horrors of helping Friends/Relatives with computer shit -

[Pee Cola]

My wife works in IT support, yet I end up being the one that has to fix her laptop when it fucks up. Thankfully it's only about once a year, and even then it's usually just some malware she somehow managed to pick up despite adblockers, a good quality paid antivirus (ESET) and so on. I think I might be a cuck.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

My wife works in IT support, yet I end up being the one that has to fix her laptop when it fucks up. Thankfully it's only about once a year, and even then it's usually just some malware she somehow managed to pick up despite adblockers, a good quality paid antivirus (ESET) and so on. I think I might be a cuck.

The cobbler's kids always go barefoot, etc.

 

[Cool Dog]

It fucking sucks, theres no respect for this line of work despite how dependent everyone is on computers now

Compare this to car mechanics, nobody gives them shit, refuses to pay them or bitch about the price. And yet whats the worse that can happen? that your car breaks down and you have to walk? nigger if your pc/phone goes tits up you're fucked,

Anyway, I'm done doing favors and just tell people I dont know how to fix windows/macs because loonix user, they insist but eventually give up. None want to pay anyway. As for my parents I dont even bother teaching them shit just tell them to click on the remote access and do that shit myself

She was hyper religious. She even wanted to have her birthday money her son sent her tithed.
I have no problem believing that this women had gone though 3 marriages. All divorces.

Buh-but /pol/ told me to marry a church girl! that they were based and would never take half your shit!

On a serious note you should've charged by the hour, and why was that pothead still employed?

Nearly 15 GB of tranny, pegging, and general humiliation fetish porn. This kid was like 14 and looked as normal as ever.

A literal coomer, should've blackmailed him with that

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?

Man, apple users are the biggest cheapskates ever, they buy an overpriced macbook that only has 2 fucking USB ports and then get the cheapest hub in the market and it blows a fuse and burns their shitty computer they only use to browse shit at the local cafe

 

[Falcos_Commisar]

I have too many stories. My experiences as a technician have taught me to hate senior citizens, have no patients for normies, and have a low view of the retards that don't stop being technicians after learning what's is like to be one.

Story one.
Client old man age 79.
Needs help. Basically I work the computer for him because his wife divorced him and now lives in New Mexico with her simp while old man struggles to pay sales tax. I get to the house and let old man talk because he's lonely. I let him spend about 1 hour of chinwagging before we actually get to the computer. The computer thing is easy. All you do is read websites and fill in the balk. (like knowing how to hit next on installers) After the computer stuff It's time to pay and old man wants met to take a bunch of broken electronics with me that don't work and are all a mess in a box. I agree to take the box of junk. I did a number of things on the computer for old man and I'm always really flexible about the time he wants to spend talking. I say it's 150 for the session. Old man doesn't like this. Says he gave me good stuff so the price should be lower. I revise the price to 100. Old man accepts reluctantly.

I really hate old people. I'm not going to try to shift or really do anything with the box of junk that you think is so valuable that you are going to give it away or put it in the trash. I can get better garbage tracing streets in the spring for people cleaned out junk, if interested, I don't need your crap. If in this case old man has hired GeekSquad or some other outfit they would have him on the clock for 3 hours and add fees for driving out to his house. It would be an easy 250 or so and there would be a nice shiny bill to go with that amount. You probably think I'm pretending to be nicer then I am, but 150 is a steal when I'll even take your garbage out to the curb without a second thought.

Story two.
Old women age 74.
Religious Nut who hands out terrorist propaganda and openly bad mouths the people she doesn't like in her building right to their faces. Then she has the audacity to say, "I can't believe [the gays I keep saying are going to burn in hell] didn't invite me to their christmas party". Old woman has a gmail account and is afraid of being spied on by the government. My thoughts are you can't have your email spied on if you don't have en email account. Of course, I don't tell her this. The last time I ever agreed to do work for this women was when she was having problem sending a video to her friend with gmail on the ipad. The video won't send because it's too big a file to attach to the email. (yes I know about google drive but that's not in this story) I explain that it is nothing wrong with her gmail and that it's just the file is too big to send. For five minutes strait she starts sulking in this not-crying but same sounding voice as crying about how she'd done this before and that she can't believe this is happening to her and that she prays all the time and that she always used to be able to do just this... (all manner of hysterics) To the question of why this is happening, taking her at her word that she has done this before (I wasn't there how should I know), that it must have been google who lower the size limit for file uploads in email. Still in hysterics, eventually she starts to be calm enough to ask me to fix it for her. I cut the video so isn't shorter and it uploads fine and sends. While I'm cutting he video her building's fire alarm miss fires and a loud siren echos though her whole building. Why did you have me com to you building, we could be at a coffeehouse or something, if you knew your building was malfunctioning. I mentioned the siren. Hardly phased, she explains that's it's been a chronic problem for the past month. I don't remember how much I charged her, but she couldn't afford service even if it were free.

