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Fixing Macs door to door

matduggan.com

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Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#131

Post by smith7018 »

qingcharles wrote: post #48

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around. I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe. One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequen…

I also did this in the 2000s and while it was fun to peer into their lives, the amount of porn I was forced to see on elderly people's machines was... not great. Especially during those rare occurrences where they wanted to watch what I was doing to "learn how to use the computer." Just awkward all around.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#132

Post by thelittleone »

smith7018 wrote: post #131
qingcharles wrote: post #48

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around. I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe. One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequen…

I also did this in the 2000s and while it was fun to peer into their lives, the amount of porn I was forced to see on elderly people's machines was... not great. Especially during those rare occurrences where they wanted to watch what I was doing to "learn how to use the computer." Just awkward all around.

Found same on laptop of an insurance company CFO. Had to ignore it.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#133

Post by sandworm101 »

qingcharles wrote: post #48

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around. I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe. One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequen…

So non-manufacturer repair of electronics lead to vice, criminality and exploding ink cartridges? Don't anyone tell Louis Rossmann. He has whole videos about that being a myth.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#134

Post by ftio »

I was once an Apple Certified Technical Consultant, mostly doing managed services-type work for small businesses in NYC but would sometimes get the call to go to someone's house, usually an owner or other senior-level exec at one of these businesses.

These were serious houses. Huge houses out in the Hamptons or four-story brownstones on the Upper East Side.

One call, I was doing work to resolve an issue with a customer's network, which consisted of a number of AirPort Extremes. One of these was in their bedroom, under a bed.

For fifteen minutes or so, I lay on my belly, working away at my laptop trying to reset the godforsaken thing, when I spotted a small chair a few feet away. Pulled it over, and began working in a much more comfortable seated position. As I grew comfortable, I'd lean back on the back two legs of the chair and kind of rock back and forth.

As I'm doing this, the owner pops her head in, saying, "Hey, anything I can get--oh my god please get up."

Turns out the chair was pre-federal (ie from the early 1700s) and was probably worth at least my annual salary. Fortunately no damage, but it scarred me. I was not invited back to do repair work at that house.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#135

Post by steveBK123 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #115

From the entire article, this paragraph stood out the most to me > The golden rule that every single one of these assistants warned me about was not to bother the husband when he gets home. Typically these CEO-types would come in, say a few words to their kids and then retreat to their own area of the house. These were often TV rooms or home theaters, elaborate set pieces with $100,000+ of AV equipment in there that…

I had a friend in school back in nowhere whose family for some reason resembled this, without the money or in any way being a captain of industry as they say. He in no way made enough money to household help, or even to fully support the families lifestyle as the wife did do some part time work.

It was one of the weirdest experiences being there and the mom was super prepping everything for The DAD arrival, down to having prepared him a completely separate meal of different food to be consumed on his own later. It was clear that whatever she cooked for him was better, and off limits, to her, kids, and me as a guest.

Was super weird. One of those moments where you suspect decent odds the dad was a wife beater.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#136

Post by bookofjoe »

TylerE wrote: post #63
2143 wrote: post #50

The experiences of people who meet a wide range of customers are always interesting. I had read a similar story of a man who worked at car showrooms of various brands (such as Honda, Toyota). > Look it's important that if you see Oprah, you act normally, please don't ask her for an autograph or a photo I never understood why people drool when they see celebrities. Movie actors, musicians, sportspersons etc — I like w…

The trick, and I say this as someone who's gotten to meet a fair number of musicians, including some semi-famous ones, is that they're people. Plus they're also huge music nerds. Just mention Cheap Trick and you're in... (Although at the same time, do know how to read the room - it's not that hard to tell when someone just wants to be left alone. Those genuine interactions are better than any autograph or selfie.

Sort of related: I was friends with a world-famous surgeon at UCLA, chairman of the urology department (he married an ex-girlfriend whom I stayed on good terms with).

