Fixing Macs door to door | Hacker News Reader

Fixing Macs door to door

matduggan.com

1,033 pointsjnord203 comments

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 frequency, and the inkjet released its entire content of magic smoke, which incidentally was enough to fill a very large penthouse apartment. I ran her out of the apartment, then I remembered it was still plugged in, so I had to stagger totally blind through the apartment to find the damned thing and unplug it lol

That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP in the world and a dump site for most of the top pirate groups like Razor 1911.

Wild read!

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 low or cover their mouth with their clothing like in hollywood...but they take a bit of a breath, cough, and suck in lungfuls of the smoke, and are almost immediately incapacitated.

A lot of things, like PVC for example, release chlorine gas when they burn, which immediately turns your lung mucus into hydrochloric acid. All the other things in the smoke is incredibly bad for you both short and long-term, too.

The smoke is also flammable. Opening a door lets in oxygen, and oxygen + fuel + heat = a fuckton of heat, very suddenly.

I really wish that writers would suffer legal liability for shit like showing people entering a building with their shirt over their mouth - it's where people get the idea that they can so that sort of stuff.

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 said hose and follow it back out to safety.

Most important, I must have a reasonable suspicion that there are lives inside that might be savable.

Without all that, screw it. That building gets to burn.

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

> crawl along by feeling said hose

Smooth bump bump, back to the pump!

But yep, absolutely. We will risk a lot, in a calculated manner, for savable life. And I will not send my guys interior on a confirmed empty defensive fire.

We just had a house fire over the holidays. It started in the basement, I was to the flames in 10 seconds, using an extinguisher another 5-6 seconds later. That failed... I spent another 30 seconds scrambling for anything that might suffocate the flames.... then I had to get out. I was 'upwind' of how the flames were spreading, but was not prepared for the power to suddenly cut out in a room now quickly filling with black smoke.

The whole ordeal was 1-2 minutes before I had to evacuate the house and watch it all burn, helplessly.

Even a good plan isn't always enough; most don't have any plan.

Holy cow.

How did the fire start, and where was it initially spreading that went up so fast?

Sorry to hear that, that's awful. I'm glad you (and everyone else hopefully) made it out (relatively) safely.

Wow. I am sorry to hear that. Glad you are ok, and hope no one was hurt.

> It is incredibly common that people think they can just go back in holding their breath or stay low or cover their mouth with their clothing like in hollywood

Thanks, I had the slight impression that this was true and now feel incredibly stupid.

Yeah, as another firefighter, please don't. That often ends tragically, a t-shirt or towel will do nothing to stop smoke particulates.

Yes, it was dumb as hell. I realized that once I'd taken several steps in and could no longer see the way out o_O

Most likely that printer blew the capacitor by the power feed. It smoked its 'bunch of pixie dust' and was dead. Just the air needed to clear. But yes never go into a burning building, unless you're willing to die trying to save something or someone.

> That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP

Statements like this seem to agree with the anti-piracy groups' narrative about piracy being closely related to organized crime, a claim that initially seemed questionable to me.

That narrative is idiotic, sure pirates might buy stolen drives, same as gangs use knives. Stopping one won't affect the other.

Back in the VCD/SVCD/DVD/PS1/PS2 days, piracy was absolutely heavily interwoven with organised criminal gangs. I couldn’t comment on the current state, but I’d be surprised if there was enough money in media piracy for organised crime to even glance at it, given the vast and easy profits now available in narcotics and fraud.

“HK silvers” were industrially pressed and printed CDs and DVDS you could buy in any market street in SE Asia. Later they started flooding into Europe. For a few years you’d often see illegal DVD sellers outside supermarkets in the UK with all their warez spread out across the pavement for sale.

There was even a local enterprising porn DVD seller in our local area that went around all the local pubs flogging pirated porn DVDs to the inebriated chaps just before closing time. Illegally pressed pirate disks that he purchased from another criminal who mass illegally imported them for resale. These weren’t disks he burnt off with his home PC.

Many of the large FTP sites when I was involved in the piracy community 20 or so years ago certainly seemed to have nefarious links as well if you dared to look or think (so you generally didn’t). Sure, some were just illicitly set up on fast college/university networks by enterprising students, but there were certainly many running around that time that were funded by organised crime.

*edit - I mention above I doubt organised crime is interested in media piracy now, but on reflection I suddenly realised how I’m probably quite wrong on this. There are plenty of illegal IPTV services (re streamed PPV, commercial channels, streaming providers) being illegally sold through the same people & channels as narcotics.

How would organized crime benefit from setting up an illegal FTP?

It just cut in their profits of selling pirated CDs with movies or software

Those FTPs were not publically accessible -- the users, numbering in the dozens or hundreds at most, were software crackers, dvd rippers, couriers, etc. So normally a 'top site' FTP would see a steady incoming flow of brand new pirate material that the site owners could use in the money-making side of their operation.

I am very annoyed by TV and streaming services. I have a very nice TV which I specifically chose because it had Google TV builtin, so I wouldn't have to suffer through any third party TV interfaces.

My gosh, it is not very good. I get advertised TV shows I cannot watch all the time. I have legally purchased several streaming services (netflix/disney/prime/apple/etc.) but I have to open each service as a separate application to just browse.

I do not own a TV license, but I will be advertised shows on iPlayer which I _legally_ cannot watch.

My friend has an illegal IPTV subscription, something in the order of $100 for 12 months of access. This has one single interface that lists thousands of live channels, across multiple countries. It has streaming content from every paid streaming service in one searchable / sortable / listable interface. The provider also has their very own branded 'streaming service' which has content in true 4K HDR. Films ripped from 4K disks in full bitrate.

With the rise of Steam / Netflix I have only not paid to consume media when it was not available in my region, now we have another half-dozen services the content has become fragmented.

I currently pay 4x for 1/10th of the service my friend does with illegal IPTV.

Piracy has become attractive again. I'm not sure how this is going to get solved.

Really I want a service where I pay my $10 a month and can stream/watch _everything_ and the royalties just get paid to the content creator. Much like Spotify does for music. I wonder if we will get the same content fragmentation in music streaming in the future; Swift's new album only releasing on Tide, for example. I hope not.