This woman I had been doing work for a few times by then and I had gotten to know more then I wanted to know about her. Her kids and grand kinds never visited because she would be cranky and judgemental when they would come which scared them away. She was hyper religious. She even wanted to have her birthday money her son sent her tithed. (I know it's usually the other way around, right?) Her son had sent her 2 computers and an ipad. The first computer was wrong because windows didn't look exactly like on her last computer which was form 1995. I don't know what was wrong with ipad, she probably didn't like it because it didn't have real keyboard. From the moment I had met her she would insist that she was writer, while never writing anything and only ranting about trade publications that ruled her choice is hardware and software. She said she didn't like the ribbon gui in ms word, so I installed libreoffice as an alternative option. She never tired it. Instead, listing a bunch of things she and her forums (forums that she didn't comment on or belong to) said made libreoffice unacceptable. Once she showed me an excerpt she had gotten published in the local news paper, but to her she was a journalist with a hot career. I can always understand the technical ignorance people have with computers. That was not this woman's problem, she was just an awful person. It quickly became apparent it was a waste of time helping her. I have no problem believing that this women had gone though 3 marriages. All divorces. At one point the question of weather or not I tell lies came up, probably because of her religious obsession. Of course I tell lies. Who doesn't? It would be dishonest of me not to say I sometimes lie. She got really worked out of shape about this like a small child being obstinate and withholding when they get caught up with needing to get their own way. It's like she was the grandmother strait out of A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor: ignorant and obsessed with adherence to superficial orthodoxy.

I think the worst part, like with most of these stories, is the fact that they have no money or don't want to part with any of what they don't have. Computers are not food or water. Yes they make things easier, but the are not as essential as food and housing. Much of what you can do over a computer you can do slower by phone, so if you can't use computers you're not entirely disabled either. Back when I was a technician, I would charge different rates to clients on fixed government subsidize incomes. This women couldn't even pay 10 dollars so that she could have someone to berate.

Story three.
Man age 66. Partial disability.
The village pot head.
This guy had gotten kicked out of his wife's house and was living at his office because of pot addiction. Pot head was very nice, but useless and poor. He couldn't pay his debts and his line of work didn't support him. He had me prepare documents on the computer for him a number of times. If he were high he wouldn't pay. Not "I'll get you next time", he just wouldn't pay. He'd forget while he was high and it would be impossible to get him to focused enough to pay me. He never wanted to pay either, so maybe the pot let his subconscious desire to not pay fully manifest, or something. You're probably thinking he sounds like a laugh and a half. I never thought so. He really didn't live well, he was homeless for years living out of his office that didn't have a shower or really any enmities. He was difficult to work for because he would be too high to give feedback on the work. Completely ignorant of computers. Never cared what I did anyway. Really slap dash and unprofessional. I eventually stopped answering his calls. Real nice guy when you did need anything from him, but I think most people felt like he was just in the way. His office was dusty from all the cigarettes and pot he would smoke. It was messy and gross. He was on my lower rates because he was poor, even on food stamps, but he still wouldn't pay me for anything that I would do for him. It wasn't just simple typing either. He would have me do graphic design work which would normally take hours and could cost 100s of dollars all for chicken shit he would pay. Nice guy, but you can't pay me in food stamps.


Seniors in America
It's no surprise to me that the USA is a fucking trash heap given my experiences with it's greatest resource. (I know I'm being hyperbolic.) No wonder we're all facing troon-agedden when old people don't have their shit together after a life time of chances to do so. The problems I see in the US have existed for 3 generations. The generation of my grandparents, my parents, and my peers are all this way. There really is no recovery from this state of affairs at least none that I can see. If you want to waste your life trying to find one, be my guest, but I've got a life to live.

