horrors of helping Friends/Relatives with computer shit

[ZMOT]

Unless your job is in IT you're better off playing dumb with tech.

I made the mistake of helping my inlaws with something once and I'm now the extended family tech guy.

Absolutely true. Help with something once and you are responsible for it forever. And they want you to do it all for free.

There seems to be a general lack of appreciation of this kind of work too. People don't want to pay or if so, pay peanuts.

I'm now mostly playing dumb or say that I don't have time.

best advice I ever got: never work for free. sounds like an asshole move at first, but even if it's just a pack of beer or a pizza it suddenly changes the whole thing. else they'll always think your time is worthless because it's free. and heck, sometimes it help because subconsciously people tend to think "I spend something on this it must have value".

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The worst is helping someone set up their wireless printer. I don't understand how in 2021 getting a printer on wifi with full functionality is still a pain in the ass. I couldn't even get my own printer to scan wirelessly 100% of the time (it would work for a couple of months, then stop recognizing my PC, yet wireless printing was working fine). I now have a USB printer cable that I use whenever I print or scan. The cable works 100% every single time.

It happened before my time or I would have pissed on that fire, but I worked at a place that at some point wanted to buy printers and it was a requirement that they must be able to print wirelessly! Being wireless was the deal breaker for purchasing a bunch of large format Xerox printers. Nobody, and I mean both buyer and seller, knew what they actually meant or wanted because they didn't have the nerd-language to explain or understand each other. So they ended up with a bunch of large format Xerox printers with expensive proprietary WiFi dongles, what they actually wanted was to be able to print from laptops.

 

[Stasi]

Recently helped my old man with some computer stuff. He got some legal documents sent to him in office formats (word, excel) and he couldn't make whatever edits he had to male.

"Son please help, I can't edit these files, why the hell do I need an office subscription now? Used to be you had all the office things installed with windows. I tried to pay for a subscription but still couldn't get it working and these google docs things are dog shit."

Needless to say I told him to cut that shit out and immediately installed libre office on every computer in the house. I was horrified that he couldn't figure out there were alternatives to office as he is pretty computer savvy and that he was willing to pay for this shit.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Here's a positive story. An older friend called me asking how to make their computer connect to the wi-fi. It somehow got disconnected. Told them to turn the computer off and on again. It worked.

 

[Dick Justice]

No real horror here, just blunt pain.
My mother has a laptop that wasn't cheap enough to justify just throwing it out of a window, but wasn't expensive enough to be actually usable when running W10.
She actually bought it with W10 pre-installed, but as it turned out a couple months later, it was originally a W7 machine with W10 updated on top of it. Off to a wonderful start here.
She had me back up "everything important" ("-What exactly, ma? -WELL I DON'T KNOW SON, EVERYTHING THAT LOOKS IMPORTANT!") then took it to a repair shop to wipe the drive clean and install everything fresh.

Now, with a clean W10 installed, it's still fucking slow and barely usable. Why? Because she doesn't use it frequently enough so the system needs to do everything exactly when I'm trying to fix something/help her with anything minor that doesn't need to be taken to a shop. Look for, download, and install updates, MS Defender, Windows Removal Tool, everything.
And she never shuts it down, just puts it to sleep "so it boots fast". I've offered to buy her an SSD but "-No, the repair shop guy said the laptop is a pain in the ass to disassemble and reassemble and I'd feel sorry for him if he had to."

Just install an idiot-proof linux distro on it. You'll lower the overhead by half or more and it's obvious that she won't know the difference.

 

[PuffyGroundCloud]

My ex-co-worker didn’t know Internet Explorer.
She said she used the “e” browser

 

[Return of the Freaker]

My ex-co-worker didn’t know Internet Explorer.
She said she used the “e” browser

Peak boomer hours

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

Just install an idiot-proof linux distro on it. You'll lower the overhead by half or more and it's obvious that she won't know the difference.

Thanks for the advice, but she uses some proprietary software for whatever reason.
In the end I got her extra RAM and an SSD and paid for having them installed.

