Family tech support

Every time I have to help my mother with her computer, my pulse rate doubles. This is a woman who worked on the world’s most complicated computer reservation system at Eastern Airlines for 18 years, and then retrained on the Mac and was a secretary for another five years. And yet, when she is on the laptop I gave her, or the one that she subsequently bought, she becomes an absolute imbecile. I’m sorry, there’s no other word for the woman who once called and asked me, “Mer, does my computer have a hole for the thing?”

“A what for the what?”

“Does my computer have a hole for the thing. You know, the square thing.”

“Do you mean a disk drive? For a floppy disk?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

[Count to ten. Then count ten more.] “Yes. You have a floppy drive.”

“Okay. Where is it?”

[Count to a thousand.]

Anyway, I happened to mention to her during our phone conversation tonight that I’d tried to call earlier in the day. She asked me what time, I told her, and she said, “Oh, Aunt Judy was on the phone with HP because her computer has a burning smell coming from it.” Shocked, I told her to tell Aunt Judy to immediately unplug her computer. I had to argue with them to get her to do it. Then I remembered that HP is recalling laptop batteries, so I asked Mom to tell me her model number, and checked online. Sure enough, it’s a recall model. “Mom,” I said, “you need to take the battery out of the computer.”

“Well, if I take the battery out, how will I be able to use it?”

“You can plug it in.”

“But how will it work without the battery?”

[Count to twenty.] “Mom, it will work on electric power. You know, from plugging it into the wall.”

“Oh.”

To my utter astonishment, I got her to take out the battery with minimal effort and aggravation. (I ascribe this entirely to Hewlett-Packard, whose computers I already love, but whose reputation has just shot up a thousand percent with me due to my mother actually being able to remove her laptop battery.) I explained to her that it was likely that it wasn’t defective, but we weren’t going to take a chance. And that she needed to call HP tomorrow, because she probably never updated her contact info after she moved to Florida, which is why, I’m sure, she never got a recall notice.

“I can’t afford a new computer if this one burns up,” she said.

“Mom, if the battery burns up your computer, they have to give you a new one.”

“Oh. Okay.”

And that was the end of the tech support portion of our phone call. You know, after every session like this one, I really need a drink.

A big one.

This is why I can never work in tech support. I have zero patience over the phone. All I want to do is reach through and slap people for not knowing how to do the simplest tasks on their computer.

You know what sucks the most? My mother, my aunt, a cousin, and sometimes a brother call me for tech support. And of course, I can’t send them a bill. Okay, I could, but they’d never pay.