Nobody asks me anymore because I insist on educating them on how to fix their issues. It paid off after a while. They either fix their own stuff or ask somebody else lol

For me it depends, when it's an uncle I hardly have a relationship with randomly asking me to fix his printer because I'm good with computers. Then no think you, I just tell him to google the problem or ask Mistral-AI

If it's my close family then I love helping them

It super depends on the person. But for my SO no problem. For my out of town family lmaooo forget about it.

After 1 year of tech support: "I can fix it!"

After 15 years: "I've never used a computer in my life."

Like others stated, if it's not someone I'm close to, I wouldn't want to do it. If my partner however asks me for help, being able to help her and solve a real problem she has, brings me tremendous joy.

Man, I don't recognize this at all. At work I'm currently in the middle of a two-month project that I think will end up producing about ten lines of code. It's all about tracking a bunch of stuff down in a gigantic code base and then trial-and-erroring all of it until it works.

So, my mother-in-law's phone keyboard switches to French-Canadian? Yeah, I can definitely fix that! My dad wants a mesh network in his house so he can listen to music in the garage? Can do! My kid's audio player breaks and I need to transplant in a new part? Give it to me! My wife's computer won't print suddenly? These little wins (and sometimes medium sized wins!) are euphoric. They keep me from feeling like I've wasted an entire day switching one variable, running a build, and then switching it back.

Sure, it gets annoying when they don't try anything before they ask, or they keep having the same problem over and over again. But that's by far the minority.

Yeah I don't relate to this at all with computers because of the association with work. But I do with other things!

A friend asked if I could fix the zipper on his pants. I was very tired, glanced at it and said nah, too much work. You'd have to unsew everything, split the seams apart, and sew back together. But my brain wouldn't let go of it. I already solved in my bed. So that's what I did. The satisfaction of completion and the look on his face when I actually just fixed it after saying no was pure dopamine.

Part of it is not wanting to enable people to not even bother trying to do anything on their own.

But someone who at least tries? Oh yeah, sure I'll help!:-)

Depends on the topic. Friend recently said that his old PC will no longer receive Windows 10 security updates soon and he wants to try Linux, and just wanted quick advice. I had plans but I was over at his house within 10 minutes

The last two times I had relatives ask me for remote support to remove the latest super obvious virus they loaded up I just said "Oh, sorry... I don't really know Windows anymore." That's had a 100% success rate.

Same, if I came home in that condition and the first thing brought up was yet another tech issue, I'd fucking slam the door and go get wasted at a bar.

« I don’t know about windows we only have Mac at work, so I move to mac at home years » works pretty well for me.