Well, I had personal contact with several large-scale pirates, and AFAIK, they were not involved with organized crime, they were merely well-placed to do high volume transactions.

My first job I had a peer, a low-level contracting employee. We worked in the NOC of a regional ISP. Therefore our backbone was a powerful T1-T3 in the early 90s, and we had comparatively massive storage capacity. This fellow was basically college-age, and he amassed a gigantic repository of pirated software which he termed "AHAB". Most of the other staff in the office knew about his AHAB repository, and he distributed the stuff via anonymous FTP. Often we would partake in such AHAB hauls, but I tried to stay away and stay ignorant of the inner machinations of this stuff. I was ostensibly a legit employee for a legit ISP.

Then not too much later, still mid-90s, I went to work for a VAR of SPARCstation clones. The IT boss guy was a prolific pornographer. He was well-known on the relevant Usenet groups by a pseudonym. I had no trouble figuring out his identity, and his office was obviously set up so coworkers couldn't find out about all the porn he viewed on the job. His big Sauder desk was facing the door and the monitor was not visible by anyone in the room except him. So he also took advantage of the employer's decent Internet connection and our sizeable Novell storage network, to store his porn and trade it, I guess for free, with other Usenet posters.

I'm curious--when you say "a prolific pornographer," do you mean watcher or, uh, performer? Reading it I think the latter but it sounds like you mean the former.

Oh yeah, sorry, as far as I could tell, he was a collector and trader, not a performer, but who knows, really?

That's the point, as long as it's illegal criminal would reap the profits. Same with everything else

They ran a legit front business of fitting double-glazed windows I discovered one day by accident, when I ran into them mid-install at a hair salon lol. I'm guessing it gave them some access to the buildings they were stealing from, and at least the opportunity to scope out jobs. The stuff I was buying was mostly commercial, sometimes Sun equipment, etc.

I eventually got raided by the cops and they took all the stuff at my house, but not all the servers which were shoved directly on the JA.NET.

Funnily I would rip off the criminals. Especially on hard drives. They would bring me bags of HDDs and they would say "Hey, we got this 5GB drive for you" and I would bullshit them, "No, that's a 500MB, you're reading it wrong", or "That's unformatted capacity.. it's only 3GB formatted mate".

This was in the 90s before torrenting was widespread. Decentralizing filesharing means criminal groups aren't needed and can't easily make a profit off of it.

I specialized for a while in NYC as someone who get a network of Macs connected to the internet with an ISDN line.

I know exactly what you are talking about.

>I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe.

When you applied for the job did they list this under the benefits?

It was mentioned by my predecessor who was then my boss lol. I thought he was joking...

I did window cleaning in the 2000s and went inside many rich folks homes. It was my favorite part of the job.

But I had a much different experience. They were kind, more humanizing than middle class housewives, and very proud of their homes which were often fully custom to their spec. Most had built a successful business. Perhaps my curiosity went a long way to flatter them, or they saw themselves in me - young and hustling.

>They were kind, more humanizing than middle class housewives

Honestly most "rich rich" people I've come across are like that. Most "snobby" rich people are not honestly that rich at all, comparatively, or are very new money etc. (think of "dude who sold their startup for 20 million").

An ex worked in luxury travel. She said you could always tell rich-rich from newly rich immediately. The first group would shop for value and look for experiences. Money was like water for them, plentiful but unexceptional. The latter would just hit everything with the biggest number next to it.

I've heard the same. The dude with the Ferrari, Armani suit and Rolex is not as rich as he wants you to think.

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.

Found same on laptop of an insurance company CFO. Had to ignore it.

Yup, C-level execs changing file extensions from .avi to .xls etc. lol.

I found a stash of porn in C:\Windows\System22 - it caught my attention because I figured it had to be some malware.

One of the directors backed up his laptop by copying all his data to a network folder that we primarily used for development. Was looking for a specific image and found whole folder of photos of my boss (director's very, very attractive wife) naked. I had to tell him before anyone else found them. He just grinned, asked if I'd seen them, and then deleted them.

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...!

Could you share them?

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.

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

That's why serial exaggerators are corrosive to a community. Yeah, did phones with a video camera exist? Yup. You would have had to be there, know the 8-step fermi estimate chain for the likelihood for a multitude of reasons. (ex. these were slow, terrible beasts extremely difficult to use, they'd very rarely be a heat of the moment option, and if you were preparing, there were a multitude of 100x quality options that anyone who had a video shooting phone then would have had)

Even then you have no defense for taking them too literally, there could be 1000 reasons you're actually just angry and taking it out on them, have a personal dislike, etc.

Another way to talk about why it's clear: inter-alia, multiple rich "bored housewives" throwing themselves at computer repairmen is about as likely as obtaining multiple smart phones with video capabilities and videos and selfshot porn videos on them in the early 2000s. Much less when you start throwing stuff in like "actually I was warned of [the housewives x computer repairman problem] before I took the job!" Lmao.

Usually you wanna be thinking about the cumulative probability of what they say, not the one-off probability.

Are you OK? You keep saying video, why? There were video clips, but mostly photos. This was the UK where these types of phones were very commonplace -- your experience might be from a USA perspective where flip phones were still the rage? :)

This was 2004 through 2005.

This was the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925205401/http://txtstar.co...

Had a similar experience. Long ago when I was younger and poorer I offered IT support on my country's equivalent of Craigslist.

Fairly well-off elderly chap wanted me to fix his laptop - was an underpowered machine that somehow got Vista installed on it (but no graphics drivers, so everything was in 640x480) so was unusably slow.

Now the proper answer to that would be to just tell him to buy a new computer, but I didn't want to let him down so I figured this machine might be salvageable with a lightweight Linux distro.

Couple months pass by and then I get a call. He's asking why videos aren't working. I ask him what website it was - "double-you double-you double-you... dot... x... hamster... dot com".

Now I didn't particularly care about his extracurricular activities, got him to curl|bash a script I wrote on the spot to get SSH access and installed the Flash player I forgot and sent him on his way. I was surprised he'd just openly admit to it though.

Did you remember to disable the open ssh server and NAT hole puncher after you finished with installation?

