I do my ‘real work’ on a Mac and I’m not so cavalier with that machine.)

All of which is totally tangential to the point I wanted to make. So I’m filling out the web based form to get my $29.95 yearly renewal to NAV, right? And I get to the screen where I enter my credit card and I noticed something. They give you the option to call up and give someone (presumably a warm body, but maybe a voice mail system) your credit card info over the phone, but they add a processing fee. I thought that was kind of odd…I mean isn’t customer support part of the cost of doing business? But what staggered me was when curiosity caused me to click on the link. The processing fee was $10!!! A $10 processing fee on a $30 item, just because you’re uncomfortable entering your credit card number into a web site…damn, that’s harsh. $2-$3 I guess I could understand, but $10 seemed really steep to me.

But then, I never call anyone if I can possible avoid it, so now I’m wondering if this is a common practice, or is Symantec just being brutal?