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Fixing Macs door to door

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Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#161

Post by cynicalsecurity »

rfrey wrote: post #26

>I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct. I took the $500 and told the mom the tracking software was all set up. She nodded and told me she would check that it was working and "call me back if it wasn't". I knew she was never going to check, so that part didn't spook me. I just hoped the kid didn't get kidnapped or something I'm not sure why he didn't take…

It's evil to setup such software for kids. It's going to damage their mental health hundred times more than any potential harm the phone will do.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#162

Post by refulgentis »

qingcharles wrote: post #149
smith7018 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's weird, I must have repaired hundreds of computers. Hundreds of backups, reinstalls, but never once did I come across any porn. This was around 1995 though, so it was very early days of the Internet, and pre-digital cameras. Now, in the early 2000s I had to buy dozens of smartphones to test out an SMS relay (SMSC). I bought them all on eBay. Like 70% of them had homemade porn of the owners on them still...!

The variety of stories, nonchalance with which you tell them, and a few key signs of exaggeration had me writing off your comments. This one has me publicly saying it.

yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#163

Post by effingwewt »

refulgentis wrote: post #162
qingcharles wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, I must have repaired hundreds of computers. Hundreds of backups, reinstalls, but never once did I come across any porn. This was around 1995 though, so it was very early days of the Internet, and pre-digital cameras. Now, in the early 2000s I had to buy dozens of smartphones to test out an SMS relay (SMSC). I bought them all on eBay. Like 70% of them had homemade porn of the owners on them still...!

The variety of stories, nonchalance with which you tell them, and a few key signs of exaggeration had me writing off your comments. This one has me publicly saying it. yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

You've probably never had to repair phones or buy them online used.

What op said very much lines up with my own experience.

I remember flip phones with all kinds of stuff on them.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#164

Post by sq_ »

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 does seem like Apple and a few other companies still manage to do a half-decent job today. It takes a lot of running around through the phone tree and putting up with people going through the long script of solutions you already tried, but if you can get a few rungs up the escalation ladder you get to people who can make things happen, still.

Definitely not the same as it was, though :(

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#165

Post by effingwewt »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #87
KennyBlanken wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a PSA (not trying to harp on parent commenter, just taking their comment as an opportunity to soapbox) but never, ever, every go into a room or building that is getting smokey from something burning. It's how you N+1 the casualty/death count in a fire. Unlike the heroes in films and movies, you don't have Plot Armor. It is incredibly common that people think they can just go back in holding their breath or stay…

Firefighter here. I will walk into a burning building if I'm wearing bunker gear, breathing from a working SCBA, carrying a Halligan or axe so I can chop my way back out if I have to, and my buddy is with me carrying a hose squirting water. Lots of water. Said hose must be attached to a BRT (big red truck) on the other end so that when I can't see shit and my air alarm starts beeping we can crawl along by feeling sai…

Really appreciate the work you do and the dangers you risk.

o7

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#166

Post by steveBK123 »

gen220 wrote: post #159
steveBK123 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

These stories of justifying great expenses amuse me, because I can't help but compare them to Warren Buffet's office (which is mostly sports memorabilia, loose papers, a telephone [1]). >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. Poignant! There are plenty of people and businesses happy to pry off a chunk along the way. :) [1]:…

Warren Buffett is probably the great exception to the rule of Billionaires pretending to live commonly.

Most of the other "oh I drive a Honda" or "I live with roommates" origin stories turn out to be factual, but incomplete as we find out they have roommates in a $20M penthouse / commute in the Honda for optics but have a garage full of luxury vehicles / own 27 homes / etc.

Kind of like the classic Steve Jobs "hide the Porsches" story.

That said, I bet Buffett owns at least 2 MacBooks?

And really at the end of the day, anyone with a FAANG level job should have backup compute in the case of failure. It's a nothing expense next to the income we derive from using compute.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#167

Post by busterarm »

wkat4242 wrote: post #150
freedomben wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. A friend of mine did work in a small town hard-hit by the changing economy, and multiple times had offers of sex (more commonly oral sex) in lieu of payment (or partial payment). If you're not picky then some of these people have a lot of experience and are good at what they do. But if toothless/meth-toothed people, usually not recently showered, and sometimes with a fair amount of extra weight is something t…

Uhm if you're fixing PCs as I did you don't end up working for meth-toothed people :P Maybe not the most attractive people no, but regular middle-class people at the very least. Especially when you were fixing macs which were even more premium priced here in Europe back then than they are now. I fixed all sorts of stuff but I would not have marginalised clients. I guess it's also why I didn't get such offers :P I did…

Comment OP here. Most of the people who were my clients were artist types who moved to the public transportation fringes of Brooklyn where rent was the cheapest (at that time). They were barely skating by and usually had pretty roachy apartments.

A large percentage of these folks were very into drug use... in a way that it hindered achieving the goals that they moved to NY to accomplish.

I took on these clients specifically because my store was going to fleece them and not fix their problems whereas I could and reasonably quickly. As broke creatives with broken computers their lives were likely to spiral into a dark place otherwise.

I dealt with way more desperate situations than middle-class people with regular computer problems. This was the "I pirated Adobe Creative Suite and have a deadline but the virus has taken over my computer" era.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#168

Post by ByHookOrCrook »

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…

No you didn't get hit on - americans in the mid 90s were racist toward chinamen

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#169

Post by wlesieutre »

refulgentis wrote: post #162
qingcharles wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, I must have repaired hundreds of computers. Hundreds of backups, reinstalls, but never once did I come across any porn. This was around 1995 though, so it was very early days of the Internet, and pre-digital cameras. Now, in the early 2000s I had to buy dozens of smartphones to test out an SMS relay (SMSC). I bought them all on eBay. Like 70% of them had homemade porn of the owners on them still...!

The variety of stories, nonchalance with which you tell them, and a few key signs of exaggeration had me writing off your comments. This one has me publicly saying it. yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

Early 2000’s we’re talking phones like the Nokia 6600

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nokia-6600-review/

> You can also capture the moment on video with the handset's video recorder, which renders brief (10-second), fuzzy images and lo-fi audio. The 6600 stores clips as QCIF files in resolutions of either 176x144 or 128x96, and you can play them using the phone's onboard RealOne player. We got an undeniable kick out of shooting video with the 6600, but the actual clips aren't exactly Oscar worthy. As with the phone book, picture and video storage is limited by only the phone's available memory, but if you're running low, you can store your recordings on the included 32MB MMC media.

Nobody’s saying they were hour long HD professional porn productions

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#170

Post by benatkin »

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…

> this is my schoolwork computer and we don't have money like that

I would prefer to accept this as the baseline and not have to explain why my purchase is important. A large amount of situations involving ownership of a computer are similarly important when it comes to someone being in a pivotal part of their life and not having extra money.

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