Pretty sure the script made his machine SSH back to one of mine rather than open ports.

So non-manufacturer repair of electronics lead to vice, criminality and exploding ink cartridges? Don't anyone tell Louis Rossmann. He has whole videos about that being a myth.

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

I’m confused. Where does he say he’s Chinese? Also, I would be willing to bet not everyone was racist. 1990s wasn’t too far back

> I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe.

Not sure I believe that.

In the late 1980s I had a friend who was a bit of a thug who ran a BBS that you could download any pirate software you wanted if you paid a monthly membership fee and also worked in some kind of computer warehouse where he would occasionally nick a hard drive and sell it for much less than retail. His apartment was saturated with tobacco smoke and he always had a copy of Atlas Shrugged around.

I love this. It's written for the hell of it. Not to get likes, or people to subscribe, or buy a product or show off technical prowess. It's just writing to share - Oldschool Internet content.

[Not that there's anything wrong with the things I mentioned - I just mean it's refreshing to see something not written with an obvious motive. Gah. I still sound like a wanker.]

I came here to say exactly this.. what a nice, refreshing read.

Real world person. Rare animal.

The vignettes were the perfect length for casual consumption. Little bite sized snacks.

Great read. I was wondering why it felt so familiar to me and it dawned on me it’s like a cross between my past jobs of internal it support and ems. I miss going into houses and businesses around my area on a daily basis, and driving around all parts of the city. I remember back when I first transitioned into an office job how isolated it made me feel from community. If the pay was remotely equivalent I’d consider dropping my remote sysadmin gig for a job like the author’s.

You could imagine a Patreon link at the bottom with "if you liked these stories" hook to get you to pay money if it would make you feel better.

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 Mac and the motherboard died. AppleCare told me it was out of warranty. But I had the receipt of the extended warranty we bought from Sears. They wanted me to pay for the repair and send them the invoice. I told the Sears CSR "this is my schoolwork computer and we don't have money like that. Which is why we bought this warranty. Because you told us it would take care of any problem with our Mac." That CSR jumped on a 3-way call with me and AppleCare. I think they did a purchase order but all I remember was it was handled and the Apple repair tech was there the next day.

Just the thought of someone even having that much autonomy nowadays is completely foreign.

It's interesting how rapidly the beancounters quashed CSR autonomy and put everything behind inscrutable ticketing systems.

Even at relatively small companies, with internal tools and support teams this happened pretty rapidly in the 2010s. I've worked at all sorts of small companies with as few as 500 employees where we initially just had a list of "guys" to call for different issues.. and eventually some Big Company MBA Type would come in and kill it. Next thing you know there's 5 different ticketing system queues obfuscating the fact that it's still the same 1-2 guys supporting each queue.

Turnaround time got worse, users were unhappier, support team was unhappier, we had to pay SaaS companies for their ticketing system, and probably hire a Global Head Of __ to run the whole thing. BUT.. we now could measure all the misery! Incredible!

Thank McKinsey.

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 :(

I've had several opportunities to experience AppleCare+, both remotely and at Apple Stores, and have to say they've all been satisfactory. My most recent repair was after a bunch of things came rapidly together to cause milk to spill on my MacBook Air keyboard. I took the machine in the Apple Store, they dispatched it to the repair facility and took my credit card information to cover the $300 deductible. The machine was in repair for less than a day, and the charge to my credit card was only $100. AppleCare+ is the only extended warranty that's been worth the money.

> 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.

Had similar experience with Apple in 2011. My one of my twin's iMac had an issue that the Apple Singapore service center could not fix and I had the run around from them, including a vertical line on both their iMac screen (assuming both were from the same bad batch).

Frustrated, I wrote the below email to Steve Jobs on a lark. Was not expecting a reply. Surprisingly got a call next day, and Apple arranged for both the iMacs to be replaced with new one.

Not sure if Steve actually read my email, or his EA. But the fact that their APAC regional service head was dealing with me personally to resolve this and replace the units, was quite surprising.

From: xxx <xxx@me.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Smtp-Server: smtp.me.com:xxx Subject: Your after-sales support sucks in Singapore X-Universally-Unique-Identifier: 8f59f421-365f-4434-81dc-dd73a17d13e3 Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:53:49 +0800 Message-Id: <57BEE16B-94E5-4240-8D2A-568E860439CC@me.com> To: sjobs@apple.com Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1082)

Steve.

I'm a big fan of Apple products. Have always been one. I have constantly = bought Apple products since the early days, from the Apple IIe to all = manners of Apple products since. Heck, I even have a Lisa and a Next = Cube.

But lately, I have been noticing that while your after-sales support in = the US is great (what with your Apple stores and the Genius programs), = but your after-sales support program outside the US sucks big time.

I reside in Singapore and I bought for my 3 kids, an iMac each. One of = the kids iMac have been having intermittent problems since day one. For = some reason the iMac shutdowns down itself spontaneously. Originally = (being a propeller head myself), I thought there was an OS X system = corruption. So I re-installed the system. But alas, no dice.

I then send it to one of the Apple authorized service centers here. They = claimed that they fixed it and they send it back. Within 2 weeks, the = iMac started having the same issues, repeated shutdowns spontaneously. I = then send it to another Apple authorized service center (there are 2 = independent apple authorized service centers in Singapore). This time, = the service personnel claimed that it was a faulty drive and they = installed a new drive. Again, after receiving it back, the problem = persists.=20

A few things that I note:

- The Apple 3rd authorized service centers seem to be paid to fix the = symptoms, but not the root cause - These service centers don't seem to have any quality control in their = repair process. They don't seem to be testing the iMacs overnight for = extended periods to check is if the system fails. They only want to get = the Macs out the door and charge Apple for the service (i have an = extended warranty). - The service personnel seem not to understand simple diagnostic steps. = If an iMac fails repeatedly, surely you would want to check the power = supply or the main board as the usual culprit. Instead they focus on the = drive. Flabbergasting.

I have wasted almost 1 one year trying to get this fixed, while my son = has been deprived of his precious iMac. I have even bought an extended = warranty, but to no avail.

I'm writing to you as a last resort to find resolution to get this = fixed. If I don't hear from you, I will just have to throw the damned = iMac away and get a new one for my son.

