I don't have a good example here because I have always flat-out refused to be tech support for family and friends (I think I was the only one of my nerd friends who didn't get sucked into that endless black hole in high school), but I feel like a lot of you probably have some pretty good stories.
Have you ever made a non-techie's life way easier with a tiny bit of code or automation?
Jump to Post— trcooke 253My Dad was an electrician (now retired) and he was always buying stuff from a supplier CPC Farnell. I discovered the pattern that they used for applying promotional codes to their products so I wrote a Groovy script that took a product code and then tried out all the promo …
Jump to Post— trcooke 253At a push I will help family members with IT problems but I don't do it very often. I operate a "Your printer, your problem" policy for the most part.
I supported laptops for family members. I used Macrium Reflect to image new computers, making sure that all the user files were on D. I told them that if they ran into problems I would take up to 30 minutes to try to fix it, then restore the image if I couldn't find the problem.
I couldn't stop my father-in-law from installing stuff so I installed Unchecky to automatically uncheck the boxes that would automatically install all kinds of other crap like anti-virus software. Before Unchecky I found he had three anti-virus packages installed. Biggest complaint, "My computer is running really slow".
I know nothing.
I saw nothing.
I didn't even get out of bed this morning. - Sgt. Schultz
My Dad was an electrician (now retired) and he was always buying stuff from a supplier CPC Farnell. I discovered the pattern that they used for applying promotional codes to their products so I wrote a Groovy script that took a product code and then tried out all the promo code combinations on the CPC Farnell website to discover the promo code that gave the biggest discount. He had some pretty good success with it, although it required some tweaks over the years as the website got updated and some protections were put in place to guard against the kind of thing my script did.
At a push I will help family members with IT problems but I don't do it very often. I operate a "Your printer, your problem" policy for the most part.
I used a modified version of that. "If you piss me off then it's your computer, your problem.". It helps keep peace in the family. I only had to drop the hammer once.
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