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People who think they know more than they do....
JaysonFour
Classy Monster KittehRegistered User regular
Classy Monster KittehRegistered User regular
One of my family members is a real do-it-yourself type- won't ask for help with anything, especially with computers. This morning, her computer couldn't connect to the net. So, instead of asking me to fix it, she's begun to dig around, changing everything she can to make the internet connect again. Every time I offer to help, she throws a fit and tells me to leave her alone.
At the rate things are going, I forsee a massive computer repair bill caused by the OS freezing up and corrupting. How the hell do I convince her to let me look at it and to stop fucking around with stuff she has no knowledge about, and more importantly, how do I teach her she needs to take the PC in or let me fix it instead of trying to fix it herself?
At the rate things are going, I forsee a massive computer repair bill caused by the OS freezing up and corrupting. How the hell do I convince her to let me look at it and to stop fucking around with stuff she has no knowledge about, and more importantly, how do I teach her she needs to take the PC in or let me fix it instead of trying to fix it herself?
I can has cheezburger, yes?
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Some people just don't like asking for help. If that doesn't work dig around and give her some manuals it will speed up the learning process.
until then, their unhelpable.
Savour this time JaysonFour, savour it.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
This. You should be glad your family isn't constantly bothering you, asking for help putting in a DVD or resetting the VCR.
Also, "savour", not "saviour".
As long as shes not hard resetting, things shouldn't get corrupted.
Damnit, I knew I was spelling it wrong. I was thinking, "saviour, huh.. it's not the messiah.. maybe savior, still not the messiah"..
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
...I'm going to make some little instruction sheets for everything, laminate them, and possibly crazy-glue them near the devices in question. Learning to change a DVD in the player for another one isn't as hard as some people in this house think it is.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
"MY COMPUTER CAN'T HANDLE THAT AND THIS AT THE SAME TIME"
She uses an Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook that was bought earlier this year. The extent of her usage is e-mail and other variants of word processing.
I wanted to say "no, you stupid bitch, the computer can handle it, but I certainly doubt your feeble mind can". Ugh, technology is supposed to aid productivity, not scare women in their fourties. Sometimes I hate my mom.
No, that just cements the devices in question as being powere by Mystical Voodoo and if something ever goes wrong during the ancient rituals inscribed on the laminated tablets, they'll be totally lost.
Either try to fix their incompetence through teaching, or stop fixing stuff and just bite your tongue. As GrimReaper pointed out, their reliance on you will be horrible should they discover you can fix computers.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
I have taught my parents to power cycle the cable modem and router, in that order, when the internet "stops working". That has saved me a lot of phone calls, however I still get a call from time to time "I powercycled it and it still doesn't work YOU SAID THAT WOULD FIX IT HOW DO I FIX IT!?!?!?".
How about you let her mess with her own damn computer as much as she damn well pleases.
So much truth
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
I feel sorry for my best friend. He's fixing his brother's computer for like the fifth time.
we really need a way to double lime on the forums.
Computers though? This is the one area I can pretty much run circles around him in.
He doesn't quite get this yet. Once I had a mac emulator so I could play Escape Velocity on our old computer. The computer was old and beginning to break. My father decided the correct response was to try to delete the emulator, but instead he ended up deleting all of my save files and leaving the emulator there. His reasoning? "The computer's trying to be a mac, but it's not a mac, so that's why it was breaking".
He still has the gut reaction to format whenever anything goes wrong with the computer. Anything. At all. A few months ago he reformatted and reinstalled Windows every week for maybe 2 months.
Also he gives helpful advice like "Well you left your computer on all night, it probably overheated".
Sometimes it's nice that I'm never bothered with tech support by my mother or him. On the other hand my sister has learned it's probably best to come to me with computer problems, and it's a lot nicer to fix "It's broken!" than "Well I reformatted and it still won't work without the Power supply in there".
Also I overheard a lady going into a fit because the computer was plugged in and she didn't want to burn out the battery by having it plugged in like that all the time. Of course, I've heard a billion different myths about batteries, from people thinking Li-ion batteries work like the Ni-Cad batteries.
I don't think it's uncommon for fathers to be like that. Mine does that all the time. Most fathers are used to being handy fix-it dudes, but computers are a far cry from plunging a toilet or wallpapering a room. Some dads have a hard time biting their tongues and realizing that they can't be masters at everything. If someone's dad is really handy and also has a hard time understanding computers, I typically use comparisons to household stuff.
For example, you could have said something along the lines of 'not re-wiring the house if a lightbulb blew out, so don't reformat the hard drive just because you got one error'. Sounds silly, but it works if you can compare computers to someone's forté.
Complex stuff right?
But explain to him how to get a movie from DVD to the AppleTV? impossible.
I just opened up the remote admin port on his router and turned on vnc on his desktop. Now I can fix it without even having to pick up a phone (they live a few states away from me)
Ryan M Long Photography
Buy my Prints!
Yea, it's a slippery slope.
I will still do support for people, but I charge now. The only people I don't charge for are my parents, a couple of my aunts, and my girlfriend's computer and her parent's computer.(although my girlfriend will "pay" me in other ways :winky: ).
I don't charge as much as you'd have to pay if you take it to Best Buy or wherever, but at least by saying up front my rate, it gets people at least to think twice about immediately calling me again.
I'm going to go with bigger.
EDIT: Hmm. Apparently we can't make text bigger anymore?
The people that kind of know what is going on with computers.
They know simplified basics, so that when something goes wrong, they kind of know where to start, and will muck around, but often end up fucking things up even more.
It's like a friend of mine.. he kind of knew how to build PCs a few years ago. So he started building an Athlon T-bird box, you know, the CPU that gets hot as hell within a split second?