Just to show you how rabid an Apple fan boy that I am, here's a list of = the Mac products that I own:

3 iMacs (2009 version) 1 PowerMac 2 Mac Mini (one Intel and one PPC version) 1 AppleTV 1 2010 MacBook Pro 1 2009 MacBook Pro 1 1st Gen Macbook Air 1 Cinema display 1 original 1st Gen iPhone 1 iPhone 3G 2 iPhone 3GS 3 iPhone 4 3 iPods (various) 2 iPads

regards,

xxx

What a great story. This is the kind of writing I encourage many of my retired friends to try. Start by a few short anecdotes and stories of things or people you remember. Even though we are not Cicero, our history has changed dramatically in our life times (maybe it was always like this?) Many of them have lived thorough some interesting part of history and witnessed social and cultural, technical, change that will be very interesting in the future. Imagine the characters, the anecdotes, the humor, the disaster that retired: teachers, farmers, mechanics, doctors, and so on, can tell.

This takes me back. Way back in like 2004-2006 or so I was working a computer repair desk at a big retailer and did a ton of side business. The side business honestly paid more than my job did.

I would travel around NYC fixing things for mostly clueless people. People attempting to screw me on payment was common. The frequent move was to offer drugs or sex in lieu of payment after the work was done. The only sane response to this though was to tell them to just pay what they could afford and then get out of there as fast as possible.

I had a few rich and famous clients. It was a fun time, but I got tired of taking long, extended train rides after a full day of work only to do more work and have a long train ride home.

I did that too, worked for a computer shop and often got hired by clients.

Never got offered sex on lieu of payment unfortunately, I would have taken it :) Nor drugs but I don't do those.

It's almost never the attractive, talented, or regularly-tested-for-STIs-and-STI-free ones that offer the sex...

Understood but I always use protection anyway.

And when I did this kind of work I was a shy horny teenager so I wouldn't have cared about looks :P

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 that will be a problem for you, then it's not going to be as appealing as it initially sounds. On the (maybe) plus side they won't make you wear a condom. On the negative side, they didn't make anybody else either...

Much better (IMHO) to put in the time and effort to cultivate a loving long-term relationship with a good partner.

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 didn't charge a lot so people could pay my fees easily.

In fact I think sensitivity to paying money (or receiving financial incentives) is more of a US thing. Only last month I spoke to a fairly rich American guy because a friend asked me about a problem he was having with his WiFi. I gave him some advice and he offered me money to come to his place and sort it out myself. I said no, because I already have a day job (enterprise architect) and I just don't want the responsibility. Once I start taking money it comes with expectations to show up if something goes wrong. So I help friends for free but that's it (and he was only a friend of a friend). I don't mind giving some advice but actually going there and taking care of his stuff is a bridge too far. I have zero entrepreneurial spirit anyway, I'm a typical "salaried employee" and happy with that.

The guy was a bit offended, he said that in the US everyone would be eager to do some work for money on the side and here he's always having issues getting IT help. His way of finding such help is apparently talking to friends and offering them money then. It surprised me a bit. I don't think many people here would be too eager to do that.

> he said that in the US everyone would be eager to do some work for money on the side and here he's always having issues getting IT help

Well that’s just bollocks. Perhaps young teenagers are typically okay with earning a bit or forced by their parents to help but it certainly is not the cultural norm that grown ass salaried professionals jump at the chance to earn $50 sorting their neighbors WiFi out.

He just thought he’d found another sucker and was annoyed when you turned out to have a backbone, because you are absolutely right this guy would become what is often called in the trades a ‘sinsya’.

‘Sinsya’ fixed my printer my WiFi doesn’t work as well. Did you break it?

‘Sinsya’ fixed my WiFi my washing machine doesn’t do the hot cycle properly. You were messing with the ‘wires’ weren’t you?

Etc etc fucking etc.

If he called a professional company to help he’d have no issues ‘here’ but he’d also have to pay the going rate.

What he means is back home he has a network large enough to exploit and doesn’t have to worry about learning how to do it or pay a professional.

Thanks, it's kinda the impression I had already, that he was making this up.

And yes the "sinsya" thing was exactly what I'm worried about. With money come commitments.

Not sure why you're being downvoted because I really appreciate your insight.

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.

Ahh I see. When I was young, Holland was in a very different place. Much less income equality so almost everyone was middle class and pretty respectable.

I thought 90s/00s Holland was supposed to be hardcore ravers paradise with an active cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA scene.

At least that was definitely my experience with gabber back then.

> he offered me money to come to his place and sort it out myself

This reminds me of a personal experience I had.

Many years ago I was a graduate student at a US university (I'm not from the US).

There's this study room that I used to study from. There was this much older (??) woman who sometimes studied from there. One day out of the blue she asked me if I was good with statistics. I was, and clarified a couple of quick questions that she had.

Then she started trying to set up an appointment with me for a specific day, for two hours, and asked me how much she would have to pay me to teach her statistics.

Wtf?! I was so taken aback I didn't even know what to say. I declined, and just left.

It was weird to me for several reasons: this was the first time somebody straight up offered me money to teach them something. The way she asked me was uncomfortably formal, and if my statistics tutoring doesn't satisfy her then who knows she might sue me. And I'm not even sure if it would have been legal for me to accept money in exchange for this ad hoc service, as I'm not a US citizen.

In my home country (relatively big country in south Asia), if a fellow student has difficulties with certain topics, people (well, friends or friend of a friend) who have a better idea with the subject try to help them out, for free. There is not even a question, or even a thought about monetary reward, from any of the parties involved.

Maybe that's why there's a lot of entrepreneurship in America? If so, then this particular exchange just felt so odd.

I don't know what to conclude from all this.

> 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).

There was a thing that made the news maybe ten years ago in Washington, maybe a little more. Woman offering "a year of oral sex" for a truck. "No funny stuff, no relationship, nothing else. You give me the truck, we meet once a day, I give you oral. On day 365 I give you oral and you give me the title."

I was once an Apple Certified Technical Consultant, mostly doing managed services-type work for small businesses in NYC but would sometimes get the call to go to someone's house, usually an owner or other senior-level exec at one of these businesses.

