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Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?
My parents usually ask me to fix whatever is wrong with the computer/router (well, they do now anyway -- in the past, not so much, especially after setting that computer on fire the one time). When we first moved back up north, we were having issues with our internet connection (which, now that I think about it, seems to happen every time we move to a different place).
Since my parents aren't exactly technologically savvy, more often than not I would be the one who would have to talk to a tech at the ISP (AT&T up here, Time Warner back in the day). Don't get me wrong -- my parents are not complete electronic idiots; they know how to turn on the computer, they know how to follow specific instructions, but occasionally something more advanced would have to happen, which would take a very long time to explain. That's where I come in, since I know how to do virtually anything they want done (and probably even did it before we called).
Anyway, in my experience, I've found that telling the person up front that I am a computer geek makes things go much smoother, and they seem to talk to me with less baby than before I would tell them. For example, they would just say 'now release and renew the IP' instead of telling me 'go to start... run... type cmd... now type i.. p.. c.. o.. n.. f.. i.. g..' etc.
My step-father works at AT&T as a sales rep, oddly enough, so we normally end up talking about business. He actually often uses me and what I do at times in his sales pitch. For example, one day I was in the car riding down the street to our house with my old laptop, just watching for wireless networks as they appeared. In a 5 block stretch, I had maybe 20-30 networks total, of which only one was using WEP encryption - the one at our house. There were points I'd even be able to retrieve a simple webpage from those networks, which led my step-father to use that in his explanation on security of their DSL service.
My parents usually ask me to fix whatever is wrong with the computer/router (well, they do now anyway -- in the past, not so much, especially after setting that computer on fire the one time). When we first moved back up north, we were having issues with our internet connection (which, now that I think about it, seems to happen every time we move to a different place).
Since my parents aren't exactly technologically savvy, more often than not I would be the one who would have to talk to a tech at the ISP (AT&T up here, Time Warner back in the day). Don't get me wrong -- my parents are not complete electronic idiots; they know how to turn on the computer, they know how to follow specific instructions, but occasionally something more advanced would have to happen, which would take a very long time to explain. That's where I come in, since I know how to do virtually anything they want done (and probably even did it before we called).
Anyway, in my experience, I've found that telling the person up front that I am a computer geek makes things go much smoother, and they seem to talk to me with less baby than before I would tell them. For example, they would just say 'now release and renew the IP' instead of telling me 'go to start... run... type cmd... now type i.. p.. c.. o.. n.. f.. i.. g..' etc.
My step-father works at AT&T as a sales rep, oddly enough, so we normally end up talking about business. He actually often uses me and what I do at times in his sales pitch. For example, one day I was in the car riding down the street to our house with my old laptop, just watching for wireless networks as they appeared. In a 5 block stretch, I had maybe 20-30 networks total, of which only one was using WEP encryption - the one at our house. There were points I'd even be able to retrieve a simple webpage from those networks, which led my step-father to use that in his explanation on security of their DSL service.
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