Yes, I am the only tech guy in my family, and I HATE IT. I imagine being a doctor is a lot like this, where members of your family or their friends always try to pump you for free advice while giving you incomplete or incorrect information about their problem, and expecting an instant solution, even if it's not within your specialty. I've had to play dumb soooo many times to keep from getting roped into a few hours worth of intractable confused remote diagnosis that inevitably ends in a verdict of user error.
For instance, my mother-in-law had a friend from her church call me up because the computers at the church were having a problem. After a good hour on the phone, trying to get her to articulate just what kind of problem she was having accessing the internet, I finally managed to figure out that their computers were not networked, and in fact they did not have an ISP, nor had it occurred to her that access to the internet for computers required anything beyond just turning the computer on and opening IE. :|
My in-laws also had a horrible fucking PC running Windows 3.1 that gave them no end of problems, and me no end of headaches. I told them that the next computer they buy should be a Mac, since they didn't have a need for any Windows specific programs, and they weren't at all computer literate and weren't likely to learn. Naturally, the next thing they bought was a horribly underpowered Pentium 2 running a pirated version of Windows 98 from a "friend" at the church. A PERSON WHO WOULD SELL YOU THAT IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. =_=
I think my father-in-law went through about thirty different printers because he could never keep the fucking things running with that piece of shit, and the pattern was that the first time he had a problem printing, he'd call me, and I'd come over and plug in the cable, or reinstall the driver, or reformat the whole fucking machine and reinstall Windows because it needed it every other week. The second time he'd just go out and buy a new printer, then call me, because he had opened it up and was trying to work through the setup instructions and had managed to screw something up. Then I'd come over and start over from scratch, and get the thing working, and the cycle would repeat itself with the next time he couldn't print.
As time went on, and the machine became even more laughably out of date and the hard drive grew fresh new crops of bad sectors, and the good sectors got choked with spyware and viruses, I got called for all kinds of new problems, until I finally got so sick of it I just bought them a damn used iMac outright as a christmas gift for the whole family. Now my call volume is greatly reduced, although I still get the occasional call for help, but at least it's stuff on the order of "How do I do this?" instead of "It's making this horrible squealing noise and the colors on the screen are all screwed up and all these windows keep popping up and won't go away and Satan just appeared."
But then there are my little brothers-in-law.
"I'm making a web page for my school and I need some help." Neat, I didn't know you were learning HTML. "What's HTML?" Uh, okay, what program are you using then? "Program?" =_=
"Hey, copy this CD for me." Hell no. "Come on man, I need to copy it since it won't play anymore?" Wait, what? "See, it's all scratched up." How am I supposed to copy it if THE DISC CAN'T BE READ? Maybe next time you should keep your discs in their cases like I fuckin' told you to before and not loose in your bookbag. "Damn. Well, can I borrow this DVD?" FUCK YOU.
"I'm trying to watch these anime movies on the computer, but I can't figure out how to do it." Okay, what format are they in? "Format?" Yeah, like what's the file type? "I don't know, I'm trying to find them." Well, where do you normally download them to? "How do you download them?" ... "Where can I find episodes of Dragonball Z? I looked on Yahoo but I couldn't find any." >click<
Word of advice to any young people who might make a career in a computer related field: DON'T TELL ANYONE. Pretend that you're a garbage man instead.
