Memes

And when your radio is broken, you don't ask a composer

“You use Arch, now, btw”

I just tell them that I only deal with Linux and that is usually enough to dissuade.

Did that for my sister but nowadays I just use the excuse: "Sorry I can't help you, I don't use Windows anymore".

The real problem is when a relative know that I'm computer guy and ask me to fix the TV/air conditioner or like my father once did: setup an antenna

Did that, kind of. The system's been running flawlessly for like a decade now. I'm not sure if they even understand the difference.

and "actually needing Microsoft support but coming to you cause Microsoft doesn't give a shit about private end users"

Yeah, just read that their newest server OS puts a recovery partition to the right of the primary partition by default.
Which is completely useless on a server, and prevents you from growing the partition when you run out of space.

At this point, they're basically saying "Office and AD guarantee our monopoly, so we can push out literal monkey shit, and tell admins to deal with it."

mashes the A button to skip dialog

Stare at their computer blankly
"Wait, they got rid of the green hill????"

imo - you are not the outlier, you just haven't yet progressed to the mostly inevitable stage where people take advantage of your help, or their spyware ridden dumpster fire of a laptop breaks and they blame you because you "touched it last" - never mind that was 6 months ago and the only thing you did was change the screensaver timeout.

I like helping people, but not with what I do for my day job. Ask me to shovel your driveway or help you move or proofread your emails or anything but more of what I’ve already spent all day doing.

I used to work in IT, and both then when I was on my personal time, and now, I do not love helping people, but all it takes is someone else doing it poorly would annoy me enough I would end up helping someone

I actually like helping people a lot, too.

I don't think IT folks are naturally misanthropic or antisocial, but I personally got beat down so much by wanting to help and realizing they didn't care to listen, or weren't willing to learn anything. At all. Even though they came to me with the problem, it seemed they mostly just wanted me to fix it for them with zero understanding required, or to "be emotional at someone" or were lonely.

I also got so tired of being friendly and enthusiastically educational with advising my relatives or friends, only to then watch them completely disregard 100% of my advice they came to me for.

In the former job I'm still putting myself back together from, most of the public peoples who visited me would have been better served by visiting a psychologist / therapist first, but I was cheaper (free). :(

Often when it's something I do specialize in and I get all excited, that's when they choose to gloss over and I can tell they just want me to stop talking.

I hate having biases against people, but there very much are definitely "normies" who are threatened by the prospect of having to activate their neurons for the first time since they stumbled out of their highest level of education, and only learned to think when it was forced upon them.

Makes a guy feel pretty crappy. So I'm not as forthcoming with my skillset as I used to be in casual company. Lol

Step-IT, can you help me with my hard drive problem?

The biggest career mistake I've ever made is opening an Excel macro and changing two characters to make it count a thing again.

I was then permanently labelled Cracks the Technomancer, master of all things technology. It fucking sucks.