I usually get flamed for this, but I just do NOT do family tech support any more. The appreciation doesn't always exist for the work put in, the expectations are as high as any job I've had, and it just...never...stops... I've been through the worst of it, not having a free weekend with my friends for weeks at a time, having weeknights with my partner disturbed constantly, and feeling like I'm moving from 9 to 5 work just to come 'home' and face more of the same.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Saturday November 20, 2004 @08:27AM (#10873953)
From a newsgroup I read:-
I stopped doing that stuff years ago. It just ain't worth the hassle.
Typical genuine scenarios that have contributed to my attitude...
- As you've mentioned, folks whining for help before even attempting to solve their own problem
- When they stop offering any kind of token reward or payment (some never offer anything in the first place), regardless of whether you normally accept such gifts. It's not so bad if it's a two minute job, but some of these morons are so convinced of your passion for IT problem-solving that they think it's perfectly reasonable for you to spend half a day in their spare room without so much as a cup of tea and a biscuit
- When they start recommending you to their friends and handing out your number
- When they start with "my neighbour's brother is having trouble..."
- When the "problem" is clearly a veiled request for you to obtain a pirated copy of AutoCAD for them
- "My graphics card has gone faulty. You must have done something to it when you upgraded my hard drive in March" (i.e. they want you to buy and fit them a new card, cos it's your fault that it's busted)
- Asking for advice and then ignoring it ("don't buy it at Dixons", "You'll need more memory than that", "D-Link sucks", "Ethernet is better than USB for networking", "You should really have some Antivirus", etc.)
- "Selective memory" when, after ignoring your advice, they experience an expensive problem
- When they call you at 21:30 on Christmas Eve with a computer problem
- They decide to save money by building their own system, except that they want you to spec it up, price it up, order the bits (they'll pay you back once it's working), take delivery of the bits and, of course, build it
- You get into the office and find that some ancient filthy hulk of a home PC has been deposited on your desk chair - with a note vaguely describing a problem, specifying the day that it needs to be fixed by, and warning you against losing any of their (unspecified) data. Lots of exclamation marks, and a smiley face at the bottom
- When they happen to be a millionaire but they won't upgrade their Amstrad 1640 and dot matrix printer
- They start forwarding every hoax virus warning to you, merely adding a "?" to the top
- They want you to arrange for them to no longer receive any spam
- They show up unannounced at the front door brandishing a laptop that they found at some car boot sale or something. They invite themselves in and won't leave until you take a look at it. It almost seems to be your fault when it turns out to be missing some vital part - you know, like the charger or the battery. They get mad at *you* when you tell them how much the replacement part is likely to cost for their lovely "new" £10 laptop
- They haven't got a CD burner, but they know that you have
- They *have* got a burner, but can't be arsed to learn how to work Nero
- They have access to at least a dozen spotty little geeks who are capable of hooking their new Deskjet up, but they still come to you
- They have a novel requirement - say ripping-off audio tapes to CD and scanning, resizing and printing the case inserts. You know that if you listen to them, it'll suddenly be up to you to do all the research on the hardware required, pirate the software, make it all work, write step-by-step instructions, and be available on the phone the first ten times they try to do it
- Describing an apparently easy-to-fix problem in order to get you to visit, then revealing the true, massive, extent of the task once you're onsite
hey! D-Link doesn't suck! They are far from flawless, but their NICs and some of their broadband routers ain't half bad.
And you forgot to mention situations where you build someone a new PC at their request, get everything installed and loaded, and because the start menu looks a little bit different they flip out and demand that you put Win98 back on their machine, despite the fact that half the hardware isn't supported by Win98 because they wanted the latest and greatest.
Or the times when someone sees
If anyone likes IE better than firefox, then it wasn't installed right with a minimum of the adblock and tabbed browsing preferences extensions. Add in the UA selector and view in IE and you are set.
As for D-link, I had a bad experience with them about 10 years ago. Like Gateway and Lexmark, they are on my permenant Do Not Buy Ever list due to horrible support and crappy product. When people ask what they should get, I give lists of what I know is good and well supported, and a list of brands to avoid. A N
If anyone likes IE better than firefox, then it wasn't installed right with a minimum of the adblock and tabbed browsing preferences extensions. Add in the UA selector and view in IE and you are set.
wow, thats a hellavua generalization. Some people like one browser over another simply because they like the logo better, or because it was the browser they used first. In the case of my sister she was just used to IE, and never even tried out firefox. She was upset that I changed something she was used to...
Relatives? Friends? Actually, you are describing all of our former clients!
The profile is even worse, in that: If they fit your description, you can also expect their account will end up in collections. Fortunately that ends the "relationship".
Jesus, my eyes were getting wider and wider with every new sentence. I am not in tech support, I code for living and since my family is small here (my parents, my brother and I immigrated 12 years ago to Canadea) and my brother is a programmer too, and my mother actually can code in assembler and C++ I just never had these kinds of requests from relatives. A few requests here and there from some acquiantences, but nothing at all compared to your extreme case.
The comment about not wanting spam is what really got me. I had someone complain that they were getting 100 spams/week. I pointed out they only received 75 emails that week, and 30 of them were auto-filtered. So no, they didn't. They didn't really believe me, though, and asked me to fix the problem.