These were serious houses. Huge houses out in the Hamptons or four-story brownstones on the Upper East Side.

One call, I was doing work to resolve an issue with a customer's network, which consisted of a number of AirPort Extremes. One of these was in their bedroom, under a bed.

For fifteen minutes or so, I lay on my belly, working away at my laptop trying to reset the godforsaken thing, when I spotted a small chair a few feet away. Pulled it over, and began working in a much more comfortable seated position. As I grew comfortable, I'd lean back on the back two legs of the chair and kind of rock back and forth.

As I'm doing this, the owner pops her head in, saying, "Hey, anything I can get--oh my god please get up."

Turns out the chair was pre-federal (ie from the early 1700s) and was probably worth at least my annual salary. Fortunately no damage, but it scarred me. I was not invited back to do repair work at that house.

My favorite bit, "Threats quickly lost their power when you realized nobody at any point had asked your name or any information about yourself. It's hard to threaten an anonymous person."

I don't get this part. Thet could just phone Apple and complain about some contractor and Apple could get his name from some records.

> They could just phone Apple

That's the thing. Once they realise that they have to put effort in it, the threats stop.

Exactly, they wouldn't complain themselves or even make the initial call themselves, they'd have a personal assistant do it, and whether or not they do is arbitrary because they won't check, not important.

Mine was

> As smartphones became more of a thing, the number of "please spy on my teen" requests exploded. These varied from installing basically spyware on their kids laptops to attempting to install early MDM software on the kids iPhones. I was always uncomfortable with these jobs, in large part because the teens were extremely mean to me. One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say "I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up".

> 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 and I would end up on the evening news. But I was also a little short that month for rent so what can you do.

His boss was indeed a bad judge of character.

He writes well. This is the blog post I'd really like to read:

> Like all of my bosses early on, his primary quality was he was a bad judge of character.

This is a great read! I am fifty years old now, but for many years during my twenties I supported myself as a one-man Mac/PC repair shop...in a college town. I made house calls almost everyday, and every evening was spent in my home shop working on drop-offs.

I got to meet a ton of different people. There were the computer-illiterate business owners with ridiculous expectations; the lonely middle-aged guys with esoteric hobbies who talked my ear off; the single moms on a tight budget raising three kids; the ultra rich people wanting to keep a ten-year-old PC alive; the author who had lost years of data and would pay "whatever it takes"; the religious father with gigs of porn; the helpless college students whose lack of basic computer knowledge actually impressed me....and more

This was like a trip down memory lane. Great read. Thanks for sharing!

I did that for about 10 years from 2000 to 2010. The part about "being part of the furniture" is really on point. It is incredible how little they think of you. This has a side effect, they thrust you. Ebanking logins, emails, personal conversation, photos... You get it all. I was always very discrete and never did anything "bad", but there were moments when I was treated like a nuisance where I really wanted to. There is also a few times when you find out that the husband or wife is cheating, that is always very difficult to handle especially when the other one is here with you saying how great their partner is.

The experiences of people who meet a wide range of customers are always interesting.

I had read a similar story of a man who worked at car showrooms of various brands (such as Honda, Toyota).

> Look it's important that if you see Oprah, you act normally, please don't ask her for an autograph or a photo

I never understood why people drool when they see celebrities.

Movie actors, musicians, sportspersons etc — I like watching them when they're in a movie, or when have sung a song, or when they're on the field playing, but I never really had any inclination to actually meet them. Even if I did meet them, I wouldn't have anything useful to say.

The trick, and I say this as someone who's gotten to meet a fair number of musicians, including some semi-famous ones, is that they're people. Plus they're also huge music nerds. Just mention Cheap Trick and you're in... (Although at the same time, do know how to read the room - it's not that hard to tell when someone just wants to be left alone.

Those genuine interactions are better than any autograph or selfie.

Sort of related: I was friends with a world-famous surgeon at UCLA, chairman of the urology department (he married an ex-girlfriend whom I stayed on good terms with).

His patient roster was a who's who of Hollywood: Groucho Marx, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, etc. He told me the secret of getting these famous people to follow his orders: he always included something in his post-op instructions that would force them to do something they'd much rather not do.

Making them compliant created a kind of master-servant relationship with the surgeon as master; these megastars were so unused to following orders that the harsher the Rx, the more they regarded the doctor as a demi-god.

I think its a para-social thing. We are not build to see somebody everyday in a certain context and only passively interact with them. This crosses a couple of wires I think.

I have similar desires to not meet them but its mostly because I do not care that much and they probably have enough randos bothering them. I would probably dive under the table as well as in the article :)

I've met a few but would normally not bother them as I'm sure they're not at all interested in anything other than the job at hand. One exception was when I was a specialist extra for a documentary and the star presenter asked me for some background info. on my specialist area; in that case I was happy to chat to them for a while about it.

I feel the same way and yet once I turned around at a city art fair to be right in front of somebody recognizable. It struck me as surprising in the same way as bumping into a friend. I involuntarily greeted them by name. The best response to my mistake that I could come up with on the spot was "I'm a big fan", handshake, "have a nice day", leave.

Thought provoking article. I like to think I acknowledge the people I call for services, at least to the extent they want the conversation. I'm sure there are many more in daily life I don't notice but whose work makes my world go around.

The anecdotes about the rich in Chicago match the ones I hear about the rich in California. The divide is nearly complete.

It's just an awkward social situation, and most people just want to be left to get on with their work when they're on the clock.

Agreed. The divide might be real, but when I've done this sort of work I want to be viewed as the furniture by most people so I didn't have to spend effort on awkward conversations. And I never even dealt with rich people like this.

Building a list of good, reliable service people that one can go to in the future takes effort. Some want the minimum, some like a little give-and-take. Getting that balance is tricky. Becoming known as a good customer can help in some cases both for later work and referrals to other specialists.

That was the most fun thing I've read all year. I know we're not very far into the year but I do read a lot.

Just an example about a parent requesting tracking be installed on her daughter's phone

"One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say 'I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up'."

I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct."

Part of what made this such a fun read is knowing it's 100% all true.

