read slashdot.

Punch the monkey!

Isn't it obvious?

The moment they know you're in I.T. everyone in your family, and all your mother's friends, want you to fix their PCs.

Women swoon when I talk to them about high-speed computing, VOIP, and the inherent tension between creator and consumer in the post-copyright world. It's a tough gig, but I'm happy if I can fall asleep knowing that I brought a smile to just one face.

Cybersquatting and phishing scams? Not much!

To all you posters who think you're comedians, I'm going to beat you to the punchline...

3) Profit!

If you're already doing contract work its not really a stretch from your existing skill set.

Throughout my years as a Unix admin, I have been a working blacksmith and woodworker in exotic woods. Recently I have branched into selling BDSM gear and sex toys, but that's beside the point.

I suspect many IT workers have a more artistic/creative outlet, whether it earns them any money or not. Its amazing how theraputic hammering hot metal is after a day dealing with computers and their users.

...So make sure it's not turned off, then you're set!

I deliver pizza as a side job. Only a couple nights per week, and a few hours per night. Get $$$, and find loads of WiFi hotspots.

Well, I do fix PCs for friends and family, of course, but they have to feed me.

One evening, after fixing a computer, my friends were taking me to restaurant and we passed a homeless man with a "Will work for food" sign . . .

He shoulda been an underemployed software guy.

I'm a wh0re.

opps, no, wait a minute. Thats my IT job :|

I hire blue-collars for odd-jobs, pay them cash and then call the IRS. ;-)

Fixing my sister's comuter, for pennies :,-(
Fixing my parents computer, for food :,-(
Fixing my girlfriends computer, or else! :,-(

Women swoon when I talk to them...

So ... you hire out as a sleeping pill substitute? Cool.

If we could only charge our grandmothers for every time we fixed their cord not being plugged in...

I didn't know grandmothers required electricity.

Just do what schoool board members in Tennessee do... make moonshine [newschannel5.com]. Remember to avoid the tax-man, though...

You work for EA, don't you?

I eat babies.

of my girlfriend...

There are only so many suckers, don't go telling people who are likely to be good at poker where our suckers are! You're giving away our money man!

Erm, I mean, this is a horrible idea, all of the IT people I know lose lots and lots of money playing poker online.

The commune thanks you, brother.

Its amazing how theraputic hammering hot metal is after a day dealing with computers and their users.

I just get hot and hammer on the users, but hey, whatever works for you.

KFG

> I didn't know grandmothers required electricity.

This is obviously an early example of nanatechnology.

embezzlement

(in case my boss is watching, I'm j/k)
(if he's not, contact me for more info.)

"Panhandle" not found

What the hell?

...Hello.sir. My.name.is.Steve. I.came.from.a.rough. area. I.used.to.be.addicted.to.crack.but.now.Im.off. and.trying.to.stay.clean... ...That.is.why.I.am.selling.magazine.subscriptions ...

Some do. [imdb.com]

I have absolutely no idea why I remember that...

Where is the "+1 Evil" mod when you need it...

just ask the goatse.cx guy!

All those stoned IT dudes need to get it some where, and if it's not me, then it's going to be somebody else. ;-)

Only joking....heh.

what I do on my day job... read slashdot.

Good strategy - everyone knows that the best way to make some money off /. is to use one of those clever Free iPod! sigs. They really work! People love getting spam in their newsthreads! Don't forget the exclamation marks!!!

Want to join a Free Pyramid Scheme [pyramidschemealert.org]? Click here!!

I'm good @ all sorts of jobs - I'll even give hand jobs in the corner....

You may have heard of it. It's called Slashdot!

That's "Aytch-Tee-Tee-Pee-Colon-Slash-Slash-Slashdot-Dot- Org".

Best places for a n00b to learn how to play?

My place, Wednesday's.. most people bring $200-$300 with them.

Its an *easy* game...

Pimp the wife... She likes it, good money too.

If you set your sights on college math tutoring, I'm sure you can work out a pretty attractive barter scheme.

Is that OpenBDSM , FreeBDSM or NetBDSM ?

