Thread: IT Elitism: get paid because of people's ignorance

From a post on Slashdot:

I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity.

It seems like no other specialists have that problem on such a routine basis. When someone's doctor says "you have X disease" they generally don't look at him and say "no I don't." When an electrician says that something needs to be rewired, they might get a second opinion but they don't usually argue with the guy. Same deal with mechanics. With almost any other specialist it's understood that if you come to them, it's because you recognize that they know a lot more about medicine, electricity, or auto repair than you do.

What do techies get? They get uncooperative users who come to you for help and when you give it, they argue with you and bicker and drag their feet every step of the way, insisting that such-and-such can't possibly work, until it does work, at which time they complain about how long it took or they give you some bullshit about how they just tried that and it didn't work for them. Of course there are exceptions, but this is the norm and I can't understand why this applies so much more to computing. What I am talking about has nothing to do with the user's technical expertise or anything like that. It's the simple principle that if you know more about computing or networking than I do, there is no point in seeking my help. No technical expertise is required to understand this simple principle.

Anyway, for the non-technically inclined who think that we're a bunch of arrogant elitists, this is an example of why we say users are stupid. It's not because we expect them to become experts or even technically knowledgable, it's because we constantly see users complicate simple things, drop all basic standards of common sense and mutual respect, and otherwise engage in behavior that is in no one's interests, particularly theirs.

My brother is an IT guy and when i worked in his company everyone would call him Nick Burns. Its funny cause my brother was almost like this guy here;

Saturday Night Live - Nick Burns - Video - NBC.com

Originally Posted by Yanick

My brother is an IT guy and when i worked in his company everyone would call him Nick Burns. Its funny cause my brother was almost like this guy here;

Saturday Night Live - Nick Burns - Video - NBC.com

I never have to tell people to get out of my way, they come and get me and then offer me their chair. I don't have a hard time with anyone at my job who needs help they are usually so glad that I will know what to do that they are anxious to bow to me for fixing their problems.... I'm not even the official IT guy at my company it just so happens that I have a degree in the field along with a gift for understanding these contraptions....

Im seriously considering setting up some sort of part time IT service around uni. 80% of the problems anybody has ever shown me have been as simple as:


- running a virus checker

- running a spyware checker

- defragging all the drives

- stopping unwanted programs at startup

- installing a firewall


Thats it.

Occasionally i will need to break out the external harddrive and backup their stuff for a drive format and fresh OS install.

Sometimes i'll need to use some sort of OS that you can run from a CD because theirs is shagged.

The rest of the time its a hardware problem, which can include anything from serious dust issues to a fried motherboard.

Easy fucking money.

If it were regular enough for me I would do it full-time. I had my own PC Repair Co. when I first got out of school I did a few websites, installed a network and Point of Sale system for a golf resort and helped a few users. Then things dried up so I had to find a different job. I still do small things on the side usually laptops for friends or friends of friends of coworkers. It's still good money, in fact I got a couple hundred the other day for setting up my spare laptop to Telnet into a datalogger and then graphing the data in Excel. That was less than an hour and a half, when he asked me how much I said $50 but he said "nah, it's the Holidays here's $200 and thankyou so much I would have never figured this out..."

Originally Posted by KelJu

On a side note, when did Pigpen get into IT?

I forgot about Nick Burns, those were the days. I never treated people like that but sometimes you feel that way, they probably feel the same about me not knowing what their job is like half the time.

Originally Posted by KelJu

A thread at somethingawful reminded me of all the times I made easy money working on people's shit. I can remember countless times of driving 45 minutes to someone's house just to power cycle a router or turn the damn printer on for a quick $150.00.

lawl@ not a virus .exe