Yeah that was a great anecdote, I was going to post the same story! Parent pays you to install spyware , rich kid pays you not to install spyware, double payment for nothing.

  s/year. I know we're not very far into the year but I do read a lot./week, and I read a lot./

FTFY ;)

LOL

As someone who has lived here for going on 15 years, he really unintentionally nailed the whole spectrum of experience of living in Chicago.

And “Live in a city for any amount of time and you'll start to develop a subconscious odds calculator.” was very relatable.

From the entire article, this paragraph stood out the most to me

> The golden rule that every single one of these assistants warned me about was not to bother the husband when he gets home. Typically these CEO-types would come in, say a few words to their kids and then retreat to their own area of the house. These were often TV rooms or home theaters, elaborate set pieces with $100,000+ of AV equipment in there that was treated like it was a secret lair of the house. To be clear, none of these men ever cared at all that I was there. They didn't seem to care that anybody was there, often barely acknowledging their wives even though an immense amount of work had gone into preparing for his return.

You often hear anecdotes of the rich family that's got it all yet the kids are all screwed up and the marriage is on the rocks. For me this paragraph offers a glimpse into why that's the case and why people say "money can't buy happiness". I don't know I may be way off base here but that's the impression I got.

I spent a year working for an A/V installation company - whole house integrated sound systems, media servers, security, etc - and their clientele was solely multi-millionaires of various nationalities.

My job was primarily as a programmer for the control systems these installations used so I spent the majority of my working day in clients homes. They were without exception the most sterile, vapid, soulless environments I had ever been in. They had everything in them but nothing felt homely. Another thing was the lack of responsibility for cost. You know the line from Arrested Development “it’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost, $10?” Well, this is their real lives.

I was asked to visit a client to arrange a laptop for them to use for day trading. I turn up, start going through options for MacBooks, their pros/cons, costs of models vs features and the guy turns to me, exasperated, and goes “I don’t care about the cost, just give me what I need”. Ok, I say I’ll let my manager know what I picked. I find out a couple weeks later, he’s actually rented a Bloomberg terminal for thousands a week. He then gets me back in to set the thing up. I’m sat at this machine, on the phone to Bloomberg being asked by them for the clients usernames and password, me leaning over to them to ask for the details, being told, relaying that back to Bloomberg, about three times. Until, exasperated, he takes me notebook and writes down every username and every password for every account and service he used. Bloomberg, banking, email, everything. It was worth poor old me having that to not bother him any more than necessary.

Plenty of experiences from that too brief 12 months but was a massive eye opener to a side of society that I’d never have got the chance to see.

It’s a different world, but not entirely sure it’s one I’d want to live in.

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 basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures.

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.

Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour.

For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.

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]: https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-t...

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.

Even Elon, "I don't own a house" (but I have a holding company that owns several), but "I stay in a friend's $50M home which has a household staff".

I had a friend in school back in nowhere whose family for some reason resembled this, without the money or in any way being a captain of industry as they say. He in no way made enough money to household help, or even to fully support the families lifestyle as the wife did do some part time work.

It was one of the weirdest experiences being there and the mom was super prepping everything for The DAD arrival, down to having prepared him a completely separate meal of different food to be consumed on his own later. It was clear that whatever she cooked for him was better, and off limits, to her, kids, and me as a guest.

Was super weird. One of those moments where you suspect decent odds the dad was a wife beater.

Ironically enough, one of the rich people who did not have a large household staff was Steve Jobs himself. One thing that money often seems to buy you is a bunch of strangers in your fucking house and he hated that.

The tales from the 90s of fixing Macs are like pages from a tech thriller novel. Each story is a mix of high-end luxury, unexpected social encounters, and a descent into the murky waters of digital piracy, all wrapped up in the day-to-day life of a computer technician. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a past where the lines between technology, adventure, and moral ambiguity were constantly blurred.

Well written, but man it leaves me kind of depressed. Maybe that speaks to the power of the writing.

> When I got out and realized it was dark, I started to accept something bad was likely about to happen to me.

This was the only part that really got me. I have visited a few major US cities but never really lived there, but now I’m wondering how common it is for American city dwellers to be afraid of the dark.

Entirely place dependent, these days (30-50 years ago, crime was seriously pretty bad). I live in a huge American city, and I have virtually no fear of personal or property crime when I’m out at night. But in many cases, if I shifted my path a half mile in a different direction, it’d be a different story.

Like anywhere, I would suppose, being aware of your surroundings, keeping your wits and not making yourself into an easy target will go a very long way to keeping you safe.

Its very important to know the area. Because I grew up in Detroit I know where to go and where not to go. Downtown the billionaire Dan Gilbert owns a huge chunk of buildings. He has his own security force and cameras literally covering every square inch. It's worth it to know exactly where those cameras end because the criminals do and that is where you are most often to encounter them.

Keep in mind that cameras don't mean anything in today's world because law enforcement doesn't care about any crime short of a murder.

Maybe cameras still have a chilling effect on law-abiding people but criminals have since wisened up to it.

I cannot speak to other areas but in Detroit cameras have made a huge difference. In Gilbert's case he wants the area around his buildings safe. Detroit police are understaffed but Gilbert's cops augment the force and work closely with them. It matters to them if someone gets mugged or assaulted and they have the manpower to keep up. I've left bars at 2 am and walked to my car feeling very safe. I cannot say that about SF or Chicago anymore.

Detroit police have launched Operation Greenlight and placed cameras with cooperating merchants mostly gas stations where a high levels of crimes occur. Part of the agreement with the merchant is they promise a high level of response when there's a crime in progress. Detroit dropping down the national list on carjackings I believe is a direct result of Operation Greenlight.

It's also possible that Detroit's rankings on carjackings are an artifact of other cities being at the epicenter of the Kia phenomenon. Certainly that's been a major factor in Chicago carjackings.

I thought Kia's were stolen off driveways when the people were asleep? Detroit I believe invented modern day car jacking. Someone comes up to you as you're filling your car at the pump, sticks a gun in your face, asks for your keys and drives off.

Or someone bumps into you at a light or stop sign. You get out to inspect the damage and exchange insurance cards and again they pull a gun and take your car while their accomplice speeds off in the attack car.

Last I checked St. Louis was the current king of car jacking although Detroit is still sadly is in the top ten.

