If you work in information technology for a living, you end up being the de facto tech support staff for your friends and relatives. This is perfectly reasonable. I don’t hesitate to ask my brother-in-law, whose home improvement and carpentry kung-fu is unstoppable, to help me when things break around my house. I leverage the expertise of family and friends, too, just not for IT-related stuff, since I know a thing or two about that.
I’m a software trainer by day. A big part of my daily life is helping people coax some use out of crappy (and not-so-crappy) software. Looking at it negatively, badly designed software is my meal ticket. But, to be fair, most people are too busy with the rest of their lives to understand the ins and outs of all the software tools they find themselves using, no matter how well designed the software in question might be. Fundamentally, being a power user isn’t so much about intelligence as it is about patience. Any computing problem will bend to your will if you’re willing to not give up until it does. And keeping that in mind is very reassuring.
So, anyway, the occasion for this reflection is that I found myself visiting a friend recently. And my friend said, “Hey, you know computers, right?” and I said, “Yeah, a little bit.” And my friend told me she was having a problem with networked printing. She didn’t put it that way, but that’s what it boiled down to. She had two desktop machines. One of them had a printer, connected via USB, that she wanted to be able to hit from either box. She said “we had the guy from Geek Squad out to look at it, but he couldn’t figure it out.”
I’d never actually set up print sharing on a Windows box, but, since my wife and I both have WiFi laptops, we also have a WiFi print server. I figured it couldn’t be very hard to set up. Windows is a pain in the ass a lot of the time, but I figured even the boys in Redmond were smart enough to create a simple wizard for this. I knew that the little bit of command-line know how that I do have would give me the IP addresses and such.
I’m happy to say I was right. It was cake. It took about fifteen minutes. And though it was easy, I was fairly proud of myself. I’d been able to help my friend and play the hero with a minimum out effort. And, in fact, the Geek Squad dude(tte) had gotten about half-way there. But I thought, how the hell could you even pretend to be a door-to-door IT fix-it man and not be able to do something this simple? I’m not a networking guy. I understand the basics, sure. But all subtleties of the various processes are lost on me. Then again, I’m not charging anyone $80/hour to marvel at my madd skillz, so I’m allowed a certain degree of ignorance. This has been my only (and, to be fair, second hand) experience with Geek Squad, but, based on this single data point, I’d be cautious if I were one of you non-IT/non-power user types. In fact, I recommend you find some friend or relative who works in IT. Just don’t be offended when the same person asks you, six months later, to come over and help hang a window, or do some landscaping or whatever it is you excel at.