Fixing Macs door to door

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around.

I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe.

One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequency, and the inkjet released its entire content of magic smoke, which incidentally was enough to fill a very large penthouse apartment. I ran her out of the apartment, then I remembered it was still plugged in, so I had to stagger totally blind through the apartment to find the damned thing and unplug it lol

That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP in the world and a dump site for most of the top pirate groups like Razor 1911.

That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP

Statements like this seem to agree with the anti-piracy groups' narrative about piracy being closely related to organized crime, a claim that initially seemed questionable to me.

Back in the VCD/SVCD/DVD/PS1/PS2 days, piracy was absolutely heavily interwoven with organised criminal gangs. I couldn’t comment on the current state, but I’d be surprised if there was enough money in media piracy for organised crime to even glance at it, given the vast and easy profits now available in narcotics and fraud.

“HK silvers” were industrially pressed and printed CDs and DVDS you could buy in any market street in SE Asia. Later they started flooding into Europe. For a few years you’d often see illegal DVD sellers outside supermarkets in the UK with all their warez spread out across the pavement for sale.

There was even a local enterprising porn DVD seller in our local area that went around all the local pubs flogging pirated porn DVDs to the inebriated chaps just before closing time. Illegally pressed pirate disks that he purchased from another criminal who mass illegally imported them for resale. These weren’t disks he burnt off with his home PC.

Many of the large FTP sites when I was involved in the piracy community 20 or so years ago certainly seemed to have nefarious links as well if you dared to look or think (so you generally didn’t). Sure, some were just illicitly set up on fast college/university networks by enterprising students, but there were certainly many running around that time that were funded by organised crime.

*edit - I mention above I doubt organised crime is interested in media piracy now, but on reflection I suddenly realised how I’m probably quite wrong on this. There are plenty of illegal IPTV services (re streamed PPV, commercial channels, streaming providers) being illegally sold through the same people & channels as narcotics.

How would organized crime benefit from setting up an illegal FTP?

It just cut in their profits of selling pirated CDs with movies or software

Those FTPs were not publically accessible -- the users, numbering in the dozens or hundreds at most, were software crackers, dvd rippers, couriers, etc. So normally a 'top site' FTP would see a steady incoming flow of brand new pirate material that the site owners could use in the money-making side of their operation.

I am very annoyed by TV and streaming services. I have a very nice TV which I specifically chose because it had Google TV builtin, so I wouldn't have to suffer through any third party TV interfaces.

My gosh, it is not very good. I get advertised TV shows I cannot watch all the time. I have legally purchased several streaming services (netflix/disney/prime/apple/etc.) but I have to open each service as a separate application to just browse.

I do not own a TV license, but I will be advertised shows on iPlayer which I _legally_ cannot watch.

My friend has an illegal IPTV subscription, something in the order of $100 for 12 months of access. This has one single interface that lists thousands of live channels, across multiple countries. It has streaming content from every paid streaming service in one searchable / sortable / listable interface. The provider also has their very own branded 'streaming service' which has content in true 4K HDR. Films ripped from 4K disks in full bitrate.

With the rise of Steam / Netflix I have only not paid to consume media when it was not available in my region, now we have another half-dozen services the content has become fragmented.

I currently pay 4x for 1/10th of the service my friend does with illegal IPTV.

Piracy has become attractive again. I'm not sure how this is going to get solved.

Really I want a service where I pay my $10 a month and can stream/watch _everything_ and the royalties just get paid to the content creator. Much like Spotify does for music. I wonder if we will get the same content fragmentation in music streaming in the future; Swift's new album only releasing on Tide, for example. I hope not.

That's the point, as long as it's illegal criminal would reap the profits. Same with everything else

They ran a legit front business of fitting double-glazed windows I discovered one day by accident, when I ran into them mid-install at a hair salon lol. I'm guessing it gave them some access to the buildings they were stealing from, and at least the opportunity to scope out jobs. The stuff I was buying was mostly commercial, sometimes Sun equipment, etc.

I eventually got raided by the cops and they took all the stuff at my house, but not all the servers which were shoved directly on the JA.NET.

Funnily I would rip off the criminals. Especially on hard drives. They would bring me bags of HDDs and they would say "Hey, we got this 5GB drive for you" and I would bullshit them, "No, that's a 500MB, you're reading it wrong", or "That's unformatted capacity.. it's only 3GB formatted mate".

