For some reason the only electronics I get asked for help with are literal e-waste which existence must be considered crime against computing, engineering and even humanity. Because of that, my success rate is less than half of cases. Is it bad, or should I consider it good that people only call me in worst possible cases where everything else failed?
Nothing is e-waste if you’re skilled enough
Anything made by Dell is. Try disassembling one of their mini PCs. I don’t know what tools they have at the dell manufacturing plant, but they must not be made of normal matter that’s all I can tell you, because otherwise how have they managed to put a screw that holds the PSU in place, under the PSU itself.
I beg friends for ewaste and harvest their organs.
Pretty sure I could build a battery bank that would rival styropyro’s most recent one.
Even an Oxford comma couldn’t save that one.
I fix stuff because I can’t fix myself.
After a lifetime of being tech support for everyone I know outside of work, I do not relate to this
For me it depends, when it’s an uncle I hardly have a relationship with randomly asking me to fix his printer because I’m good with computers. Then no think you, I just tell him to google the problem or ask Mistral-AI
If it’s my close family then I love helping them
Man, I don’t recognize this at all. At work I’m currently in the middle of a two-month project that I think will end up producing about ten lines of code. It’s all about tracking a bunch of stuff down in a gigantic code base and then trial-and-erroring all of it until it works.
So, my mother-in-law’s phone keyboard switches to French-Canadian? Yeah, I can definitely fix that! My dad wants a mesh network in his house so he can listen to music in the garage? Can do! My kid’s audio player breaks and I need to transplant in a new part? Give it to me! My wife’s computer won’t print suddenly? These little wins (and sometimes medium sized wins!) are euphoric. They keep me from feeling like I’ve wasted an entire day switching one variable, running a build, and then switching it back.
Sure, it gets annoying when they don’t try anything before they ask, or they keep having the same problem over and over again. But that’s by far the minority.
Like others stated, if it’s not someone I’m close to, I wouldn’t want to do it. If my partner however asks me for help, being able to help her and solve a real problem she has, brings me tremendous joy.