Well, he started building his PC. But after putting in the CPU and Ram and hooking up the PSU, he thought it'd be a good time to "test" the thing to see if it recognized the CPU.
This is before he puts the Heatsink+Fan onto it.
Why didn't he put one on first? Because, he conjured from his lack of experience, that if he ran the machine for only a few seconds to see if it recognized the CPU, it wouldn't get hot enough to cause damage.
So he turns it on, and instantaneously it starts literally smoking. As the old T-bird Athlons did when you turned them on without a HSF.
Had to buy a new CPU and motherboard after that.
Why didn't I stop him? He was doing this at his own home by himself at the time. He told me the whole story the next day...
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
This X 1000
It gets kind of annoying because now, instead of trying to learn to do it by themselves, they just ask me to do it. I always tell them that I won't be around forever but they never listen.
My cousin asked me to call him about something last night. So I called him, long distance mind you. His question is how you clean out cookies on a computer. I called somebody long distance to tell them how to delete their cookies, because apparently a quick google search is too much to ask.
Ryan M Long Photography
Buy my Prints!
My damn mother still buys a new computer every time hers gets bogged down with spyware after a year or so. Still uses internet explorer and Norton. :x
Again for emphasis. I just spent 3 hours attempting to recover my dad's corrupted laptop, and failing that, backing up as much of his data as possible. I'm going to start charging them soon. :x
Actually while we'll probably not like those newfangled cars that fly themselves and at any point could crash you into a wall, technology has been advancing so fast during the time that we've been growing up and living that we probably will in general be better at adjusting to technology as it continues to advance.
when my mom got her new headset for her phone I told her either she could read the manual with me and watch me set it up or do it herself. if she's going to be using it every time she's in the car she might as well know how to deal with the setup in case something ever happens. she did it herself and whenever I see her with it (which is almost always) it's a little victory for me. I may not have taught her how to do it, but I taught her something far more valuable... technology is not scary, and we are actually smarter than machines!
edit - and I also taught her to RTFM.
In actuality, though, I've done a pretty good job of training my parents. Those initial years were rough, though.
"JaysonFour, I think I killed Microsoft Office. None of my coupon lists will open."
As in, my writing, some old papers I did, nearly the entire load of coursework for that video game class they don't offer any more... I don't know why she felt the need to tinker with it, but I sure hope my stuff's not corrupted.
Of course, I told her it was okay and then gathered up every computer book I have and locked them in a foot-locker, all the while running every Simpsons episode I've seen where Homer chokes Bart through my mind, with her taking Bart's place and me Homer's.
Anyways, I got my sister to agree with me that A) This person should never have tried to fix it themselves, and
I can has cheezburger, yes?
She probably feels incredibly terrible.
Ryan M Long Photography
Buy my Prints!
Unless she's rapidly turning the computer on and off, or unplugging the hard drive during the middle of a defrag, or dumping a bag of magnets into the case and giving it a shake there's nothing she can do to corrupt your data.
The worse thing she can do is fubar windows and hence lose your files, but in terms of the health of the computer? Nothing a reformat can't fix.
Just back up your stuff and let her have at it. It's something she wants to do, and in the long run she'll be wiser for it.
A: Why aren't files you don't want to lose on a CD somewhere? Your bad for not having backups
B: Professional repair or new computer because she tinkers? Your files corrupted because office isn't installed correctly? o_O Hiding your computer books from her? She obviously doesn't want to be a standard end user, so why are you so bent on forcing her to be? FYI that'll never work, just accept what's going on and do your best to help her learn. You should have just said "oops you messed up office, just reinstall it" instead of trying to instill fear of the magical computer voodoo gods in her. I actually say kudos to the fact that she's not afraid of her computer.
I kept the windows CD next to my computer when I was a noob. I used to fuck things up every day or two. I learned to put my files somewhere safe and take it for granted that what was on my OS drive was temporary. Seriously if it's her computer and she fucks with it this much the best thing to do it to teach her how to reinstall the operating system and let her have at it. Oh and get shit you want to keep off of there.
I don't mean to sound snide but if you think your only two options are a "professional repair job with a massive repair bill" or "a new computer in general" then maybe you're the one who thinks you know more than you do? :P
Sounds like you've since moved on from the computer you're talking about and you have your own rig, if that's the case why haven't you migrated all your stuff?
mom: ok wheres this file we just downloaded
me: its on your desktop
mom: *opens up the c drive and starts looking through folders
mom: wheres the desktop?
me: close out of that window
mom: whats a window?
i laughed for a whole week.
i also tried to install software for her once... u know all those screens where you just click next? she spent a minute on each of them and yelled at me when i just clicked through them all.
my entire family is tech smart though so we take turns laughing at our tech dumb parents.
fun times.
Friends I charge in booze, that way, when they call me again, I can say I'm drunk.
Other random people, I tell them I'll either have to charge them for my time. They usually give up after that. These are usually friends of the friends that I make buy me booze for my efforts.
I have this one friend that I'm constantly having to do work for. He can use his computer, and he thinks he can do other things to it. However, when he does these things, he breaks things. He likes to just add new hard drives at will. Some of these contain OSes already on them. He doesn't format them. He'll switch cables around. Then wonders why he gets a bunch of errors. I hate his computers. Actually, I think it may just be his house. I took my recording PC over there to record his band this past weekend. Everything worked fine when I left my house. When I got there, hooked everything up, nope. Channel 1 was coming out on channel 9, 2 on 10, and 3 through 8 weren't coming in at all.
He pays in decent beer though so I don't mind going over there every few months to correct whatever he's fouled up since last time.
PSN : Bolthorn