More Than Living

IT in the family">Parental technical support — keeping IT in the family

There comes a time in most children’s life when their par­ents, after many years of self­less care and devo­tion, begin to age, and a role reversal takes place. When it comes to tech­no­logy, that day nor­mally arrives before a child’s 10^th birth­day presents.

These days, kids have to start explain­ing the world to their par­ents over social net­work­ing or a TV remote con­trol, but in my case it was our home com­puter – a Sin­clair ZX80 that actu­ally did arrive around my 10^th birth­day. My brother and I used to care­fully copy in the simple BASIC games prin­ted in com­puter magazines of the day – most months they wouldn’t work until cor­rec­tions in the fol­low­ing issue. Mean­while dad, who actu­ally worked with com­puters, looked on with a mix of pride and incom­pre­hen­sion: he had men who did the coding.

Our early exper­i­ence with com­puters prob­ably goes some way to explain­ing how I ended up fixing the damn things for a living. After a few false starts I fell into tech­nical sup­port, and had the pleas­ure of dis­sem­bling any number of broken com­puters and reas­sembling almost as many work­ing ones. I got out of that game, but nobody seems to have told my parents.

Which is how come I spent some of the week­end help­ing my dad create a blog, and my even­ings so far this week trying to unbreak my mum’s PC. I don’t mind of course – they’ve done enough for me that it’s prob­ably the least I could do – but some random beha­viour from mum’s com­puter in par­tic­u­lar is remind­ing me why I wanted to stop fixing them for a day job.

In fact, I’ve given up. So random was the beha­viour that, although I have a theory about the cause, I haven’t been able to prove it. So mum’s got her com­puter back un-​​mended.

For a child, it comes as a shock to dis­cover your par­ents are fal­lible. By the time you’re a parent, I guess your expect­a­tions are lower.

IMAGE by Flickr user AMagill

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​25 11:10:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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