«Help me Thomas, I can’t get in!» How I became my family’s IT support

I love my yellow iPhone 11. We spend many hours together every day – I’ve already reported on this. I’m very familiar with its settings and can solve almost all problems that arise during everyday smartphone use myself. The same goes for my iMac.

But looking back, I’d have been better off just keeping that to myself. Ever since my family realised that I have a helpful and understandable answer to practically every Apple question, I’ve become their official IT support. My son’s mother also likes to use this service, as does my partner, although they both already belong to a generation that rarely reaches the limits of its technological understanding. They come to me once, at most twice a year. My relatives, on the other hand, well: it’s a bit more common.

A miniature Edward Snowden

Our favourite customer here at Meyer’s Apple Support is my father. Like me, he logged thousands of flight simulator hours in the 1980s and 1990s (we took turns on our Atari ST, so it was almost a 24-hour flight operation) and has gained quite a bit of expertise since then. However, he also has a strong need for security, as evidenced by the fact that he has a separate password for each login.

This isn’t wrong in itself, and the mere fact that it takes him several minutes of searching each time to find out which password belongs to which login using various sheets of A4 paper can be described as solid protection against unauthorised access. My assistance subsequently mainly consists of assigning his handwritten notes to the correct purpose. Or to stop iCloud from hijacking his photos, contacts and appointments. He doesn’t trust Clouds. He’s our family’s Edward Snowden.

My mother, on the other hand, acquired a smartphone and laptop late in life and has a decidedly casual relationship with them. Although I’ve explained and demonstrated to her many times what a bookmark is and how to set it, she consistently saves web pages to her computer; along with all her pictures, sometimes on the desktop, sometimes in some random folder. And when I then go to clean it, i.e. delete everything, she naturally asks: «Well, how else am I supposed to save something that interests me? It says save right there!»

Things get really metaphorical when we talk on the phone. I’m often greeted by «Thomas, this isn’t working!», whereupon I have to elaborately determine what «it» is, and – far more complicated – what led to it «not working». Even an «I can’t get in!» is quite hard to decipher. «My screen is completely black!» on the other hand, although never ideal, seems comparatively banal.

The Bermuda Triangle in human form

Finally, my sister wouldn’t actually need my help at all, but she’s a virtual Bermuda Triangle. Time and again, devices haunt her immediate surroundings or even give up the ghost altogether. Voice messages aren’t available. Ticket machines that were working perfectly just a minute ago black out as soon as my sister approaches them (possibly a hereditary trait inherited from my mother). Cash registers crash when she’s about to pay. Photo albums mysteriously disappear. She recently purchased a new MacBook Air and reported that the battery performance was even worse than her previous model, which is now eight years old.

She could probably be put to excellent military use – you’d simply have to place my sister next to sensitive enemy structures – but this poses a considerable problem during everyday use. Again and again she calls me – if that’s even technically possible – to complain about the total failure of all her systems.

I usually can’t offer much more than cheerful support and my deepest condolences, which rarely helps my exasperated sibling.

However, the real IT expert in our family is my son. He can happily command an iPad in his sleep, hardly ever has a question about how to use it, and impatiently snatches the Nintendo Switch controller out of my hands as I apparently take far too long to browse the Mario Party settings. It’s obvious that he thinks I’m a hopelessly tech-illiterate moron.

That’s just fine with me: I’m happy to give up the job of family tech support.

Do you also have to solve IT puzzles for family and friends all the time? Tell me about it in the comments!