Of course, that's not nearly as bad as when I caught myself skimming over their caught-spam folder to check for false positives, because they couldn't be bothered to learn
"folks whining for help before even attempting to solve their own problem"
In my experience, the more they try to solve the problem on their own before calling me, the worse they make it and the more work I end up having to do to fix it.
My philosophy is this: either try to figure it out yourself, or call me. Do not do both.
"For the love of phlegm...a stupid wall of death rays. How tacky can ya get?"
- Post Brothers comics
I usually get flamed for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it comes from having a really large ex
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:5, Interesting)
I stopped doing that stuff years ago. It just ain't worth the hassle.
Typical genuine scenarios that have contributed to my attitude...
- As you've mentioned, folks whining for help before even attempting to solve their own problem
- When they stop offering any kind of token reward or payment (some never offer anything in the first place), regardless of whether you normally accept such gifts. It's not so bad if it's a two minute job, but some of these morons are so convinced of your passion for IT
problem-solving that they think it's perfectly reasonable for you to spend half a day in their spare room without so much as a cup of tea and
a biscuit
- When they start recommending you to their friends and handing out your number
- When they start with "my neighbour's brother is having trouble..."
- When the "problem" is clearly a veiled request for you to obtain a pirated copy of AutoCAD for them
- "My graphics card has gone faulty. You must have done something to it when you upgraded my hard drive in March" (i.e. they want you to buy and fit them a new card, cos it's your fault that it's busted)
- Asking for advice and then ignoring it ("don't buy it at Dixons", "You'll need more memory than that", "D-Link sucks", "Ethernet is better
than USB for networking", "You should really have some Antivirus", etc.)
- "Selective memory" when, after ignoring your advice, they experience an expensive problem
- When they call you at 21:30 on Christmas Eve with a computer problem
- They decide to save money by building their own system, except that they want you to spec it up, price it up, order the bits (they'll pay you back once it's working), take delivery of the bits and, of course, build it
- You get into the office and find that some ancient filthy hulk of a home PC has been deposited on your desk chair - with a note vaguely
describing a problem, specifying the day that it needs to be fixed by, and warning you against losing any of their (unspecified) data. Lots of
exclamation marks, and a smiley face at the bottom
- When they happen to be a millionaire but they won't upgrade their Amstrad 1640 and dot matrix printer
- They start forwarding every hoax virus warning to you, merely adding a "?" to the top
- They want you to arrange for them to no longer receive any spam
- They show up unannounced at the front door brandishing a laptop that they found at some car boot sale or something. They invite themselves in
and won't leave until you take a look at it. It almost seems to be your fault when it turns out to be missing some vital part - you know, like
the charger or the battery. They get mad at *you* when you tell them how much the replacement part is likely to cost for their lovely "new" £10
laptop
- They haven't got a CD burner, but they know that you have
- They *have* got a burner, but can't be arsed to learn how to work Nero
- They have access to at least a dozen spotty little geeks who are capable of hooking their new Deskjet up, but they still come to you
- They have a novel requirement - say ripping-off audio tapes to CD and scanning, resizing and printing the case inserts. You know that if you
listen to them, it'll suddenly be up to you to do all the research on the hardware required, pirate the software, make it all work, write step-by-step instructions, and be available on the phone the first ten times they try to do it
- Describing an apparently easy-to-fix problem in order to get you to visit, then revealing the true, massive, extent of the task once you're
onsite
Yep. That's why I don't do that sh*t any longer
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:1)
hey! D-Link doesn't suck! They are far from flawless, but their NICs and some of their broadband routers ain't half bad.
And you forgot to mention situations where you build someone a new PC at their request, get everything installed and loaded, and because the start menu looks a little bit different they flip out and demand that you put Win98 back on their machine, despite the fact that half the hardware isn't supported by Win98 because they wanted the latest and greatest. Or the times when someone sees
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:2)
As for D-link, I had a bad experience with them about 10 years ago. Like Gateway and Lexmark, they are on my permenant Do Not Buy Ever list due to horrible support and crappy product. When people ask what they should get, I give lists of what I know is good and well supported, and a list of brands to avoid. A N
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:2)
(They haven't.)
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:1)
Sounds all too familiar (Score:2)
The profile is even worse, in that: If they fit your description, you can also expect their account will end up in collections. Fortunately that ends the "relationship".
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:2)
What the fuck, don't people realize what they
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:1)
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:2)
The comment about not wanting spam is what really got me. I had someone complain that they were getting 100 spams/week. I pointed out they only received 75 emails that week, and 30 of them were auto-filtered. So no, they didn't. They didn't really believe me, though, and asked me to fix the problem.
Of course, that's not nearly as bad as when I caught myself skimming over their caught-spam folder to check for false positives, because they couldn't be bothered to learn
I'm sorry (Score:2)
Re:I usually get flamed for this (Score:1)
"folks whining for help before even attempting to solve their own problem"
In my experience, the more they try to solve the problem on their own before calling me, the worse they make it and the more work I end up having to do to fix it.
My philosophy is this: either try to figure it out yourself, or call me. Do not do both.