No, I won’t fix your computer

Posted September 16, 2008 at 10:16 am by Ricardo Kustner in General.

Most people would agree you shouldn’t bother others too much in their spare time with questions about their job. At a party you wouldn’t just ask a dentist to have a look at that naggingly painful molar of yours.

But for us in the computer/internet business, this proves to be a lot trickier. When people sense you “do something in computers”, they suddenly seem to know very well how to get hold of you to have a look at their machine.

“Recently my computer is so much slower and it frequently jams”, is a painful phrase to the ears of many of us. When you hear that, you already envisage the hours it is going to take to search for, and clear the computer of, spyware, just to do it all over again in a few months time. I am not even talking yet of all the vague problems of non-compatible hardware and software.

And once you’ve helped someone, this spreads like wildfire and before you know it, people will start calling you and you have become a sort of private help desk. The other day, a colleague told me he got ushered “upstairs” at nearly each birthday party. One of my own personal experiences includes being invited to a woman’s house on a first date, but when she lured me into her bedroom, it was for an entire different reasons than I had hoped for.

Nowadays, I am glad to say, I have things under control. For my work I use a Mac laptop and at home I have an iMac. The use of a Mac is so straightforward it does not require any complicated dealings to get it up and running, and there is a minimum chance of encountering some fuzzy problems that need hours of sorting out without being rewarded with a clear solution. Now when I get asked to help with a computer issue, the chance of it a Windows PC is involved is pretty big. I have not worked with XP very much, and Vista I never even had to use at all. So these days I just say I have insufficient experience and they better find someone else to have a look.

To be honest, with some technical experience (and loads of time) Windows PC problems are usually fixable as well. So actually I probably could be of help, if I really wanted to. But nobody needs to know!