Family tech support

I don't know anyone who works in IT and enjoys being the designated tech support for their family. Worse yet, it seems that they ALL own a computer. My aunts, uncles, and even my grandparents have pc's. Tomorrow I get to drive for an hour to my grandparents house so I can help setup their new Dell. I really don't mind doing it, but since I will be a person that laid eyes on the new computer and touched it, apparently that means that I am the person to call for any and all abnormalities. Lucky me. I'm OK with helping someone to install something and get it working, but I HATE being called if it decides to stop working. Don't call me. Call tech support. That is what they are paid to do.
Published 07 January 2005 08:43 AM by eking1013
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Comments

# Kyle said on 07 January, 2005 09:43 AM
That's a hard one, because on one hand, you want to help out family. On the other hand, you normally would get paid for the tech support. I've finally convinced my family that I'm not that great of a tech support person. Now, if I could only convince my wife's family of the same. They live 900 miles away. "Really. It's not that easy for me to do this over the phone. It'll be a lot easier (and quicker) if you call someone in your time zone."
# Benjimawoo said on 07 January, 2005 10:47 AM
It's not too bad, I find, if you're there from the start. The bad ones are when you go round to visit and they say 'Hey, my computer's running slow. Can you have a look at it?'

Only then do you find a machine loaded with every bit of adware under the sun, AOL, a whole bunch of defunct demo utilities that 'came with my scanner, so I thought I needed them' and a whole bunch of other stuff.

If I was nice, I would have given my dad a stern lecture on internet security, how adware/spyware works and the dangers of installing software without knowing what it is.

As it was, I didn't have ime for lecturing, so I just installed Ad-Aware and told him to run it now and again, get his machine patched with all the updates and get more memory (which he needed anyway). Maybe I'll lecture him next time...
# Alex Papadimoulis said on 07 January, 2005 11:44 AM
Here's an easy fix, Eric:

"I work in Mainframes."
# Wim said on 07 January, 2005 11:49 AM
They might be reading your blog entry at this very moment. ;)
# Wim said on 07 January, 2005 11:49 AM
They might be reading your blog entry at this very moment. ;)
# Eric King said on 07 January, 2005 12:53 PM
They very well might, but I don't think many of them have found their way to the blogosphere yet.

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