[oniMaker]

"Mere" is a bit much. You're not an immortal superhero.

To answer your question: a non-technologist pays someone like you to fix it. Much like the way most people bring their cars to mechanics instead of spending hundreds of hours learning to fix the vehicles personally. This type of specialization is prerequisite to the large civilizations in which we live.

[cjensen]

In this case fixing the issue required knowledge of how certs work in order to guess that there is a date issue. That's probably pretty rare at fix-your-computer shops.

It's pure luck that I'd seen this type of issue before because I'm one of those mere civilians: my Windows machine at work loses BIOS settings on power down. I've seen that until the date is restored, DropBox and several other things don't work.