That narrative is idiotic, sure pirates might buy stolen drives, same as gangs use knives. Stopping one won't affect the other.

Just a PSA (not trying to harp on parent commenter, just taking their comment as an opportunity to soapbox) but never, ever, every go into a room or building that is getting smokey from something burning. It's how you N+1 the casualty/death count in a fire. Unlike the heroes in films and movies, you don't have Plot Armor.

It is incredibly common that people think they can just go back in holding their breath or stay low or cover their mouth with their clothing like in hollywood...but they take a bit of a breath, cough, and suck in lungfuls of the smoke, and are almost immediately incapacitated.

A lot of things, like PVC for example, release chlorine gas when they burn, which immediately turns your lung mucus into hydrochloric acid. All the other things in the smoke is incredibly bad for you both short and long-term, too.

The smoke is also flammable. Opening a door lets in oxygen, and oxygen + fuel + heat = a fuckton of heat, very suddenly.

I really wish that writers would suffer legal liability for shit like showing people entering a building with their shirt over their mouth - it's where people get the idea that they can so that sort of stuff.

We just had a house fire over the holidays. It started in the basement, I was to the flames in 10 seconds, using an extinguisher another 5-6 seconds later. That failed... I spent another 30 seconds scrambling for anything that might suffocate the flames.... then I had to get out. I was 'upwind' of how the flames were spreading, but was not prepared for the power to suddenly cut out in a room now quickly filling with black smoke.

The whole ordeal was 1-2 minutes before I had to evacuate the house and watch it all burn, helplessly.

Even a good plan isn't always enough; most don't have any plan.

Wow. I am sorry to hear that. Glad you are ok, and hope no one was hurt.

Holy cow.

How did the fire start, and where was it initially spreading that went up so fast?

Sorry to hear that, that's awful. I'm glad you (and everyone else hopefully) made it out (relatively) safely.

It is incredibly common that people think they can just go back in holding their breath or stay low or cover their mouth with their clothing like in hollywood

Thanks, I had the slight impression that this was true and now feel incredibly stupid.

Yes, it was dumb as hell. I realized that once I'd taken several steps in and could no longer see the way out o_O

Firefighter here. I will walk into a burning building if I'm wearing bunker gear, breathing from a working SCBA, carrying a Halligan or axe so I can chop my way back out if I have to, and my buddy is with me carrying a hose squirting water. Lots of water. Said hose must be attached to a BRT (big red truck) on the other end so that when I can't see shit and my air alarm starts beeping we can crawl along by feeling said hose and follow it back out to safety.

Most important, I must have a reasonable suspicion that there are lives inside that might be savable.

Without all that, screw it. That building gets to burn.

I also did this in the 2000s and while it was fun to peer into their lives, the amount of porn I was forced to see on elderly people's machines was... not great. Especially during those rare occurrences where they wanted to watch what I was doing to "learn how to use the computer." Just awkward all around.

Found same on laptop of an insurance company CFO. Had to ignore it.

It's weird, I must have repaired hundreds of computers. Hundreds of backups, reinstalls, but never once did I come across any porn. This was around 1995 though, so it was very early days of the Internet, and pre-digital cameras.

Now, in the early 2000s I had to buy dozens of smartphones to test out an SMS relay (SMSC). I bought them all on eBay. Like 70% of them had homemade porn of the owners on them still...!

I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe.

When you applied for the job did they list this under the benefits?

It was mentioned by my predecessor who was then my boss lol. I thought he was joking...

I did window cleaning in the 2000s and went inside many rich folks homes. It was my favorite part of the job.

But I had a much different experience. They were kind, more humanizing than middle class housewives, and very proud of their homes which were often fully custom to their spec. Most had built a successful business. Perhaps my curiosity went a long way to flatter them, or they saw themselves in me - young and hustling.

So non-manufacturer repair of electronics lead to vice, criminality and exploding ink cartridges? Don't anyone tell Louis Rossmann. He has whole videos about that being a myth.

Wild read!

I specialized for a while in NYC as someone who get a network of Macs connected to the internet with an ISDN line.

I know exactly what you are talking about.

Well written, but man it leaves me kind of depressed. Maybe that speaks to the power of the writing.

When I got out and realized it was dark, I started to accept something bad was likely about to happen to me.

