during my short stint at a PC repair place the owner changed policies from "attempt to remove viruses" to "reformat/reinstall if more than 5 viruses reported".

during my short stint at a PC repair place the owner changed policies from "attempt to remove viruses" to "reformat/reinstall if more than 5 viruses reported". Shortly after, a customer came in with an urgent need to get their PC fixed, it had more than 5 viruses (maybe 20? who knows). I didn't reimage, because in SATA HDD days that would take quite a while. I booted the antivirus/repair CDROM that me and a coworker made, removed the viruses, rebooted into windows and let it do a scan too. The job was to remove the viruses, not find the underlying cause. Boss was out of the office thursday and friday, so we just did what the customer asked. well this customer, who begged us to get this done, had some website or plugin or lord knows what that reinfected them, and they brought it back the following Monday and complained. I got fired for not following policy. Nevermind that reimaging wouldn't have fixed the stupid of this customer, they still would have brought it in on monday, but "we reformatted the drive" would have sufficed as "we did the work, you messed it up, pay us again." ETA: we had a whiteboard with a "record virus count" and it was between 30 and 40 thousand infected files found when i left. I can understand reimaging with 30,000 infected files (at the time a default windows install was only about twice that number of files if memory serves, win11 has 134K files in c:\windows), but 20?