Wear this pin to your next family gathering and make it clear you won't be spending hours hunting spyware and reformatting hard drives.
Categories: Tech, Final Frame
Wear this pin to your next family gathering and make it clear you won't be spending hours hunting spyware and reformatting hard drives.
Categories: Tech, Final Frame
Mean-spirited and inappropriate.
How about if the person who ordinarily hosts the holiday meal wears a button that says, "No, I will not cook your dinner" or the person hosting the event wears a button that says, "No, you may not watch the big game on my TV"?
In a family people work together and help one another out. Do you think geeks are the only ones who get buttonholed into giving free help and advice? My father in law is a physician and at any event he attends he's besieged with people asking for free advice, free diagnoses, even for him to write prescriptions.
Get over yourself!
I fully support this pin. I don't need to spend hours teaching someone who doesn't bother to even pay attention how to upload a photo or how to find whatever stupid file they downloaded.
What I do is asking if the person has a data backup. If not I don't touch the computer, if yes I advice to reformat the drive and make a new installation.
No more fussing about looking for viruses or anything like that.
... and mdorothy: for your example with the dinner, do people come to your house (uninvited) and say "Hey I'm hungry, cook a 3-5 hours meal for me"? If yes, then you have the right to wear such a button ...
I too support this pin. Being known as the computer genius of the family hasn't been a blessing whatsoever. I just get to repair computers every holiday season.
I totally concur with most of the comments in this post. Although I think I would wear it 'tongue in cheek'.
"Hey, maybe we can get together later this week, catch up, have some tea, and then maybe you can have a look at my computer... Oh yeah, and my daughters computer has been acting really weird too.""
Seriously, I love to help people, but I don't like being used. The computers above? Online all the time and no anti-virus! A basic check suggested 500+ infections. Yay.
Try not only putting up with it at work (I'm in IT at a large corporation), but also, every weekend going to my parent's house and dealing with it there too. I told my wife we should have moved far away from them... :p
I completely agree! I work an IT Helpdesk and then get calls from friends asking me why their obscure software won't work or they can't connect to their wireless network.
To add insult to injury they want me to walk them through it over the phone rather than just rolling up my sleeves and doing it myself. It just gets old after awhile.
However there are some people I don't mind helping, like family. My mom is my most frequent customer and I've made sure that I can get her IP and RDP into her box.
Needless to say I'm pro pin.
It's called humor. What should follow is called laughter. Or at least chortling. Snickering?
Can I get a guffaw?
No, I will not fix your funnybone.
I forced my parents to buy AppleCare. ;)
I love this pin, when I went away for college I wrote detailed notes and instructions on sending emails w/ attachments, uploading photos, anything you can think of EVEN with screen captures in sequential order for my parents and they would STILL call me asking how to do things.
I have an aunt and uncle from 3 hours away anytime they come visit they bring their camcorder that has the hard drive in it and they're like um can you get our videos off and make a DVD for us.... 4 copies please..and if you can, can you leave the videos on your computer just in case? (I don't save them that's asking too much) Its really annoying.