This was the only part that really got me. I have visited a few major US cities but never really lived there, but now I’m wondering how common it is for American city dwellers to be afraid of the dark.

Not an American city thing. It’s a bad neighborhood while carrying an iMac box thing.

There’s plenty of cities worldwide with rough neighborhoods where I would absolutely not want to be lugging apple branded stuff through at night.

That's why I feel safer rocking Chinese branded electronics. Who's gonna rob my Lenovo and OnePlus?

Junkie can. They will hit you first and then figure out what is in the box.

Luckily there's no junkies in my area.

Even by day it can be harrowing. By far the sweatiest walk home I’ve ever had was the 20 minute walk carrying home my 5K iMac through the outskirts of a less than fancy neighborhood. They wrapped it in nondescript cardboard to conceal, but the shape unmistakably said “new iMac walking”. It didn’t help that it was a warm day and those 5Ks are deceptively big and heavy. Shouldn’t have cheaped out on calling a cab.

I once bought a new laptop and walked out of the shop realising I had walked into a riot of Millwall football fans facing down Greater Manchester Police’s finest (including dogs and horses).

I and the laptop got out unscathed thanks to me knowing shortcuts and back streets.

Fun times.

Entirely place dependent, these days (30-50 years ago, crime was seriously pretty bad). I live in a huge American city, and I have virtually no fear of personal or property crime when I’m out at night. But in many cases, if I shifted my path a half mile in a different direction, it’d be a different story.

Like anywhere, I would suppose, being aware of your surroundings, keeping your wits and not making yourself into an easy target will go a very long way to keeping you safe.

Its very important to know the area. Because I grew up in Detroit I know where to go and where not to go. Downtown the billionaire Dan Gilbert owns a huge chunk of buildings. He has his own security force and cameras literally covering every square inch. It's worth it to know exactly where those cameras end because the criminals do and that is where you are most often to encounter them.

Keep in mind that cameras don't mean anything in today's world because law enforcement doesn't care about any crime short of a murder.

Maybe cameras still have a chilling effect on law-abiding people but criminals have since wisened up to it.

I’m not sure this is true anywhere. I live in a moderately sized UK city, and have done most of my life. There’s nowhere in the city that I would intentionally avoid at night due to the risk of bad things happening to me, many decades ago a friend and I were mugged by a large group of teenagers, and that was in what’s widely considered a good part of the city. At the same time I’ve walked through what are considered rough areas late at night on the regular and never had anything more threatening happen than drunks stumbling about the place.

The only thing I can think of here is that I’m a fairly heavyset 6’1” male, who wears chunky jackets most of the time. Maybe trouble sees me coming and decides it’s not worth the hassle (which is for the record hilarious to me, I’ve been in two fights in my life, and got my ass kicked both times).

I'm quite unafraid to roam around my own neighborhood, even though it's quite rough, because it's densely populated, and so there are plenty of other locals passing by at any given time. The scary thing about nighttime in a big urban area, is when you're in a strange neighborhood and you're not known as a local, and you don't know the gang scene there, or ethnic culture is different or whatever. So yeah, carrying around a conspicuously expensive box of electronics will get you noticed in those situations.

I'm fairly standoffish and I'm wise to a lot of the soft street scams that individuals tend to use. So I'm not likely to attract someone who will bully or mug me or rough me up. I've literally never had it happen to me.

One time I did make a lot of friends on the bus ride home, when I'd been to Fry's Electronics to purchase a large and ostentatious Corsair computer enclosure. It was literally nothing else but the enclosure, so no appreciable electronics, but there was no bag large enough to conceal it, and so the other passengers sat up and took notice of that. Of course, that was in daytime, going through some relatively calm neighborhoods.

I'm usually found on the way to or from a train station around here; train stations are fairly well-regarded as patrolled and safer than the surrounding environs, so it's sort of like getting home free when I end up there.

Yes, the big electronics box was a target. No thanks, I'll help myself to a black trash bag and drag it around like a crazy person.

I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct. I took the $500 and told the mom the tracking software was all set up. She nodded and told me she would check that it was working and "call me back if it wasn't". I knew she was never going to check, so that part didn't spook me. I just hoped the kid didn't get kidnapped or something

I'm not sure why he didn't take the $500 and set up the software on the little punk's phone.

How does a teenager have access to $500 they haven’t spent and can spend without their parents knowing (especially the kind of parents who’d want tracking on their kids phones)?

