I hate working on anyone's machine because after you work on it, anything that goes wrong after that point, you get blamed for. "It didn't give this virus pop-up until 3 months after YOOOOOU worked on it" and so on.
Friends, family friends of the family, friend of friends I hate when they all ask hate even more when I get volunteered, I dont even want to deal with my own computer issue anymore. anyone that asks me has to pay for it some way and most when they hear that say ok never mind. it never simple as it should be. At this point it is hobby to me and that is only cause, I still game mostly on pc. I like keep up with HW tech and new OS( well I did till MS decide new build every 6 months that always need to clean installed or thing some how are broke) but I in no way like dealing it for my own personal use let alone for others, I refused to do for the girlfriends I have over the years and still refuse. forget about the fact the majority time the issue happen cause said person in first place has no common sense and should haven't computers and i not talking about the elderly here. I specifically tell people that as for recommendation for new "computers" to do them self and me everyone else a favor go get apple computer, you less likely to fubar it.
It is a miracle when you manage to solve problems with someone`s PC on the phone. I had two or three such cases. I like to hassle with software. I started to build laziness towards HW.
"fix my computer it's running slow" ok so buy this and this and it might help, spend 2 hours looking up things "ok thx" 3 months later, "my computer is still slow", did you buy them things?, "no" that or basically the same conversation but with a 10 year old computer, "but it was fine when I bought it!"
I got a million great/funny/digusting/facepalming stories. I had one once, they called saying that there was a funny noise in there server room. I get there, and there is an inch of water standing in the server room (no one mentioned that). Meanwhile the all the UPS are sitting on the floor IN THE WATER, which was the sound (and this is all still live and somehow nothing has popped yet). I scream, run around trying to find the power breakers (that no one knew where were at). Kill the power, run grab my high-voltage gloves and boots, run back to server room, hastly unpluug and grab UPS, then run them out to the parking lot (its possible i was screaming the whole time, but i will never admit to it), then the fire dept. came and did proper destroy/dispose. That one was crazy. I was mounting and wiring up an AP on the outside of a building when the bucket on the bucket lift truck i was on broke (one of the main pins that couples it to the boom)......and that sucked and was scary (i hate heights anyways). I would have probably survived the fall, but not without very serious injury. What else. I once picked up a computer out of the line that was in for a virus removal, and when i finally got it booting, the desktop background was a picture of the owner jerking off (ewwwwwww, i know!!) I have had people saw vga cables off because they didn't know to unscrew them, have had them rip vga ports off boards because of same. i recently fixed the network of a business that had never had an IT guy before, and the owner (who i do like as a person very much) had been "handling" it. When i get there, there are routers everywhere. average home wi-fi routers of about 7 different makes ( in a building that needed only 3 AP's to cover totally). 12 in total, each with its own SSID (channel squashing the hell out of each other), each with its own NAT (seriously, at the end it was like octuple NATed)..............and i was there because the internet didn't work right (duh ).
"But the guy at Best Buy said it was a good one." "But it's a Mac. I heard they never break/get viruses" "But i saw some guy on Youtube fix it with a penny and some tape." "Why is the laptop i got for $150 dollars on black friday slow, it's new"
Man, you got that one right. Helping old folks with their tech stuff has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my career.
I totally agree with that, I respect my elders. When I was doing tech support I had lots of elderly men and woman call in thinking that AOL was the only way to get on the internet.
The worst is when people phone you up and ask for advice over the phone. Sometimes trying to navigate people around a PC/Windows is unbearable as they are normally complete idiots, like my sisters friend who I got so frustrated with I made her install Teamviewer and I remotely took control of her laptop from my PC and I was horrified to see that her ENTIRE desktop screen was littered with random folders, icons, picture files, left over .exe files... Not a single space wasn't taken up and her taskbar was nearly HALF the length of the screen from the clock to the middle of the screen. Majority of which were "pc speed optimiser" programs or "super duper money saving" apps, or ultra antivirus pro 2013 edition" all running in the background!!! Did I mention she was still running Windows Vista!! WITHOUT SP1!!!! I told her to forget it and just bring me the laptop so I could nuke it and start again lol. Ended up getting her to buy an SSD and started from scratch.
Oh man those were the worst, when people called in and had all of this anti-virus bloatware installed. Which is still a problem today, Norton and McAfee made millions fooling people with fake and intentional software threats.
Brother asked me a few months ago to help him get his new printer working. Windows XP with a 15" LCD and Dell from 2002 And yes usually sports 15 toolbars in the browser
Oh man, those where the time when toolbars clouded our desktop vision! Well, owning a computer doesn't make one more savy in computer science or related. Don't get me wrong, but almost no one reads a manual or a guide with do and don't for their personal computer. Because it doesn't exist anymore, and being on your own in the digital world means money for some companies
