I swear...

[phaedra-13.livejournal.com]

...I am going to charge my mother $19.95/minute for tech support.

I was JUST over there on Sunday, and she had no known issues with her PC. Last night, I get a phone call:

HER: My computer is stuck.
ME: [sigh] What do you mean, "stuck"?
HER: It won't start up. It stops on that black screen with the grey bar going across the bottom. The grey goes about half way and then stops.
ME: [sigh] Do you still have a disc in there?
HER: Um...[the sounds of futzing}...oh, yeah. [sheepish laugh]
ME: [sigh] Take the disc out, do a hard shut down and wait 10 minutes. How many times, exactly, do I have to remind you NOT to leave discs in the computer when you shut it down for the day?
HER: I'll remember. I swear.
ME: Uh-huh.
[ten minutes of craptastic chatter]
ME: So...did it work?
HER: Yeah, it's working now.
ME: Amazing. Gotta go, I have another call coming in.

Seriously, I have gone over this with her a hundred times since we got our first PC back in 1996. Ten years of the same, exact reminders/instructions. I shoulda started charging her in 1998 - she'd call me at my JOB on Saturdays and ask me how to fix her issues. I'd be rich by now had I started charging her.

x-posted

Comments

[jeffreyatw.livejournal.com]

You should probably make the hard drive the first boot device. It'd save you trouble, and in the rare occurrence that you actually need to boot from a CD, you can just choose it from a boot menu...

[ianwalker.livejournal.com]

I was about to say the same thing.

[phaedra-13.livejournal.com]

Yes, I probably should. However, that would require me to remember to do so when I am at her place. And in order to do that, I would have to use my brain on a weekend - which I prefer to do as little thinking on those two days as possible in order to avoid a meltdown.

So...c'est la vie.

[sheryls.livejournal.com]

plus you'd probably get my luck. my dad's computers are so messed up, he askes me to do something (like that) and his ungodly amounts of spyware cause his computer to lock up and he freaks out that i "broke it"... i'm like dad. all i did was open a browser. WELL YOU BROKE IT!!

*headdesk*

[neferde.livejournal.com]

You too? Ran Ad-Aware on my dad's computer last weekend for the first time in 310 days and it picked up his Solitare Master program as spyware and got rid of it, along with at least 13 spyware programs and 5 malwares. I got yelled at for breaking his computer because Solitare Master wouldn't work anymore. It's not my fault he bought a program that conforms to the definition of spyware!

At least my mom has finally realized that her observation that my computer is "always broken" is only because she sees me actually doing regular maintainence on it rather than letting it get so bad that only an FDISK will save it. 'Course it took her becoming the IT person for her office to figure out that regular maintainence =/= broken, but hey, better now than later!

[fixerkitty.livejournal.com]

Sweet Jesus...

Sounds like my mother, although not quite as bad. She teaches for a local university so for her a computer is more of a tool and she doesn't use it for much else. Petfinder is hardly a spyware site. With her it's not the problem, it's her reaction to the problem. She's not quite sane to begin with. One tiny error message and the screaming and tears start. Joy. :/

As for why I don't charge her whenever she throws a tantrum, the answer is simple. I gotta live with her. :/ It drives me up the wall too. Because of arcane Medicaid rules regarding income, I don't have much of a choice if I want the meds that keep me alive. :/

Good luck...

[ximinez]

Ten years of her not listening, and you haven't bothered to disable booting from floppy in the BIOS? ;)

[foobarintel.livejournal.com]

yeah my mother will call me while I'm working and do the same thing.

I just stream into her PC though and resolve it that way.

[phaedra-13.livejournal.com]

Glitch: I have no computer of my own. Well, no Internet access anyhow.

[jjjiii]

Why do you have to wait for 10 minutes to reboot? Is that like a penalty box time for the luser?

[phaedra-13.livejournal.com]

It's basically so she doesn't fsck things up worse. :)

[steppenlaeufer.livejournal.com]

You're lucky, that it's only your mother. I have to do tech support for
my mother ("Wow! How did you make the blinky thing [cursor in Word] jump to the next line?"),
my father ("I bought this and this and this - you have to install it."),
my 82yr old grandfather ("What's software?") and
my uncle (He tried to surf over a Wireless LAN connection on a Pentium II with 64 MB RAM and 2 MB free storage on his 4 GB hard disk. I wept.)

[phaedra-13.livejournal.com]

In the IT sense, yes I am lucky it's only my mother; she's all the family I've got.

[princess-kessie.livejournal.com]

I'm not even *in* Techsupport, but I *still* have to do all the troubleshooting for my mother and brother (who is 24 and a naval officer/qualified engineer) for their 2 pc's, wired lan and broadband connection. I am not technically qualified to do so! Oh, hang on, I know that little tray holds disks, not coffee. Compared to my family, I *am* qualified after all...

If I had begun charging by the hour when they first got their home pc, I could have retired this year on a Very Good Income...

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

When I was ten, I used to get pimped out to whoever in the neighbourhood couldn't figure out how to read the manual on their new whatsit.

Although my parents did buy a computer, it doesn't usually break badly enough for me to have to do more than a weekend's cleanup annually.

I thought it fortunate that none of my grandparents ever bought a computer, until my dad called me today asking me to go retune my grandfather's TV channels before the big game this weekend :/

(Personally, I suspect this is a ploy of my mother's to force me into more face time with my oldest living ancestor before he eventually shuffles off this mortal coil. And I have nothing against him personally, he's a nice bloke and all there mentally, but we simply have very little in common. Unfortunately, at the moment I'm also the only descendent of my generation within a thousand miles who isn't a teenager, so I get lumped with family duties I've been successfully avoiding for the better part of a decade.)

I'm also technically kinda sorta responsible for my younger brother's laptop while he's using it to write his dissertation, but I've locked that bunny down so hard he'd have to throw it under a bus to break it.

One disadvantage of being back in the city where I grew up (and most of my extended family still lives) is that at some point, I know I'm going to be asked to troubleshoot the PCs of uncles, cousins, third aunts once removed and so forth. So far, the requests have not started rolling in, but they will. I'm going to see if I can get a job a couple of hundred miles away and claim unavailability.

[fixerkitty.livejournal.com]

One disadvantage of being back in the city where I grew up (and most of my extended family still lives) is that at some point, I know I'm going to be asked to troubleshoot the PCs of uncles, cousins, third aunts once removed and so forth.So far, the requests have not started rolling in, but they will. I'm going to see if I can get a job a couple of hundred miles away and claim unavailability.

That's actually not so hard, but it depends on where you live. If I moved back East it'd still be easy. A lot of my family lives in Manhattan. I'd just move to the Bronx and NO ONE would come looking for me. ;)

Just refer everyone to your cellphone mailbox and don't put any identifying information in the message. ;)