I have seen teenagers in New Orleans partying with American Express platinum cards in their name.

Possibly dealing drugs (or prostitution), hence not wanting parents to access their messages? The highschools in my small UK city that are known for having drug problems are the ones with the richer kids.

It seems like poor kids have to get in to crime first to afford drugs, richer kids can just use their pocket money. YMMV.

I wasn't rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I could have had acquired $500 with a bit of planning in the 90s, and did, multiple times.

Giving your kid $50 is hard. Giving your kid $500 after you just gave them $50 is easy.

My relatives regularly gave me cash for holidays and birthdays. And if your parents ever gave you cash for anything it's easy enough to not spend all of it and save some.

I probably usually had >$300 in my bedroom as a teenager (and more saved in a bank account).

Also the kid can lie about what they spent it on. Or steal their parents'/siblings' money. Mistakes that lead to important life lessons.

If she will pay 500 she will pay 1000. Dude should have held out for more.

My thought exactly.

I'm not sure why he didn't take the $500 and set up the software on the little punk's phone.

Because you shouldn't spy on people?

I love this. It's written for the hell of it. Not to get likes, or people to subscribe, or buy a product or show off technical prowess. It's just writing to share - Oldschool Internet content.

[Not that there's anything wrong with the things I mentioned - I just mean it's refreshing to see something not written with an obvious motive. Gah. I still sound like a wanker.]

I came here to say exactly this.. what a nice, refreshing read.

Real world person. Rare animal.

The vignettes were the perfect length for casual consumption. Little bite sized snacks.

You could imagine a Patreon link at the bottom with "if you liked these stories" hook to get you to pay money if it would make you feel better.

Great read. I was wondering why it felt so familiar to me and it dawned on me it’s like a cross between my past jobs of internal it support and ems. I miss going into houses and businesses around my area on a daily basis, and driving around all parts of the city. I remember back when I first transitioned into an office job how isolated it made me feel from community. If the pay was remotely equivalent I’d consider dropping my remote sysadmin gig for a job like the author’s.

This takes me back. Way back in like 2004-2006 or so I was working a computer repair desk at a big retailer and did a ton of side business. The side business honestly paid more than my job did.

I would travel around NYC fixing things for mostly clueless people. People attempting to screw me on payment was common. The frequent move was to offer drugs or sex in lieu of payment after the work was done. The only sane response to this though was to tell them to just pay what they could afford and then get out of there as fast as possible.

I had a few rich and famous clients. It was a fun time, but I got tired of taking long, extended train rides after a full day of work only to do more work and have a long train ride home.

I did that too, worked for a computer shop and often got hired by clients.

Never got offered sex on lieu of payment unfortunately, I would have taken it :) Nor drugs but I don't do those.

It's almost never the attractive, talented, or regularly-tested-for-STIs-and-STI-free ones that offer the sex...

Indeed. A friend of mine did work in a small town hard-hit by the changing economy, and multiple times had offers of sex (more commonly oral sex) in lieu of payment (or partial payment). If you're not picky then some of these people have a lot of experience and are good at what they do. But if toothless/meth-toothed people, usually not recently showered, and sometimes with a fair amount of extra weight is something that will be a problem for you, then it's not going to be as appealing as it initially sounds. On the (maybe) plus side they won't make you wear a condom. On the negative side, they didn't make anybody else either...

Much better (IMHO) to put in the time and effort to cultivate a loving long-term relationship with a good partner.

Uhm if you're fixing PCs as I did you don't end up working for meth-toothed people :P

Maybe not the most attractive people no, but regular middle-class people at the very least. Especially when you were fixing macs which were even more premium priced here in Europe back then than they are now. I fixed all sorts of stuff but I would not have marginalised clients.

I guess it's also why I didn't get such offers :P I didn't charge a lot so people could pay my fees easily.

In fact I think sensitivity to paying money (or receiving financial incentives) is more of a US thing. Only last month I spoke to a fairly rich American guy because a friend asked me about a problem he was having with his WiFi. I gave him some advice and he offered me money to come to his place and sort it out myself. I said no, because I already have a day job (enterprise architect) and I just don't want the responsibility. Once I start taking money it comes with expectations to show up if something goes wrong. So I help friends for free but that's it (and he was only a friend of a friend). I don't mind giving some advice but actually going there and taking care of his stuff is a bridge too far. I have zero entrepreneurial spirit anyway, I'm a typical "salaried employee" and happy with that.

