Tech, the Gift That Keeps on Taking

Do you have a specialty in your circle of friends?

Maybe you are the person that knows Photoshop and everyone asks you to graft peoples faces onto the rear ends of monkeys.
Maybe you know the stock market and are constantly asked to pick the next tenbagger.

Me? I'm the "tech" guy, which somehow equates to being the go to person for anything that takes electricity.  I don't really understand how IT guy translates to "he who knows about anything invented after the ARPAnet" I mean I'm not going to ask a pharmacist how to cure cancer.

I usually get the standard range of unanswerables such as; What is the best laptop?  Which TV technology is going to last?  Why do people buy Windows phones when Android phones are clearly better?  OK that last one is actually answerable; they don't.

Now, not to say that the questions us tech people usually get asked don't have answers they just don't have 10 second answers like people expect.  Ask us a question and you will get 20 questions back about what you are trying to do with this shiny new technology.  It's not that we are just being difficult, it's that we have become accustomed to having to interpret questions so that we can tell you what you are really looking for.

Which brings me back to the topic, of this post.  Isn't it great when you watch a buddy or family member unwrap a gift or proudly display their latest tech purchase while the time counter starts tallying up in your head about how long you are going to have to spend helping (read as, doing it for) them get it to a functioning state.

Worse is when you forget this almost unavoidable constant and purchase a tech gift for a family member. This act should be known as "the gift that keeps on taking" because you will never be rid of the unwritten support agreement that is tied to said gift.  You'd better hope to whomever works for you that the tech gift works as designed for its entire life and likely longer, else you will never be able to live that down.

-Z