How to Quit Being Family Tech Support for Free

My mom calls me because "the internet is gone." It's the TV on the wrong input. An hour later my teenager needs me to fix the Wi-Fi, approve a download, and explain why they can't put a credit card on the game console. I'm 51, I'm on call around the clock for both ends of the family, and nobody ever says thank you. How do I get out of being the family help desk?

Trapped Between Input And Wifi,
Unpaid Tier One Support

You don’t get out. Nobody gets out. You were drafted the day you set the clock on your parents’ VCR in 1987 and it finally stopped blinking twelve. That was your enlistment. Your mother has been dialing that number ever since.

Here’s what nobody tells you about our generation. We’re the bridge. We’re the last people who learned to do everything the hard way and the first people who had to learn it all over again with a mouse. Our parents never caught up and our kids never had to. So everything that blinks, beeps, buffers or asks for a password gets routed to the one person in the family who remembers both worlds. You.

And they will never say thank you, because to them you didn’t do anything. You pressed one button. Input. That’s it. To your mother you’re a magician who refuses to share the trick. To your teenager you’re a slow, disappointing search engine with opinions.

So stop trying to escape and start running it like the job it is. Real help desks don’t come running. They triage. Mom’s TV on the wrong input is not an emergency. It’s a Tuesday. Write it down for her. On paper, in marker, taped to the remote, in letters you could read from a moving car. INPUT. HDMI 1. She’ll lose it. You’ll write it again. That’s the job.

The teenager is different. The teenager is not your customer. The teenager is your replacement. Every time that kid asks you to fix the Wi-Fi, you hand them the router and stand there. Unplug it. Count to thirty. Plug it back in. Congratulations, you just trained Tier One. In five years Grandma calls them, not you, and you get to be the guy who doesn’t know how anything works anymore. That’s not defeat. That’s retirement.

And the credit card on the console? Absolutely not. That’s not tech support. That’s a ransom note with a controller.

You’re going to be the help desk for the rest of your life. Accept it. Just make sure you train your successor before you go, because somebody in this family has to know where the reset button is. And it is definitely not going to be the people who never had to look for it.

– Uncle Bobby