Christmas time is a time of joy, family, giving, and life. Unless its 2020.
Jokes aside, there was always one thing about Christmas time that grinded my gears, and I think it can partially be portrayed with this meme:
This is especially true around Christmas time. When your Grandmother or some older member of your family gets a new piece of technology and as far as they're concerned the only thing you study is “computers” so they assume you can help them. Well, I’m a programmer not the annoyed IT guy from your work.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind helping if you ask, but this rant isn’t so much about helping people, as it is a rant about the misunderstanding of my field and how some people react when I tell them “I don’t know”.
“Well aren’t you supposed to be good with computers?”
Not all of them at once.
Just because I work on a computer all day, does not mean I am an expert on literally anything computer related. No, I do not know how to set your printer up. No, I don’t know why your computer is running slow all of a sudden just because you said “All I use it for is email”. No, I don’t know why or how your Facebook got hacked.
Now I understand there are many people who do not understand computers and these are not stupid questions to them as they are legitimate concerns. However, these are not questions I can answer without knowing all the information. I need to look at the printer manual to set it up. I need to take a look at your computer and see what you accidentally downloaded from the “free gift card” websites. If you clicked on a link that looked like it was from Facebook, but asked you to log in again even though you’re already logged in, you just gave your username and password away to a hacker (okay I can sort of answer that one). Anyone who’s reading this probably gets what I mean though.
If you have any experiences about this you would like to share, please leave a comment either on this post or on my GitHub Discussions Forum!
Have a safe, socially distanced, and Merry Christmas! And Happy Holidays!
Top comments (2)
The fact is they also can set up a printer by reading the user manual but It's more easy for them to ask you without caring a single second about that. Some get surprised when I answer them to look the user manual on it's new product before asking me something and I keep standing like a rock making them read the user manual. At the end of the day they usually know how to handle it's own device instead askin me each time a non expected behaviour happens on it 😂
10000% agree! A friend called me to install windows on a few PC's which is no problem for me. But he was shocked when I told him I never touched one of these big office printers