Punching, Beating - how extreme. What's wrong with the old fashioned "spank the monkey"?

You have obviously NEVER done tech support.

Me:Ok whats on the screen.
Them: Some box thing.
Me: ok what does the message say in the box.
Them: I dont know.
Me: Can you read it to me?
Them: It says something about windows.
Me: OK what does it say about windows.
Them: Something about Internet being Shut down.
Me: Were you on the internet when the problem happened?
Them: (defensive) NO!
Me: Was anything changed since it worked last?
Them: NO! CAN YOU COME OVER HERE AND LOOK AT IT?
Me: I'll be right over

So I go over because they have messed up VNC somehow and I cannot connect to the computer, and the error is something to the effect of

Your document has been sent to the printer

|OK|

Or my personal favorite, is when some issue happens and we get a bunch of calls about it, so we send out a net message asking everyone to please not call about the issue we already are working on it... Invariably 5-10 people will call immediately either stating that they have an error on thier computer what do they do, or they ask about the message and what do we want them to do about it.

READ IT DAMNIT. ITS IN ENGLISH, YOU MORON!

Fortunately I make enough money where that isnt a concern, but I do work enough hours, so that when I am not at work the last thing i want to do is ANYTHING for anyone else.

Screw you, I'm doing my own thing. Of course that makes my wife kinda mad sometimes when she wants to go shopping and I'm all surly cause I dont wanna go, Guess thats why I havent gotten any in a few weeks maybe its been months, with all this porn I lose track.

Gamesss...we loves gamesess...what has it got in its pockets, my preciousss?

So, a few weeks ago my wife asked me if I could clean up the computer of one of the other Girl Scout den-mothers. After listening to the job description, I said, "Let me get this right. You're asking me to go to the home of a 27-year-old divorcee who wants me to look at a computer full of porn while her kids aren't home. No problem!"

1. Write some software in your free time
2. Open source it
3. ???
4. Profit !!!

Now, ain't that easy?

Easy solution: "Fix" their problems by wiping off Windows and installing Linux.

Then they'll either be happy with the stability, or so annoyed that they'll never bother you again.

After that reply, did you still get to go?

But I'm not allowed to talk about it at work any more because HR says that it creates a "hostile workplace environment". Funny, I thought I was dead sexy wearing the fishnets and a pair of Manolo Blahnik fuck me shoes.

You are a terrible person! Are you trying to get me fired?

Perhaps he already has his side job lined up and is looking to create some openings in the IT field...

You ment "-1 Evil", right?

Step 1. Steal underwear
Step 2. ...
Step 3. Profit

Ad-Aware has just about totally stopped me from charging people I halfway like. When someone agrees to a. change to Mozilla or Firefox, and b. Install ad-Aware, and learn how to use it, I will usually help them not only with that, but fix a few other niggling little nuisances their PC suffers from. If they are blindly loyal to IE, they tend to get charged about 30 bucks an hour.
I only charge one relative, but he's a second cousin that is convinced he can make more money in the market if he has an even faster connection. He is currently using cable internet because they said it was up to 5 times faster than local DSL, ignoring that he can't get that speed during the hours the market trades, and when he heard that the cable speeds tend to be faster early in the morning (like 4 A.M.), he decided to start trading on forign exchanges, even though he knows next to nothing about the companies involved, because he's that convinced the extra speed somehow matters. He hears a distorted explanation of resetting MTU's in the Windows registry for faster access systems, from one of his clueless friends, and I get another call. Him, I charge for calls.

When I was in college I was an administrator in the "Advanced Computing Lab" -- basically a lab that had slightly beefier machines and bigger monitors than other labs. It was intended for math and science students, but to many non-math/science people it was a place they were more likely to find a free computer than the busy general-purpose labs.

One year they clamped down and started only letting math/science people log in. I was sitting in the lab working one day, shortly after this policy was instituted. To give people fair warning, I wrote the following message on the white board:

PLEASE READ (<-- in HUGE letters)
There is a new policy in place where only people
on the ACLUsers list can login in this lab. You
are on this list if you are enrolled in a math or
science class in this building.