The epicenter of the Kia thing is Milwaukee (I think that's where it started?). The thing about Kias is that they're burner cars. It's not that people are carjacking Kias, it's that they're using burner Kias to carjack other cars.

I think we're going to learn in the next couple years that the Kia thing was a much, much bigger problem than we appreciate even now. I think it's a very big deal.

I’m not sure this is true anywhere. I live in a moderately sized UK city, and have done most of my life. There’s nowhere in the city that I would intentionally avoid at night due to the risk of bad things happening to me, many decades ago a friend and I were mugged by a large group of teenagers, and that was in what’s widely considered a good part of the city. At the same time I’ve walked through what are considered rough areas late at night on the regular and never had anything more threatening happen than drunks stumbling about the place.

The only thing I can think of here is that I’m a fairly heavyset 6’1” male, who wears chunky jackets most of the time. Maybe trouble sees me coming and decides it’s not worth the hassle (which is for the record hilarious to me, I’ve been in two fights in my life, and got my ass kicked both times).

Not an American city thing. It’s a bad neighborhood while carrying an iMac box thing.

There’s plenty of cities worldwide with rough neighborhoods where I would absolutely not want to be lugging apple branded stuff through at night.

That's why I feel safer rocking Chinese branded electronics. Who's gonna rob my Lenovo and OnePlus?

Junkie can. They will hit you first and then figure out what is in the box.

Luckily there's no junkies in my area.

Even by day it can be harrowing. By far the sweatiest walk home I’ve ever had was the 20 minute walk carrying home my 5K iMac through the outskirts of a less than fancy neighborhood. They wrapped it in nondescript cardboard to conceal, but the shape unmistakably said “new iMac walking”. It didn’t help that it was a warm day and those 5Ks are deceptively big and heavy. Shouldn’t have cheaped out on calling a cab.

I once bought a new laptop and walked out of the shop realising I had walked into a riot of Millwall football fans facing down Greater Manchester Police’s finest (including dogs and horses).

I and the laptop got out unscathed thanks to me knowing shortcuts and back streets.

Fun times.

I'm quite unafraid to roam around my own neighborhood, even though it's quite rough, because it's densely populated, and so there are plenty of other locals passing by at any given time. The scary thing about nighttime in a big urban area, is when you're in a strange neighborhood and you're not known as a local, and you don't know the gang scene there, or ethnic culture is different or whatever. So yeah, carrying around a conspicuously expensive box of electronics will get you noticed in those situations.

I'm fairly standoffish and I'm wise to a lot of the soft street scams that individuals tend to use. So I'm not likely to attract someone who will bully or mug me or rough me up. I've literally never had it happen to me.

One time I did make a lot of friends on the bus ride home, when I'd been to Fry's Electronics to purchase a large and ostentatious Corsair computer enclosure. It was literally nothing else but the enclosure, so no appreciable electronics, but there was no bag large enough to conceal it, and so the other passengers sat up and took notice of that. Of course, that was in daytime, going through some relatively calm neighborhoods.

I'm usually found on the way to or from a train station around here; train stations are fairly well-regarded as patrolled and safer than the surrounding environs, so it's sort of like getting home free when I end up there.

Yes, the big electronics box was a target. No thanks, I'll help myself to a black trash bag and drag it around like a crazy person.

Tools specially for Mac repair. Anyone else remember the "case cracker"? It was a very broad hinged wedge you had to use to open up the original all-in-one Macs (with the 9" B&W screens). There were some capacitors in those machines that blew out frequently. Fantastic computer for its time though, if you could afford it.

Don’t forget its two friends — the long-handled Torx and the screwdriver with the 10M resistor and the alligator clip, to bleed the charge out of the CRT.

Fun machines. I still have two SE/30s, including my upgraded SE from childhood!

Hah! I did the same thing for a few years in the early 2000s, but I wasn't affiliated with Apple and just did upgrades, fixes, etc. I rode my bike all over town and charged by the hour. I had all my tools and wallet of CDs for all kinds of stuff with me. Good times!

Finally a comprehensive guide on how to arrange ones home/life once that YC deal goes through.

There's also the tip on bus station prey, should it not.

Great read (seriously).

Interesting read. It reminded me of "Do Things That Don't Scale" https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

I just didn't get the part where he says teens are mean to him, but the only example is where a teen made his job easier...

> I was always uncomfortable with these jobs, in large part because the teens were extremely mean to me. One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say "I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up".

> 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.

A guess: The teen sized him up as needing money, intuited how much, and offered it in a show of power.

Probably less about what was said, and more how I'd imagine an entitled teen might act and say things.

the kid called him cheap and/or poor in the straight-forward way you talk about someone’s hair color.

Mean teens and the bribing teen are separate anecdotes. Most teens are unhappy with a stranger rifling through their phone, especially somebody installing spyware. Those are the mean teens.

If you liked this, you might like the novella "Laserwriter II" by Tamara Shopsin.

https://www.theverge.com/c/22713440/the-worst-thing-on-earth...

This was a delightful piece of writing, but it's hard to see how it turns into a novel. Kind of a documentary style?

The author is a member of the semi famous Shopsin family

https://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/shopsins/

Reminds me that what we really crave is authenticity. It’s the number one rule for writing. Also shows why AI content is so pointless.

Interesting remark to me. I was thinking the whole time what parts may be made up. I'm a really bad judge of sarcasm, let alone actually dishonest content. In the end I'm inclined to believe the whole thing, but it's not particularly authentic, just quite different from my life and therefore interesting. (Some parallels also, as I've done computer fixing for some friends of friends.)

How does interesting and original work compare to AI-generated and most human-generated material? Maybe we could say rather than being merely plausible that it is surprising in plausible ways.

It reminds me of this book:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii

Oh cool, I’ve been meaning to check this out ever since I saw her do a reading from a new book of hers. Her family runs a pretty well known restaurant in the city with a 900 item menu (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopsin%27s). Maybe she talks about in the book. Thanks for the reminder.

It was enlightening to learn about obscure parts of the Mac repair world and to ponder the lives of all the people you met.