 

[ZMOT]

Peak boomer hours

I can do you one better, I knew someone who opened "the internet" by clicking a specific icon at a specific place. when that was ever changed he was completely lost. dude was younger than I am now.
also remember one customer throwing a fit when he thought the shop I was working at had scammed him because it only showed 15 megabyte at startup (back then some bios' reserved 1 meg of ram, can't remember why, so if that wasn't disabled you were 1 megabyte short - but not in hardware).

Thanks for the advice, but she uses some proprietary software for whatever reason.
In the end I got her extra RAM and an SSD and paid for having them installed.

check if it runs under wine. it might be more trouble at first but in the long run it means less issues when they can't break it that easily (bonus points for keeping the root password or write it down somewhere so someone else can find it if needed).

linux for boomers is always a good advice. these days it's pretty idiot proof, usually comes with everything they'll ever need, still works fine even on old hardware (mostly), and if they complain about the different look just tell them it's an update.

Here's a positive story. An older friend called me asking how to make their computer connect to the wi-fi. It somehow got disconnected. Told them to turn the computer off and on again. It worked.

well, there's a reason that meme exists.

 

[Finder]

“Finder my computer is slow and has viruses can you fix it?”

“Sure but it’s old so it’s still going to be slow after, I can’t speed it up much”

Remove dozens of pieces of bloat ware, toolbars, and viruses.

“The computer is still slow when I use chrome, you didn’t do anything and stole my money”

Fucking computer was running XP on 512mb of ram, no shit I can’t make it faster.

First and last time I helped family.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

My parents are the fucking worst kind of people to help with anything IT related. The people at my past and present jobs are more understanding and literate than my parents. These are the kind of people that SHOULD write shit down, but they don't, and I'm not talking about passwords either. I'll get called for the same issues over and over and over again regarding the same over and over again issue they had over and over and over...

Not only that, but they are PARANOiD as fuck. They always assume that I'm going to delete important shit if I touch their computers. It's like they come to me because they know I know wtf I'm doing with computers but at the same time they don't trust me.

 

[Enig]

My mom was fucking dumb enough to fall for one of those Indian scammers where they nuke the NT kernel's central keys to keep the OS from booting, that resulted in me having to reinstall 7 on a beat up business class Lenovo from 2008 while resisting the urge to tell her to go get checked into a fucking loony bin for thinking a pajeet number and voice meant it was actual Microsoft tech support.

 

[Ted Kaczynski]

I had to help my mom set up her Etsy page. Worst experience of my life.
I can't believe she didn't let me sell my hentai on there.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I got paid in drinks by an acquaintance to help her set up her expensive MacBook Pro or whatever it was before going to school abroad for design. At a cafe/bar, as is the custom with fancy MacBooks. First question: How do you install windows?

 

[Ted Kaczynski]

I got paid in drinks by an acquaintance to help her set up her expensive MacBook Pro or whatever it was before going to school abroad for design. At a cafe/bar, as is the custom with fancy MacBooks. First question: How do you install windows?

Make her pay with vagina instead

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Make her pay with vagina instead

She got really defensive when I joked about Twilight.

 

[Cheerlead-in-Chief]

For my mom's fiancé looking for a job, we tried (and failed) in trimming his resume to a page for 4 hours and he had to resort to his sister-in-law to do so.
One evening, I was called multiple times to work in Excel for him as he's not that knowledgeable on computers. Oh, and the job required him to speed up his typing which he didn't bother to attempt despite free typing games online. Obviously he didn't get the job.
Edit: removed quotation marks

 

[seri0us]

"typing games"

Why is this in quotes?

 

[Cheerlead-in-Chief]

Why is this in quotes?

Sorry about that.
I mentioned it in passing to him and my mom called him multiple times about it. He can only type with one finger

 

[Dick Justice]

Here, for anyone that needs to deflect stupid people

"Bastard Operator From Hell"-Style Excuses

Use this mighty power judiciously.