A lot of these people I used to do work for were old and poor. In the USA Social Security is one of the biggest draws on the non-discretionary budget. In my estimation what everone of these retards needed was a social worker not a computer technician. Some one to slap them upside the head and make clear that what they had been playing at their entire life had put them here and nothing else; it's their own damn fault. There is not a enough sympathy and kindness in the world to help adult babies who act like teenagers, and there never will be.

3rd example is why I hate potheads.

First 2 are just ignorant old fuckheads that I'm sorry anyone has to deal with. The woman.... I'd never return after she refused to pay.

 

[Puff]

It fucking sucks, theres no respect for this line of work despite how dependent everyone is on computers now

Compare this to car mechanics, nobody gives them shit, refuses to pay them or bitch about the price. And yet whats the worse that can happen? that your car breaks down and you have to walk? nigger if your pc/phone goes tits up you're fucked,

Anyway, I'm done doing favors and just tell people I dont know how to fix windows/macs because loonix user, they insist but eventually give up. None want to pay anyway. As for my parents I dont even bother teaching them shit just tell them to click on the remote access and do that shit myself

Buh-but /pol/ told me church girls were based and would never take half your shit!

On a serious note you should've charged by the hour, and why was that pothead still employed?

A literal coomer, should've blackmailed him with that

Man, apple users are the biggest cheapskates ever

Lies. Anyone who knows about cars (or knew how to work on them when they were simpler) thinks they are being scammed every time they get work done.
In a small town everyone thinks the mechanic is a crook.

 

[serious n00b]

In a small town everyone thinks the mechanic is a crook.

 

[Cool Dog]

Lies. Anyone who knows about cars (or knew how to work on them when they were simpler) thinks they are being scammed every time they get work done.
In a small town everyone thinks the mechanic is a crook.

But they shut up and pay up, see the difference?

 

[Cuntflaps]

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".

The downside is they sometimes think that having paid for one thing at one time entitles them to free work later on down the line. It's sometimes inconceivable to people that the issue you fixed 6-12 months ago is totally unrelated to the issue they're currently having, which they caused by doing something completely separate. If someone helps get a persons printer up and running and 6 months later that persons browser breaks because they downloaded something stupid, that is not the tech's fault. But that doesn't seem to stop people from trying to blame techs and get free work out of it.

 

[ZMOT]

The downside is they sometimes think that having paid for one thing at one time entitles them to free work later on down the line. It's sometimes inconceivable to people that the issue you fixed 6-12 months ago is totally unrelated to the issue they're currently having, which they caused by doing something completely separate. If someone helps get a persons printer up and running and 6 months later that persons browser breaks because they downloaded something stupid, that is not the tech's fault. But that doesn't seem to stop people from trying to blame techs and get free work out of it.

that's the same for free tho, either "hey, can you help me again" or "you changed something it's your fault". in the first case you at least got something out of it once, in the second you have to explain it to them anyway.
knew a guy who was the prime example for number 2, he could make up the most baffling arguments in his head and it's hard to argue against "I didn't change anything, so it must've been you" (one case was showing him how to drag a shortcut onto the desktop after he complained having to re-install everything, cue a follow-up call "there's an error I've never seen before, and all those files on my desktop what did you do? you hacked me!". no remote so I had to check it out in person, turns out dude didn't drag&drop a shortcut as I've just shown him and explained it, but the the executable itself, which then of course complained about missing files while creating configs and logs).

TLDR: when you get blamed anyway might as well get paid for it.

 

[Shroom King]

Lies. Anyone who knows about cars (or knew how to work on them when they were simpler) thinks they are being scammed every time they get work done.
In a small town everyone thinks the mechanic is a crook.

You might know how to change a transmission in your car, but do you really want to? I didn't think so. Pay someone else to bust their knuckles trying to loosen bolts that have been rusted solid since Obama was in office.

 

[419]

In a friend group I'm in on Discord (unfortunately) a guy was trying to save a GIF on his phone, but since it was off Tenor it did the usual shit of falling back to one of those looping MP4s and saving directly from Discord as a blank file simply called 'mp4' with no extension because Tenor is made for stupid niggers by stupid niggers. Thing is, however, he was on an Android, so absolutely nothing stopped him from just renaming it to something with an actual .mp4 extension so he could repost it and embed it properly.

