Edit: Had to change the tshirt link from thinkgeek to amazon.
Originally posted February 24, 2009 on AIXchange
You’ve probably seen this. It’s perfect weekend attire for the IT professional. Maybe you don’t go as far as wearing a T-shirt that says, “No, I will not fix your computer.” But do you tell people to leave you alone when they ask for help?
If you work in IT, the world assumes that you can fix home computers. It doesn’t matter if you’re the network guy, the mainframe guy or a Web designer–people only understand that you work on computers, so you must naturally know how to fix their broken machines.
In an ideal world, home PC owners would fix their computers–or at least they’d know how to boot from media and run chkdsk. But in reality, people bring their computer issues to IT pros, either those they know or those they don’t.
With that in mind, here’s a story I’ve been following. Maybe you heard that themayor of Racine, Wis., was recently arrested in Dateline-esque style sting.
Disturbing as it is that child pornography was found on his computer, what’s interesting is the way he got caught. The (now former) mayor apparently “brought a personal computer to city hall and asked city workers to fix a problem with it. Whatever the workers found was turned over to Racine police, who in turn passed it on to the state task force.”
I also read that the technician who worked on this machine in August 2007 copied and saved the files, and then went to the mayor and suggested he delete them. It was more than a year before the computer tech turned the files over to the police.
If you ever do need to take your computer in for service, take caution. While you don’t have illegal files or images on your PC, you may have personal data and files that you don’t want others to see. And it’s not uncommon for computer technicians to find–and make copies of–materials they find on customer machines. Keep that in mind when you’re seeking help with your computer.
People really would be best off fixing their own computers, but in reality, their choices are generally limited to trusting strangers in a repair shop or trying their luck with the IT guy that they know. When you’re that IT guy, and people come to you, what do you say? Do you try to help out, or do you just point to the T-shirt?