Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

"He's good with computers"

My boyfriend “works with computers.” Maybe you have a spouse/partner who “works with computers.” Maybe you “work with computers.” It doesn’t matter what exactly you do with the computers. For instance, my boyfriend is an engineer. Maybe yours is in IT. Maybe you are a programmer. Maybe your wife manages a help desk. Someone close to them - a friend or family member - will know only that they “work with computers” and therefore, they are available to work on their computer. For free.

Dear god yes… that’s what led me to post this back in January:

I’m instituting a new “Vagina Policy” towards MSWindows support: if I haven’t come a) out of or b) into yours, I’m not fixing your computer.

I have some friends who will contact me with any and all computer problems, many of which are solvable by “Have you rebooted?” but others aren’t. I get cell phone calls, emails, texts, etc.

At my old job I finally had to say, “Look, my work-day hours are getting eaten up by this, which means I’m having to stay late or take work home. So either you start paying me per hour for this or get someone else to do it.”

They called around and found that getting someone else to do what I had been doing would cost them $70/hr with an hour minimum per call. They paid me $50/hr (which I was happy to take, the extra income was nice) but the amazing thing was that a lot of the little “How do I…?” questions just dried up. (I’ve said at my current job that I’m not telling anyone at my next job that I know anything about computers.)

(And yes, part of the cost of having me help you includes me pointing out every time something works more simply on a Mac (Sorry Michele :-) Which is almost always. Not that Macs are flawless, but the overlapping parts of the circles representing “things that most people want to do” and “things which work really easily on a Mac” are largely overlapping.)

I did have some friends/classmates who bought me a nice bottle of scotch our last week of classes together as a “thank you”. It didn’t come close to paying a decent hourly rate, but I did it because they were friends and I was glad to help, so the gesture meant a whole lot more than the $50/hr I was grudgingly given at my old job.

p.s. — while I am on vacation at my mom’s, she wants me to:

a) help her learn how to use the GPS that she bought after calling me to figure out which one to buy (after mocking mine last summer, and then getting lost since then);

b) go to AT&T with her to get a new cell phone “with Bluetooth” to enable handsfree with her new GPS —yes, I will be telling her about the article I posted the other day but she was in the car with me when we had the accident, so she knows. If someone calls her I’d rather she be able to answer via the GPS than have to reach into her purse and try to fish around for the phone, then look at it, then answer it.;

c) change her Internet/TV/phone from One Sucktastic Company to Another Sucktastic Company because They Are All Sucktastic Companies But the One You Use Now Seems Worse;

d) clean the hard drive on her old desktop computer so she can get rid of it since she now has laptop with Vista which she bought because someone at work told her she couldn’t share files between work/home if she bought a Mac. What kind of files? Oh, Word and Excel documents. So she bought a Vista craptop from Best Buy because she saw an ad in the Sunday paper instead of talking to me about it. Grrr…