I have been helping a cousin with her computer issues since a friend fried her configuration. I was happy to help – I love her and her family and it’s something I could do.
Fast forward many years. Every two weeks or every month or so, perfectly good computers in their house would have issues. If there is nothing wrong with them, then she wants to upgrade something, or add something. People in the house would do weird things to the systems, then when you ask them what was done, they are all deaf, mute and blind, weren’t in a 10-mile radius of the PC, or some other reason that would prevent them from giving a correct or useful answer.
I was having a devil of a time troubleshooting because nobody was telling me anything. I would find all kinds of peer to peer warez, malware, dodgy sites in their history and I’d spend ages troubleshooting or reinstalling. The hardware errors were out of control too.
When I tell them I’m tired of leaving my work (as a computer tech) to come home and be presented with more work, she throws a sobbing fit. In case you’re wondering, they never have simple problems. I don’t know wtf they are doing, but it’s never simple any more. It takes me hours of troubleshooting the hardware to isolate the issue, then she needs help finding a replacement, and so on and so forth.
Admittedly, I’m now dragging my heels about fixing their PC (it will only break again I fear). She bought a laptop. I’m cool with that – it came with customer support. I made a point not to touch the thing. I didn’t want to inherit the problems for that too. That’s what customer support is for.
So her friend or whoever (I have no clue, and it’s impossible to get a straight explanation outta anybody now) installed something on her new laptop (I swear – less than a month old) and now some functionality is broken and throwing errors.
She calls me about what the friend did and the such and such isn’t working, and can I fix it?
I gently said no – they need to call customer support, which apparently stinks for that system and she comes back with the sobbing fits.
I do NOT want to alienate her or her friends. They ARE friends. But this is going a little too far.
What should I do to gently put a stop to this and save my sanity?
I guess this is one of those situations where we have to say, “Nobody can take advantage of you without your permission.” That’s exactly what they’re doing, but you’re mistaking it for friendship. They are using you. However, since they’re family I understand that you want to keep good relations with them. But you’ll need to wean them off so they can find professional solutions for their problems. By having to pay for someone to come and fix it, they will learn the hard way not to download silly things and freeware. The next time she asks, simply say, “that I’m afraid I’m too busy to get to that anytime soon, not sure when I could have time to do. You can always call Geek Patrol if you need help.” Nobody wants to be without their computer for that long, so she’ll call someone else. You will probably have to do this several times before she gets the message that you’re too busy to drop everything and fix all of her problems.