The guy was a bit offended, he said that in the US everyone would be eager to do some work for money on the side and here he's always having issues getting IT help. His way of finding such help is apparently talking to friends and offering them money then. It surprised me a bit. I don't think many people here would be too eager to do that.

Understood but I always use protection anyway.

And when I did this kind of work I was a shy horny teenager so I wouldn't have cared about looks :P

My favorite bit, "Threats quickly lost their power when you realized nobody at any point had asked your name or any information about yourself. It's hard to threaten an anonymous person."

I don't get this part. Thet could just phone Apple and complain about some contractor and Apple could get his name from some records.

They could just phone Apple

That's the thing. Once they realise that they have to put effort in it, the threats stop.

Exactly, they wouldn't complain themselves or even make the initial call themselves, they'd have a personal assistant do it, and whether or not they do is arbitrary because they won't check, not important.

Mine was

As smartphones became more of a thing, the number of "please spy on my teen" requests exploded. These varied from installing basically spyware on their kids laptops to attempting to install early MDM software on the kids iPhones. I was always uncomfortable with these jobs, in large part because the teens were extremely mean to me. One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say "I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up".

I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct. I took the $500 and told the mom the tracking software was all set up. She nodded and told me she would check that it was working and "call me back if it wasn't". I knew she was never going to check, so that part didn't spook me. I just hoped the kid didn't get kidnapped or something and I would end up on the evening news. But I was also a little short that month for rent so what can you do.

His boss was indeed a bad judge of character.

The experiences of people who meet a wide range of customers are always interesting.

I had read a similar story of a man who worked at car showrooms of various brands (such as Honda, Toyota).

Look it's important that if you see Oprah, you act normally, please don't ask her for an autograph or a photo

I never understood why people drool when they see celebrities.

Movie actors, musicians, sportspersons etc — I like watching them when they're in a movie, or when have sung a song, or when they're on the field playing, but I never really had any inclination to actually meet them. Even if I did meet them, I wouldn't have anything useful to say.

The trick, and I say this as someone who's gotten to meet a fair number of musicians, including some semi-famous ones, is that they're people. Plus they're also huge music nerds. Just mention Cheap Trick and you're in... (Although at the same time, do know how to read the room - it's not that hard to tell when someone just wants to be left alone.

Those genuine interactions are better than any autograph or selfie.

Sort of related: I was friends with a world-famous surgeon at UCLA, chairman of the urology department (he married an ex-girlfriend whom I stayed on good terms with).

His patient roster was a who's who of Hollywood: Groucho Marx, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, etc. He told me the secret of getting these famous people to follow his orders: he always included something in his post-op instructions that would force them to do something they'd much rather not do.

Making them compliant created a kind of master-servant relationship with the surgeon as master; these megastars were so unused to following orders that the harsher the Rx, the more they regarded the doctor as a demi-god.

I feel the same way and yet once I turned around at a city art fair to be right in front of somebody recognizable. It struck me as surprising in the same way as bumping into a friend. I involuntarily greeted them by name. The best response to my mistake that I could come up with on the spot was "I'm a big fan", handshake, "have a nice day", leave.

I've met a few but would normally not bother them as I'm sure they're not at all interested in anything other than the job at hand. One exception was when I was a specialist extra for a documentary and the star presenter asked me for some background info. on my specialist area; in that case I was happy to chat to them for a while about it.

I think its a para-social thing. We are not build to see somebody everyday in a certain context and only passively interact with them. This crosses a couple of wires I think.

I have similar desires to not meet them but its mostly because I do not care that much and they probably have enough randos bothering them. I would probably dive under the table as well as in the article :)

Interesting read. It reminded me of "Do Things That Don't Scale" https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

I just didn't get the part where he says teens are mean to him, but the only example is where a teen made his job easier...

I was always uncomfortable with these jobs, in large part because the teens were extremely mean to me. One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say "I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up".

I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct. I took the $500 and told the mom the tracking software was all set up.

Probably less about what was said, and more how I'd imagine an entitled teen might act and say things.

Mean teens and the bribing teen are separate anecdotes. Most teens are unhappy with a stranger rifling through their phone, especially somebody installing spyware. Those are the mean teens.

A guess: The teen sized him up as needing money, intuited how much, and offered it in a show of power.

the kid called him cheap and/or poor in the straight-forward way you talk about someone’s hair color.