You could not possibly miss this sign. And yet, over the course of the few hours I was there, I saw countless people exhibit the following behavior:

1. walk in the door
2. glance momentarily at the sign (long enough to read "PLEASE READ", but no more)
3. sit down at a computer
4. try to log in
5. look puzzled
6. try a few more times
7. try a different computer
8. come over and ask me "is there something wrong with the computers in this lab?"

It was maddening! I wanted to smack them!

It's tempting to conclude from this story (as I did at the time) that most people are just ignorant and lazy. I think that the more useful lesson is: you'll never get people to pay attention to something by asking them to. Writing "PLEASE READ" is a futile effort. You have to make them WANT to read the sign; people read things because they WANT to, not because they SHOULD.

A much better strategy would have been to change the heading from "PLEASE READ" to "CAN'T LOG IN?"

really.

Neighbor: I want to buy a new computer!
Me: Buy a Mac.
Neighbor: But...
Me: If you buy a Windows based PC you get one FREE call then I charge you 125USD/hr like I do all my clients. But if you buy a Mac you can call me anytime.
Neighbor: Well I saw this Dell.
Me: CHING! You owe me 125USD starting... now.

My favourite was that about 8-10 years ago I used to work for a company that supported various K-12 schools in my final few years of schooling. Anyway, I was taking over the phones while someone was gone and received a call from *gasp* the sysadmin of my very own school. Knowing the guy would take a joke well:

[Me] *company* K12, *insert name here* speaking
[Him] My computer is freezing at the 'starting Windows' screen
[Me] Have you done anything to the computer recently? This is one of the network workstations?
[Him] Yes- I was just surfing the web
[Me] The only time I've ever seen this happening is when the customers were looking at gay porn. Would you happen to be doing that or should I file a problem report?
[Him] Ummm... I'm going to try a few things and I'll call you back if I'm still having the problem.
[Me] All right, thank you...

Hehe- Too classic.

Alright alright, I fess up. As a side job I subscribe billg@microsoft.com to various pr0n and spam lists.

Because if you are really smart, and good, if you leave enough money alone for a long enough time it makes babies.

You can then eat those babies.

I'm just damn glad I didn't choose to be a gynecologist really.

Imagine those guys doing side jobs for their families . . .

After a hard day of abusing people in IT and treating them like shit. I go home and whack them for money. Hey it's a living.

dizzy. tired.

You get to sleep in until 8? I hate you.

Welll...would you expect your brother to charge you if you kept throwing, say, Depends down your toilet and expected him to keep fixing it for free, despite the fact that he has repeatedly told you not to throw your goddamn incontinent diapers down the toilet? Especially since after you flushed the Depends down the toilet, you decided to flush a box of tampons and a couple of rolls of toilet paper too to see if that would clear it up?

That's what fixing my families' computers feels like anymore - they don't update their virus protection, they open anything that they get in their email, they don't plug their computers into surge protectors, and then they wonder why we dread their phone calls. Every time we make the drive to their house (nine hours away if the weather is good and my toddler is very cooperative, thirteen if the above conditions are not met), we end up working on their computers. We have friends down there that they could call that would gladly come work on their computers at the first sign of trouble for the price of a home-cooked meal, but they try to fix it themselves, hose it up even more (like doing a parallel install of an older version of Windows 98 just because someone gave them the disk, then not understanding why all their apps cease to work) and then wait until we travel home for a visit to tell us their computer isn't working, but fail to mention things like the parallel install or the lightning striking their house after they decided to put the surge protector on their washing machine instead of leaving it on the computer. They also fail to mention that it's not working before we start the drive down so that we can pack parts from the graveyard, so it ends up either costing us money to buy them parts or they complain about the cost of computer parts when we make them buy the replacements.

My attitude toward the whole thing would probably be helped if my mother didn't keep telling me how much she hates the computer I gave her for Christmas last year. All the hardware was failing on her old computer, so I gave her and her partner both refurbished computers for Christmas. All I hear is how much she hates the damned thing.

If I treated my plumber like that, he would never come to my house again, no matter how much I paid him.