Awesome article

mad perspectives. being a tech frontliner you saw so much. in fame, in lives of excess. amazing hearing from your perspective how the wealthy think and live. one of the best articles i've read on the web in a long time, thank you for writing it.

There’s a certain type of person who looks for enterprise type it contractors over Craigslist. A bizarre combination of money and insanity that usually makes for a fun time.

Imagine being a Mac fixer turned pirate king - only in the 90s, right? From smoke-spewing printers to brushing shoulders with the digital underworld, those were the days of real tech adventures. Makes you miss the wild side of tech.

This was eerily similar to my experience about 5 years prior. My experience was in Australia on the software side. Down to the same equipment, same style people, same style interaction with apple.

As an Aussie, I’m curious to hear the stories! I don’t know much about Chicago!

>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 the $500 and set up the software on the little punk's phone.

If she will pay 500 she will pay 1000. Dude should have held out for more.

My thought exactly.

How does a teenager have access to $500 they haven’t spent and can spend without their parents knowing (especially the kind of parents who’d want tracking on their kids phones)?

My relatives regularly gave me cash for holidays and birthdays. And if your parents ever gave you cash for anything it's easy enough to not spend all of it and save some.

I probably usually had >$300 in my bedroom as a teenager (and more saved in a bank account).

Also the kid can lie about what they spent it on. Or steal their parents'/siblings' money. Mistakes that lead to important life lessons.

Giving your kid $50 is hard. Giving your kid $500 after you just gave them $50 is easy.

I have seen teenagers in New Orleans partying with American Express platinum cards in their name.

I wasn't rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I could have had acquired $500 with a bit of planning in the 90s, and did, multiple times.

Possibly dealing drugs (or prostitution), hence not wanting parents to access their messages? The highschools in my small UK city that are known for having drug problems are the ones with the richer kids.

It seems like poor kids have to get in to crime first to afford drugs, richer kids can just use their pocket money. YMMV.

> I'm not sure why he didn't take the $500 and set up the software on the little punk's phone.

Because you shouldn't spy on people?

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.

I love these well written, slyly comical in a dry way, articles.

These anecdotes from the front lines of 90s tech support are nothing short of astonishing. It's a vivid reminder of how the tech industry, often seen as mundane or straightforward, has its share of wild, almost unbelievable stories. From tech mishaps turning into hazardous situations to an inadvertent descent into the world of digital piracy, it's a stark contrast to the current, more sanitized world of tech support and IT.

Great story! This had me confused though:

> Often I'd show up only to tell them their hard drive was dead and everything was gone. This was just how things worked before iCloud Photos, nobody kept backups and everything was constantly lost forever.

Why not suggest sending the drive off to a recovery service? They certainly existed back then, wealthy clients could afford it, and you could add a nice markup.

Expensive (even for the wealthy, a lot of the time), not guaranteed to work, inviting more ire if it doesn’t work.

Doesn't help you now, but often data recovery companies such as DriveSavers only charge a fee if they are successful.

Yeah. Not photos at the time but I’ve lost inadequately backed up hard drives at a time when online backups and external drives weren’t really a thing. Annoying but not something I was going to spend thousands of dollars to try to get recovered.

Same, personally. But I also did on-site tech support in the same era and would always give customers the option if they had a drive I couldn't recover. Honestly seems negligent to me not to. On several occasions they opted to spend the ~$1,000 to recover their family photos, business documents, or other important files and were always extremely happy when it worked. These were not exceptionally wealthy people either.

Excellent title, better article. This described worlds I didn’t know existed.

Surprised to see Wiha mentioned here. The founder lived with his family in my hometown and my mother worked in his household back in the 60s at the age of 14/15. Definitely different times back then!

Edit: Did not follow Wiha and didn’t know that it became this big! When reading it, I only remembered stories of my mother how she took care of the children and was totally blown away to have such a personal connection from a seemingly unrelated story.

Great read and a trip down memory lane for me as I cut my teeth being a field engineer for a small IT support company in London for 2 years was back in 2005.

Nice writing. I like it.

I'm actually thinking about getting a training of electronics technician because I want to learn the soldering/desoldering part of hardware hacking -- which I believe any serious hacking may need such skill. But then the job prospect and salary are not really convincing...

Why not do it as a hobby instead? It's quite popular these days.

I used to fix computers for doctors when I was a teenager, this brought some memories, fun read.

Talk about tech gone wild! Those 90s Mac repair tales are straight out of a heist movie, complete with inkjet smoke bombs and an accidental dive into the piracy deep end. Makes today's IT work look like a walk in the park!

what an enjoyable read

i felt as if i was teleported to the OPs job

> I was directed to park across the street and told even though the signs said "no parking" that they had a "deal with the city".

He said he didn’t have a car a few paragraphs before. Has he earned enough by then?

He then proceeds to specify that it was a borrowed one

Yeah, just got to that part.

Pretty sure a friend around 2014 had one of these callouts for their Mac Pro tower in NYC. This article just reminded me that even happened. thanks for writing!

Friend of mine got link to this thread and failed to figure out that there is a link under thread name :(

Underline will be highly appreciated. Thank you.

Great read, this guy is going on my daily RSS feed list.

This was superb. Thanks to the author for sharing.

- great anekdotes

- excellent writing

- small observations that imply a ton

loved this writeup

they should fix windows systems door to door, they would make a lot more money.

they do. for like 30 years now.

Good story.

Close. GSX, not ASX.

fairly entertaining morning lecture :-) many thanks

That isn't what "door to door" means though.

Great read!

Great read

interesting

Reading these stories about fixing Macs in the 90s is like unearthing a treasure trove of tech lore. Who would have thought that a day job could lead to encounters with high society, complete with inkjet printers turning into unexpected smoke machines, and a twist of fate leading to a starring role in the world of digital piracy? It's fascinating how these tales intertwine technology with the thrill of adventure, almost like living in a real-life spy novel

Did you use LLM to write this comment? It felt a little bit unnatural to my eye so I put it into gptzero and it spit out a 91% of probability that this was generated.

Lol, I had the exact same thought. There's something.. Off about its writing style; reminds me of marketing copy or 'HR speak'.

Had the exact same thought as well. It just.. kinda feels off.

is he engagement farming?

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