Rant: Techies, Free Work & Boundaries

Every now and then, I will indulge myself and my readers with a RANT.

Our friends at Webster define a "rant" as:

1 : to talk in a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner
2 : to scold vehemently

Ranting may include profanity.

Here's my rant about technology people who don't know boundaries.

I use technology and I've studied formally the sociology of technology. I've done tech support. I occasionally get to apply XKCD's infamous approach to technology problem solving, the Tech Support Cheat Sheet.

But I've never had the delusion that all the technology in the world is mine.

I am very reluctant to allow other people to work on my tech stuff, at a level that approaches paranoia.

Because they break it.

Example 1: when I was away at college, I configured an old computer to serve as a E-mail tool for my not-at-all computer literate mother to communicate with me. We painstakingly walked her through how to use Eudora Lite, and she got pretty good with it.

A guy named Max, a friend of my mother's and self proclaimed amateur radio expert, nuked and paved the hard drive to install his own 'free' software from a company called Juno, because this was a 'better' E-mail tool. In his opinion. Never mind the E-mails that had already been sent and received; they had no value to him and were lost.

I couldn't get home for two months to fix it. Meanwhile, my mother had completely lost interest in computers.

She never sent another E-mail again.

The computer had no further value to me. I had set it up for the purpose of being able to E-mail back and forth with my mom.

Max still acted like he'd done me a favor for over a year. He even suggested at one point that I should pay him for his work. It took me telling him to go fuck himself, in front of witnesses, for him to understand that he and I were not on speaking terms.

When my mother passed, he was not invited to her funeral. I'm told that only then did he realize exactly how badly I felt that he'd fucked up. I didn't speak to him again, so I have to take their word for it.

That was when I started using passwords religiously even on computers that never left my control. Just in case.

That was also when I totally lost interest in amateur radio. If Max liked it, it must be shit, and that was good enough for me. It would be another twenty years before I went back to amateur radio.

Example 2: when I was helping a friend with a difficult situation, it proved to be convenient to live for a couple of months in her rented house while she fought to regain control of the two houses she owned. (She won one, she lost one, but it's amazing how quickly people stop harassing an elderly woman when her not-elderly friend answers the door with a handgun.)

I took advantage of the extra space to sort through and prune through some of the tech I owned. One of these pieces of tech was an ancient Dell desktop that had been configured with a Windows 2000 installation.

Another friend was staying with me. I will not name him because I'd like to stay friends. But while I was working two jobs, he discovered a need to use the Dell desktop for Web surfing.

So he installed not only Linux but a whole hard drive encryption program on the desktop.

I recently got out this desktop to set it up.

Password? ...

After a couple hours, I called him. He gave me a password. It didn't work.

"Just use a USB key to reformat the drive," he suggested.

The me of twenty years ago would have told him where to stick the key and in what orientation.

Instead, I asked him to walk me through how to put Windows 2000 back on the desktop.

He started working the problem. "OK, you need to download a CD, you need a key, you need a USB boot key, you need a boot loader ..."

"How long is this going to take?"

"Several hours ... probably not worth it, you should recycle the desktop and start over with another device."

"..."

That's when he got it. He had taken a working piece of equipment and made it into a doorstop. It now has a sticky note on it, "XXXX broke me." I plan to give it to him when I see him next.

I have many other examples, pretty much at a one for one of "Did I allow X to touch my tech gear?" "Shit."

A friend of mine tells a story about a bear and a hunter.

"You're not here for the hunting, are you?" the bear asks at the end.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is one definition of insanity.

So I have to take some of the blame myself.

Tech support for free is worth rather less than what you paid for it.