I'm a sad excuse for tech support

As my twentieth anniversary as a weekly columnist for The Alliance Review approaches, I continue to look back at earlier work. Here is a piece from 2014. 

My in-laws had a tech-heavy Christmas, which spells D-O-O-M for me in the new year.

My mother-in-law got a laptop, my father-in-law got an iPhone, and I got a migraine. A standard policy in the family is the one who bought it services it, but like Obamacare, implementation of the policy has been somewhat suspect.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m on the hook for every installation, software and hardware question, like the Geek Squad minus the black-and-white Volkswagen bug.

Now anybody who knows me will testify that I am a sad excuse for tech support. I like my little toys, but I’m also very happy to let others work out the kinks and then show me how to use them.

Any tech savvy I have comes from Googling every question, no matter how inane. “How do you take a photo of your desktop?” Google it. “What’s the best way to merge two email accounts?” Google it. “I dropped my phone in the toilet. What do I do now?” Google it. If the web is the world’s instruction manual, Google is the index, and I thumb through it often.

But back to my in-laws. To make their new laptop worthwhile, they needed wireless Internet, and that calls for a router.

Despite the fact that I’ve been leasing the same router from my cable company since George W. was in office and have therefore paid more than $1,000 for a device that costs $40 at the corner Radio Shack (something my wife never fails to remind me each time she opens the cable bill), I was assigned to buy the hardware.

This was surprisingly easy, as was the installation. (I might do it at my own home in the next decade or two.) I plugged the router into my in-law’s modem and voila! instant wireless service.

Just as I was thinking this whole task would take less than five minutes and that I would soon be lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling and thinking deep thoughts, I hit a significant snag with my mother-in-law. Our conversation went like this:

Me: What’s the password to your new laptop?

Mo-in-Law: I don’t know. Is it the same as my email password?

Me: I don’t know. What’s your email password?

Mo-in-Law: I don’t know. It comes up automatically when I log onto my old computer.

Me: Did you write it down anywhere?

Mo-in-Law: Hold on.

She produces a notebook filled with approximately three thousand words and numbers, some underlined and others circled.

Me: Great. Which one?

Mo-in-Law: I don’t know. Try this one.

Me: (typing) Doesn’t work.

Mo-in-Law: Then try that one.

Reread previous two sentences approximately three thousand times.

Me: None of these works.

Mo-in-Law: Oh, then try this.

She launches into a recitation of numbers and letters involving her birthday, mother’s maiden name, cups of flour in her favorite cake recipe and approximate hectares of land owned by British royalty. I type each into the box on her computer screen. Meanwhile, in the real world, more than two hundred animals go extinct, 6.73 million passengers ride the Moscow Metro and Hershey’s makes another 60 million Kisses. No success.

Ultimately, I resort to Google, giving away my ancient Chinese secret for tech gurudom right in front of her.

The answer is ugly: Restore the entire system, which wipes out all files the user has amassed over the life of the machine.

In my mother-in-law’s case, this is approximately two hours’ worth of Facebook postings of teddy bears and kittens. Not exactly a Shakespearean tragedy, but the reboot takes over an hour, during which time I am (ital.) not (end ital.) lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling and thinking deep thoughts.

From here on, all passwords are stored in a secret location on my phone, accessible at any hour of day or night whenever The Call comes.

It is then I realize a key difference between the Geek Squad and me: Geek Squad support has a finite lifespan, but my contract is indefinite, entered into with “I do” and terminating only when “death do us part.”

I ask Google for advice. The top response: “Marry an orphan.”

Thanks for nothing, Google.