Great story! This had me confused though:

Often I'd show up only to tell them their hard drive was dead and everything was gone. This was just how things worked before iCloud Photos, nobody kept backups and everything was constantly lost forever.

Why not suggest sending the drive off to a recovery service? They certainly existed back then, wealthy clients could afford it, and you could add a nice markup.

Expensive (even for the wealthy, a lot of the time), not guaranteed to work, inviting more ire if it doesn’t work.

Yeah. Not photos at the time but I’ve lost inadequately backed up hard drives at a time when online backups and external drives weren’t really a thing. Annoying but not something I was going to spend thousands of dollars to try to get recovered.

Same, personally. But I also did on-site tech support in the same era and would always give customers the option if they had a drive I couldn't recover. Honestly seems negligent to me not to. On several occasions they opted to spend the ~$1,000 to recover their family photos, business documents, or other important files and were always extremely happy when it worked. These were not exceptionally wealthy people either.

Doesn't help you now, but often data recovery companies such as DriveSavers only charge a fee if they are successful.

From the entire article, this paragraph stood out the most to me

The golden rule that every single one of these assistants warned me about was not to bother the husband when he gets home. Typically these CEO-types would come in, say a few words to their kids and then retreat to their own area of the house. These were often TV rooms or home theaters, elaborate set pieces with $100,000+ of AV equipment in there that was treated like it was a secret lair of the house. To be clear, none of these men ever cared at all that I was there. They didn't seem to care that anybody was there, often barely acknowledging their wives even though an immense amount of work had gone into preparing for his return.

You often hear anecdotes of the rich family that's got it all yet the kids are all screwed up and the marriage is on the rocks. For me this paragraph offers a glimpse into why that's the case and why people say "money can't buy happiness". I don't know I may be way off base here but that's the impression I got.

I spent a year working for an A/V installation company - whole house integrated sound systems, media servers, security, etc - and their clientele was solely multi-millionaires of various nationalities.

My job was primarily as a programmer for the control systems these installations used so I spent the majority of my working day in clients homes. They were without exception the most sterile, vapid, soulless environments I had ever been in. They had everything in them but nothing felt homely. Another thing was the lack of responsibility for cost. You know the line from Arrested Development “it’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost, $10?” Well, this is their real lives.

I was asked to visit a client to arrange a laptop for them to use for day trading. I turn up, start going through options for MacBooks, their pros/cons, costs of models vs features and the guy turns to me, exasperated, and goes “I don’t care about the cost, just give me what I need”. Ok, I say I’ll let my manager know what I picked. I find out a couple weeks later, he’s actually rented a Bloomberg terminal for thousands a week. He then gets me back in to set the thing up. I’m sat at this machine, on the phone to Bloomberg being asked by them for the clients usernames and password, me leaning over to them to ask for the details, being told, relaying that back to Bloomberg, about three times. Until, exasperated, he takes me notebook and writes down every username and every password for every account and service he used. Bloomberg, banking, email, everything. It was worth poor old me having that to not bother him any more than necessary.

Plenty of experiences from that too brief 12 months but was a massive eye opener to a side of society that I’d never have got the chance to see.

It’s a different world, but not entirely sure it’s one I’d want to live in.

There's a lot of jobs/markets where the physical hardware is not even remotely the main cost.

Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data vendors at $25k/50k/100k per year, etc. If you are professionally managing money (like a family office or something) at a scale of say $1B then having all these soft costs add up to say $1M/year is basically nothing.. 0.1%. In that world, a $1k vs $4k MacBook is basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures.

That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one.

Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour.

For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.

I had a friend in school back in nowhere whose family for some reason resembled this, without the money or in any way being a captain of industry as they say. He in no way made enough money to household help, or even to fully support the families lifestyle as the wife did do some part time work.

It was one of the weirdest experiences being there and the mom was super prepping everything for The DAD arrival, down to having prepared him a completely separate meal of different food to be consumed on his own later. It was clear that whatever she cooked for him was better, and off limits, to her, kids, and me as a guest.

Was super weird. One of those moments where you suspect decent odds the dad was a wife beater.

