Grabowski: IT Guy

Every family has an IT guy. He not only has all the typical pressures of appearing at holidays and family events, etc., but also the additional and even more critical responsibilities of coming to the aid of any family member with an IT issue.

His job is often taken for granted, and his kin too easily forgets how he comes to their rescue by fixing with great proficiency and prowess anything that has a power source.

In my family, that IT guy is me.

My indoctrination into the life-long job was back in 1980 when I was seven- years-old. It started with being asked to change clocks for daylight savings time: the stove, the microwave, the alarm clocks, the wristwatches, the car, etc.

No big deal, you may be thinking.

But clocks were only the beginning.

I was then tasked with setting the car radio stations. The Loop, `CKG and `XRT for my dad. WNUA smooth jazz and classical 98.7 for my mom.

Then there was the VCR duty. Do you remember having to flip a switch between UHF and VHF and then turn those small dials to manually find and set each channel?

This turned out to be a critical household function, especially back in 1985 when my dad taped most of the Bears season, all of the playoffs and their 46-10 Superbowl romp. Go Grabowskis!

I’m also good with cable….

 

Now that I am a middle-aged man, my parents have not let up. A couple years ago as I walked in my parent’s door at Thanksgiving my dad says, “Hey Jeffy, before you leave tonight, I have some questions about the Mac and iTunes and the iPod. And for some reason I can’t seem to get the scanner-printer-fax machine working. We also bought an external hard drive and I can’t figure out how to schedule automatic back-ups with Time Machine. And I can’t get this Netflix ready DVD player connected through the wireless network.”

Oh, it would be nice just to kick my feet up and drink beer on Thanksgiving and not worry about the electronic gadgetry.

One of the most challenging projects I ever undertook was for my then eighty-three-year-old grandmother. Sure, it was easy to connect the new DVD player and VCR, but the difficulty came in teaching her how to do the following: Insert a blank tape in the VCR; record TV shows; rewind the tape; watch the shows that she recorded; toggle between DVD player, TV and VCR.

On at least five separate occasions, we spent hours of doing nothing but talking about her TV. She continually added to a double-sided cheat sheet where she had written notes such as “To watch video bought” and “Press off on large controller to shut off TV” and “To record a TV program.”

Interspersed were some of my notes, too, saying things like “***DO NOT PRESS BUTTONS LABELED TV, VCR1, VCR2 or TV-VCR***” with my grandma writing in cursive next to this “ever.”

Ah, the good old days….

 

And I tell you, now that I’m married — it’s even worse. My wife has the misfortune of coming from a family that actually has no IT guy.

Well, her brother kind of serves as one, but frankly he is quite remiss in his duties.

So on our annual Christmas trips to visit them in Albuquerque, I am always met with new project.

One of the first was a few years ago when they had bought a new computer and needed help setting it up, along with two new cordless phones to be configured to their two separate phone lines.

One of the phones had a fax machine and a separate answering machine that was supposed to pick up if the call was not a fax and no one was home, but if it was a fax the fax was supposed to pick up.

God, I hate fax machines. I can’t wait until that technology dies.

And this most recent Christmas was pretty bad, too.

My wife had bought her mother an mp3 player as a gift. Well guess what? Absolutely none of their CDs had been ripped to their computer yet. Merry Christmas, Jeff!

As that trip came to an end, we went out for lunch on the way to the airport at one of my favorite places, Frontier Café, for some of the hottest and tastiest green and red chile sauce dishes around.

I sat at a table with my father-in-law as we waited for our wives to bring over the food, when he pulled out a real surprise: An iPod Shuffle, still packaged that they had won two years prior but had never used.

Five minutes of questions followed. How do I charge it? How do I connect it to my computer? How do I copy songs over from my computer? Can I play this through my Bose speaker system?

Then the ladies show up with the food. A couple more questions and….ahhhhh, carne adovada burrito. Mmmmm.

I wonder what the holidays and life would be like if I didn’t have IT duties. What could I do with all of that extra time?

The time has come for me and all other family IT guys out there to put some limits on this holiday support! Or at least charge time and a half.

Editor’s Note: Grabowski‘s last post for The Third City was Lost at Sea….

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz up
• Tweet this
• Tell a friend