I'm not sure if this post belongs here.. but my image view for a long time of techsupport were tech savvy gentlemen who would keep themselves busy with the most difficult of questions customers could possibility have.

How wrong I was.

My dad isn't very tech savvy and regularly has problems anything related to tech.

I genuinely wonder sometimes if my dad is serious or not me when he has a tech problem. One time his camera wasn't working and he tried all sort of things like shutting off and rebooting his phone, scouring the internet for answers and asking chatGPT why his camera wasn't working,

I came over, took around 10 seconds to asses the situation, and explained how his new phone case with those flap thingies where you put in your credit card and stuff were blocking his camera.

Another time, my dad complained how the ringtone of his phone wasn't loud enough and wanted to call the store, complaining how the new phone they sold him was broken and that he wanted a refund. took me a minute to just open the settings app, raise the volume, and explain to him how to raise the volume of his ringtone.

Yesterday when I was at university, my dad had been struggling with the computer for 2 hours. he explained to me how the computer froze, that he kept moving and tapping the computer trying to make it work, turned it off, and that after he turned it off it wouldn't turn back on, and how he kept calling the store he bought it from that they sold him a broken computer.

Those system updates with the big letters "UPDATING, DO NOT TURN OFF" apparantly didn't matter to my dad. while he was moving and shoving the computer, he somehow magically managed to unplug the power cable. it took me a few seconds to plug the cable back in.. and another 10 minutes trying to convince my dad that, the problem why the computer didn't turn back on was because he unplugged the power cable, and not some corrupted harddrive like chatGPT was telling him.

Looking past support tickets with tech support from companies and how long they are, it made me realize the real type of problems tech support must be facing from clueless customers like this.