OK, I can end my rant now. I would probably be calmer about it except that we just got back from a trip there - we were working on their computers until a half hour before we left to drive back.

Dear Mr Bush,

We, the authors of the CIA World Fact Book, were under the mistaken belief that it was the People's Republic Of China (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /ch.html [cia.gov]) - "mainland China" - who asserted sovereignty over Tibet, not Taiwan, (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /tw.html [cia.gov]), which is an island off the south east coast of PRC. Thank you for the clarification. We must have overlooked the invasion of the mainland while we were looking for those pesky weapons of mass destruction.

We've got a small favor to ask - can you state that Palestine and Israel are in fact several thousand miles apart, and thereby ending one Middle East conflict? Oh, and the Department of Defence would like to know if you could move Iraq and Afganistan to a more temperate climate, and prefeably to somewhere where the transport costs are lower.

We have also liaised with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taiwan pn your behalf, and report that the translation the speaker was looking for in that awkward silence was "idiot."

Thanks.

My family would have to pay me to show up for thanksgiving or christmas or what have you. Actually, scratch that, they don't have enough money to make it bearable.

By day I do good. By night I do evil.

At least you've got some balance there.

Well I consider it a trade of sorts....

For example, my Dad is a lawyer and a damn good one. I fix his computer for free no questions asked. When some big bad corporate bully comes picking on me for no apparent reason (aka a big overcharge on a bill or a denied insurance claim), I turn my dad on them, think of it as an M1A1 Abrams handling the big bad bully...in the end it all works out I think :-)

At first I read that as 'I light fires'...

With the small town I'm in, they need all the help they can get.

Things the I.T. department hears all the time, the proctologist never does:

hehe, I always wonder where proctologists come from, because who in their right mind would choose a career where you would be constantly required to peer at and finger poke the arseholes of strangers?

Good lord, they must be even more demented than dentists!

I pull up the logs, and it's FULL of porn sites being blocked at times when she was at work. He tried to blame it on spam and spyware, and I was non-committal, just wanted to get the thing working for her, but I think she had a little talk with him after I left.

Can you say "uncomfortable?"

Easy solution for that.

Turn the kid on to Linux, give him the URL for knoppix or one of the other live linux distros.

Then he can boot to linux for his porn viewing needs and his mom won't have to be embarrased by any of the porn entries in nannysitter's logs.

Everybody wins.

I have my father convinced PEBKAC is a legitmate computer virus.

Him: "Uh, you wanna come over and take a look at my PC."
Me: "Why? Whats Up?"
Him: "I think I have another PEBKAC on my PC again."
Me: "Were you looking at email from people you didnt know and opening attachments?"
Him: "I can't remember. Just come over and take a look"
Me: "Sounds like a PEBKAC issue."
Him: "That is what I'm thinking too."

A side job? I dont understand.. But I work at EA.

Actually the phrase you are looking for is "love of money is the root of all evil"

Finkployd

Somebody has likely already beat me to the punch with this idea: If your province or state allows 8 or 7 character personalized license plates, order a set that reads: "NO PLATE" . Watch the judge throw out all of your parking tickets!!!

2 days later, the scanner software goes on the blink. Guess who is going to get blamed? Yeah, probably you, the kind relative that cleaned up the PC but didn't touch the scanner software.

This is the worst part about doing 'freebees' for friends and family. You are liable for anything they think you might have caused over the next few weeks.

My favorite one is a friend of mind who is utterly clueless when it comes to PC's and a klutz to boot. He will invite me over to do his tech support and then suggest solutions to his problems to me. "Hey do you think my Unreal Tournament is broken because you installed that adaware thing?".... Or even better yet, last week he calls me up because he couldn't figure out why his monitor wasn't working...he had kicked the plug out while installing a new mouse and not had not noticed until I told him to check the power cord....then 5 minutes later he calls back telling me his sound isn't working. I tell him to check the plug and sure enough he knocked that loose plugging the monitor back in.

This person makes over 100K a year in a sales job. 0_o I took up the wrong profession.

Well, aside from my regular Saturday Night Spam Run, I find Nigerian e-mail scams to be a very profitable side income...