As soon as I suggested that it was possible to rename files on a phone I was met with about 5 different people screeching like apes about "WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT THAT'S SO LONG YOU'RE A FUCKING NERD".

 

[Spunt]

Sorry if this is a bit vague, I'll have to cut a LOT out of it to avoid PL'ing, but I used to have a side hustle writing instructional articles for a website. One of them was a sort of "how do you use this piece of equipment to achieve this thing?" type of tutorial, a really basic instructional piece to get someone started using a particular piece of PC hardware. It went down well in general, but then the emails started arriving. Apparently because I had written an article about how to use this thing, I had not only endorsed it as the best piece of hardware in its class (it wasn't, it was a cheap piece of hardware that was within the budget of most of the site's userbase), I had officially endorsed it AND I had effectively somehow sold it to them. (I had no affiliation with the manufacturers and there were many other models that did the same thing, both of which I explained in the article itself to no avail). That meant that when they couldn't get it working or had some sort of problem following my instructions, I OWED them tech support, or in the case of one particularly unhinged email, a refund.

Of course, 90% of the time it was clear that these people were just lazy or stupid. People who plugged the thing in without installing the drivers first, as the thing's instructions told you to do in massive bold capital letters on the first page of the manual. People who bought it for their Macs despite it being very clear anywhere it was for sale that this thing only worked on PC. That sort of thing.

I made the stupid mistake of actually helping one of these people. That person then turned up on the site's forums saying "hey, if anyone has a problem getting [device] working, Spunt will help you out for free" and the emails became a flood, and these people were ENRAGED that I wasn't acting as their personal tech support/warranty for this thing they didn't buy from me. I had to put a really fierce-sounding disclaimer at the end of my next article saying that no, if you have a problem getting the thing working, ask on the forums or contact the manufacturer or retailer. This pissed off the userbase even more, one of them emailing me to say "you scam people into buying this piece of shit then wash your hands of it".

I stopped writing how-to articles for that site and changed my name and contact details for what I did write after that. Lesson learned.

EDIT: a family story:

Despite the fact that both my cousin and my uncle are both full-time professional computer touchers with way more qualifications and experience than me, I'm usually the one who gets the call when one of my parents' computers had a problem. I didn't mind so much, they're Boomers but they're not stupid, and besides, I think of my time spent helping them as investments towards an inheritance. But one day my mum went a bit far.

My mum followed some weird religion and the head of her church was this ancient old woman who was terrified of computers and preferred manual typewriters. So my mum (who was an audio typist) helped her out by typing up her sermons and stuff. I had long left home by then, and it's important to know that I never met, spoke to, or interacted with this old lady in any way.

One day someone sent this old woman an email attachment so big it crashed her modem drivers every time she tried to get to her email (she was still on dialup, this was about 2004/5 iirc so it was getting rare by then). My mum phoned me to ask for advice. I said that if her ISP offered a webmail service she could delete the offending email without having to download whatever the attachment was.

"What's an ISP?"
"What's a webmail?"

Sigh. Long conversation (1 hour+) later I explain what these are. I even find out what her ISP is and how to get their webmail set up - the old lady has to call her ISP up and ask them to do it their end. This ISP was notorious for their multiple-hour hold times and bad tech support, but it was the only way forward. My mum had a plan though.

"Could you call [ISP] for her and get it set up? I don't think she'd understand what a webmail is."
"What?"
"Could you call them on her behalf and ask them to set it up, I don't know what a webmail is and she's even older than me."
"I just spent an hour explaining to you exactly what webmail is. Besides, I'm pretty sure they only let the account holders mess with people's account settings."
"Well just say you're her."
"What?"
"Just call them up, I'll ask her for all her passwords and things, and you can get her webmail set up."
"Let me get this right. You want me to phone up [ISP], stay on hold for hours, then somehow imitate a woman in her 80's who I don't know, haven't ever met or spoken to, and certainly don't owe a favour, in order to solve a problem I have nothing to do with?"
"Yes."
"No!"
"Why are you so selfish?"


A week later it emerged old lady was able to call her ISP and solve the problem on her own. Whilst it may have been fun to call up one of the worst ISPs in the country and pretend to be a doddering old lady, the 3-hour hold time would have crimped the mirth somewhat.