Personal Tech Support

We all know people out there that are clueless when it comes to techy things. Many of them are old. The ones that get to me are too lazy to put even the slightest effort at all into learning the extreme basics.

They expect you, if you know even the slightest bit, to just do the things for them or be their personal tech support any time of the day. It doesn’t matter to them if you are busy or anything. They assume that you are on call 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. You are always their first option.

They will have you call the ISP because they don’t know. They have you buy stuff for them because they don’t know how. You know how it goes. They won’t even try to do it themselves. They won’t Google anything, yet they can Google the ridiculous stuff. It is no problem for them to search for something they want to search for, but if it’s searching for how to know how to help themselves, that’s a big fat nope. Nope, it’s not possible. I don’t know how.

I had a friend. He was old. It stuck with me that he said you have to keep up with the times. So many old people are willing to sit and let their brains waste away into nothing in front of the TV. Yes, you are considered tech support for TV stuff too. Progress is not stopping because you would rather not learn new things.

I know it can be overwhelming to learn new things, and maybe even some old ones are impossible. I don’t expect these people to be coding, but they should learn the basics. On a computer, at least there is plenty of help on the screen. On touch screens that has become a thing of the past, and you can only keep guessing where to tap. Granted, on a PC screen these same people wouldn’t read the help. They just play dumb instead. You shouldn’t have to walk them through how to bring up the menu or something as basic as that every time. They should take some of their time to learn this stuff if they expect you to take your limited time (for free) over and over again.

My mom isn’t exactly the most technical person, but she does figure things out when she needs to. I was low-key proud of her when she said Uber is easy because I suggested it to her. She doesn’t drive. She will order stuff online too.

All I ask is the conversation starts with I tried this and that, and it didn’t work. Not just that it don’t work. I don’t know, which actually translates to I didn’t try and can’t be bothered to try. I need you to spend the next half hour walking me through it. This one time I spent hours trying to figure out why the internet wasn’t working for someone until they finally let slip that they paid part of the cable bill. Words don’t come to mind explaining how pissed I was. I just said nothing.

I guess I am lucky. A long time ago I learned to just say no when it comes to dropping everything anytime someone. I will help out, but it is on my terms. All I ask is that they put a little effort into learning instead of expecting someone else to just do it.