His patient roster was a who's who of Hollywood: Groucho Marx, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, etc. He told me the secret of getting these famous people to follow his orders: he always included something in his post-op instructions that would force them to do something they'd much rather not do.

Making them compliant created a kind of master-servant relationship with the surgeon as master; these megastars were so unused to following orders that the harsher the Rx, the more they regarded the doctor as a demi-god.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#137

Post by SoKamil »

Jonmade wrote: post #118

Reading these stories about fixing Macs in the 90s is like unearthing a treasure trove of tech lore. Who would have thought that a day job could lead to encounters with high society, complete with inkjet printers turning into unexpected smoke machines, and a twist of fate leading to a starring role in the world of digital piracy? It's fascinating how these tales intertwine technology with the thrill of adventure, alm…

Did you use LLM to write this comment? It felt a little bit unnatural to my eye so I put it into gptzero and it spit out a 91% of probability that this was generated.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#138

Post by steveBK123 »

Stampson_Gerhig wrote: post #130
_fat_santa wrote: post #115

From the entire article, this paragraph stood out the most to me > The golden rule that every single one of these assistants warned me about was not to bother the husband when he gets home. Typically these CEO-types would come in, say a few words to their kids and then retreat to their own area of the house. These were often TV rooms or home theaters, elaborate set pieces with $100,000+ of AV equipment in there that…

I spent a year working for an A/V installation company - whole house integrated sound systems, media servers, security, etc - and their clientele was solely multi-millionaires of various nationalities. My job was primarily as a programmer for the control systems these installations used so I spent the majority of my working day in clients homes. They were without exception the most sterile, vapid, soulless environmen…

There's a lot of jobs/markets where the physical hardware is not even remotely the main cost.

Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data vendors at $25k/50k/100k per year, etc. If you are professionally managing money (like a family office or something) at a scale of say $1B then having all these soft costs add up to say $1M/year is basically nothing.. 0.1%. In that world, a $1k vs $4k MacBook is basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures.

That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one.

Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour.

For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#139

Post by AtiRadeon9700 »

rvba wrote: post #103
christoph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the VCD/SVCD/DVD/PS1/PS2 days, piracy was absolutely heavily interwoven with organised criminal gangs. I couldn’t comment on the current state, but I’d be surprised if there was enough money in media piracy for organised crime to even glance at it, given the vast and easy profits now available in narcotics and fraud. “HK silvers” were industrially pressed and printed CDs and DVDS you could buy in any market s…

How would organized crime benefit from setting up an illegal FTP? It just cut in their profits of selling pirated CDs with movies or software

Those FTPs were not publically accessible -- the users, numbering in the dozens or hundreds at most, were software crackers, dvd rippers, couriers, etc. So normally a 'top site' FTP would see a steady incoming flow of brand new pirate material that the site owners could use in the money-making side of their operation.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#140

Post by steveBK123 »

yardie wrote: post #96

One of the things I miss by reading this post is how empowered CSRs were back in those days. Today, everything is scripted and highly metricized. Going through the customer service line today will get you the run around and lot of toothless solutions. No one can do anything and even "escalation" mostly means handing you off to another powerless CSR to continue the runaround. This post reminds me of my youth. I had a…

It's interesting how rapidly the beancounters quashed CSR autonomy and put everything behind inscrutable ticketing systems.

Even at relatively small companies, with internal tools and support teams this happened pretty rapidly in the 2010s. I've worked at all sorts of small companies with as few as 500 employees where we initially just had a list of "guys" to call for different issues.. and eventually some Big Company MBA Type would come in and kill it. Next thing you know there's 5 different ticketing system queues obfuscating the fact that it's still the same 1-2 guys supporting each queue.

Turnaround time got worse, users were unhappier, support team was unhappier, we had to pay SaaS companies for their ticketing system, and probably hire a Global Head Of __ to run the whole thing. BUT.. we now could measure all the misery! Incredible!

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