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Looks like I’m not the only one to have problems with friends and family wanting help with their computers. I’ve talked about this before and, whilst my own problem has been much reduced, plainly a lot of people in IT have problems associated with people expecting unreasonable amounts of help with their home electrical equipment.
In many ways the problem isn’t close friends and family, it’s when friends and family start farming you out to their friends and acquaintances.
You end up doing favours for people you don’t know, who you’ll never see again unless there’s another problem and from whom there is absolutely no hope of any future reciprocation.
I know a lot of IT people who, when asked what they do at work, lie utterly in order to avoid the inevitable request to help with their home PC.
One of the big misconceptions many none-IT people have is that anybody in IT must have a wide knowledge of PCs, every version of Windows yet produced, every printer etc etc. IT is a very broad application domain with a massive set of skill sets. Diagnosing and fixing PCs is not something many of us do regularly or well.
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I just tell them I don’t do Windows, mention Linux, or Ubuntu or something and you will get one of two reactions:
1. Glazed over eyes and a rapid departure.
2. Delighted smile and you have found a new friend.
The most striking thing for me recently was at a friends 40th party. When answering the compulsory “So, what do you do then?”, the most frequent response was “Oh, you mean like Open Office”.
I was pretty surprised by the number of non-technical people who were either familiar with, or a user of, OpenOffice.org.
oh… you go round at party’s asking whether they use open office? hmmm… you really do have this open source thing pretty bad!
No no no…
This was their response.
When they ask me what I did for a living and said we run an OSS consulting business it was very common for the other person to say “Oh, you mean like Open Office”.
I’d rather talk about golf, politics and/or women than software when off duty.