The Family’s Computer Tech Support Person
Posted by Cap in Miscellaneous on March 31, 2006 |Is probably you.
Your cousin, uncle, sister’s friend, mom’s coworker, next door neighbors—they all come to you with their computer problems.
I’m making an assumption here, but I have a feeling a lot of us here are the family’s computer tech support, or we have that one geek in our family that we bug constantly about computers.
It’s not so bad really. I use to get all annoy about it, till I grew up and became less of a punk.
Top 5 Reasons on “Why It’s Not So Bad to Be The Family’s Tech Support:”
- You get to scare your grandma. “Oh my! Look at all these porno!”
- You get to look at some new adult materials you haven’t come across yet.
- You get to act smarter than you are by doing simple things such as “defragging” their computer.
- You get to piss your family off by acting like you’re smarter.
- You get to save them money, so they don’t have to pay some jerk from Best Buy $300 to get rid of their spyware.
5 Responses to “The Family’s Computer Tech Support Person”
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March 31st, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Just be careful who you tell especially if you are charging a small fee! Conflict of interest for individuals, like myself, who work at major computer electronic stores (Circuit City) could result in your termination!
April 1st, 2006 at 7:30 am
hmm, didn’t think circuit city would get on your butt just because you’re doing a similar job on the side, but I guess that makes sense.
April 1st, 2006 at 8:29 am
I’m the computer tech in my house and sometimes for people outside my family.
Dave
April 8th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Ah, a chance to vent! I have one relative whose requests for tech support became more and more frequent over the past few years after I set up 3 PCs for her and answered numerous calls and emails to walk her through setting up applications, etc., and I drove to her home to troubleshoot issues caused by her grandkids screwing up her PC by installing games. Two situations took place really burned me, not sure which one takes the cake:
1) Relative calls and says email won’t work. I note that her grandson is often on her computer, please re-enter password. She says she already tried that and insists I come to her house (10 miles away) to look at it. I ask her to please enter her password one last time before I drive up there and she insists that she’s done so a few times already and refuses to try again. She’s my mom’s age and a good friend so I cave and make the drive to her house. I enter the password into the email client. It connects. She informs me a day later that her daughter had been trying to use her email client while visiting, and daughter didn’t understand that using mom’s email wasn’t “just like the email at the library”.
2) Relative emails me saying, “my granddaughter’s boyfriend has moved out and her PC is all messed up and is truly unusable. *If you don’t have time, it’s o.k.* but if you do have time please call her and set up a time to fix it. Otherwise, no need to call her.” I don’t have time, and I have no intention of doing an OS install after ex-boyfriend has obliterated the machine. The next day, I get a voice mail with roughly the same message, which includes the phrase, *it is your choice, if you can’t help it’s o.k. and just disregard this message*. I delete this voice mail. Following day I get another email asking why I haven’t contacted granddaughter (guess doing so wasn’t really my choice), and oh, by the way - she’s only available from 12-2 each day so I’ll have to go to her apartment during this time frame. This apartment is a 25 minute drive one way. I politely inform relative that I have to set a boundary here and I cannot extend tech support to granddaughter because I work and have a family to care for and I do not have the time to troubleshoot and/or reinstall OS’s. I give relative options for daughter to get PC fixed, such as contacting tech college granddaughter just graduated from. At that point, I wasn’t even willing to entertain having granddaughter drop the machine off at my house for a look-see. Husband warns me not to entertain the thought either (and these are his blood relatives).
I just recalled that one of relative’s daughters dropped off a PC at our house some years back while I did some trouble shooting and then my husband reinstalled the OS and messed with some hardware to get it work. I have done so much tech support for that family that I’ve forgotten some of it.
Shelley
April 8th, 2006 at 7:21 am
Oh boy, those are definitely reasons to NOT be the family’s tech support person. I’m glad you draw the line. One of the reason why I’m okay with helping out now, is because my family won’t push for help if I can’t extend it. On the other hand, one of the reason why I’ll never get into the field of computer tech support, is because of my family and friends.
In a long forgotten crappy scenario, I was my high school’s semi-computer tech support (the comp science teacher got a job at Boeing and bailed). Left a bunch of computer labs w/o a tech, which fell right into me and some other nerd’s lap.
Just because we can install OS & fix some comp problems, doesn’t mean we enjoy doing it!