Reading these stories about fixing Macs in the 90s is like unearthing a treasure trove of tech lore. Who would have thought that a day job could lead to encounters with high society, complete with inkjet printers turning into unexpected smoke machines, and a twist of fate leading to a starring role in the world of digital piracy? It's fascinating how these tales intertwine technology with the thrill of adventure, almost like living in a real-life spy novel

Did you use LLM to write this comment? It felt a little bit unnatural to my eye so I put it into gptzero and it spit out a 91% of probability that this was generated.

Had the exact same thought as well. It just.. kinda feels off.

Lol, I had the exact same thought. There's something.. Off about its writing style; reminds me of marketing copy or 'HR speak'.

I was directed to park across the street and told even though the signs said "no parking" that they had a "deal with the city".

He said he didn’t have a car a few paragraphs before. Has he earned enough by then?

He then proceeds to specify that it was a borrowed one

Yeah, just got to that part.

That was the most fun thing I've read all year. I know we're not very far into the year but I do read a lot.

Just an example about a parent requesting tracking be installed on her daughter's phone

"One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say 'I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up'."

I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct."

Part of what made this such a fun read is knowing it's 100% all true.

Yeah that was a great anecdote, I was going to post the same story! Parent pays you to install spyware , rich kid pays you not to install spyware, double payment for nothing.

  s/year. I know we're not very far into the year but I do read a lot./week, and I read a lot./

FTFY ;)

Thought provoking article. I like to think I acknowledge the people I call for services, at least to the extent they want the conversation. I'm sure there are many more in daily life I don't notice but whose work makes my world go around.

The anecdotes about the rich in Chicago match the ones I hear about the rich in California. The divide is nearly complete.

It's just an awkward social situation, and most people just want to be left to get on with their work when they're on the clock.

Agreed. The divide might be real, but when I've done this sort of work I want to be viewed as the furniture by most people so I didn't have to spend effort on awkward conversations. And I never even dealt with rich people like this.

One of the things I miss by reading this post is how empowered CSRs were back in those days. Today, everything is scripted and highly metricized. Going through the customer service line today will get you the run around and lot of toothless solutions. No one can do anything and even "escalation" mostly means handing you off to another powerless CSR to continue the runaround.

This post reminds me of my youth. I had a Mac and the motherboard died. AppleCare told me it was out of warranty. But I had the receipt of the extended warranty we bought from Sears. They wanted me to pay for the repair and send them the invoice. I told the Sears CSR "this is my schoolwork computer and we don't have money like that. Which is why we bought this warranty. Because you told us it would take care of any problem with our Mac." That CSR jumped on a 3-way call with me and AppleCare. I think they did a purchase order but all I remember was it was handled and the Apple repair tech was there the next day.

Just the thought of someone even having that much autonomy nowadays is completely foreign.

It's interesting how rapidly the beancounters quashed CSR autonomy and put everything behind inscrutable ticketing systems.

Even at relatively small companies, with internal tools and support teams this happened pretty rapidly in the 2010s. I've worked at all sorts of small companies with as few as 500 employees where we initially just had a list of "guys" to call for different issues.. and eventually some Big Company MBA Type would come in and kill it. Next thing you know there's 5 different ticketing system queues obfuscating the fact that it's still the same 1-2 guys supporting each queue.

Turnaround time got worse, users were unhappier, support team was unhappier, we had to pay SaaS companies for their ticketing system, and probably hire a Global Head Of __ to run the whole thing. BUT.. we now could measure all the misery! Incredible!

they should fix windows systems door to door, they would make a lot more money.

they do. for like 30 years now.

This was eerily similar to my experience about 5 years prior. My experience was in Australia on the software side. Down to the same equipment, same style people, same style interaction with apple.

As an Aussie, I’m curious to hear the stories! I don’t know much about Chicago!

Nice writing. I like it.

I'm actually thinking about getting a training of electronics technician because I want to learn the soldering/desoldering part of hardware hacking -- which I believe any serious hacking may need such skill. But then the job prospect and salary are not really convincing...

Why not do it as a hobby instead? It's quite popular these days.

If you liked this, you might like the novella "Laserwriter II" by Tamara Shopsin.

https://www.theverge.com/c/22713440/the-worst-thing-on-earth...

This was a delightful piece of writing, but it's hard to see how it turns into a novel. Kind of a documentary style?

The author is a member of the semi famous Shopsin family

https://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/shopsins/

mad perspectives. being a tech frontliner you saw so much. in fame, in lives of excess. amazing hearing from your perspective how the wealthy think and live. one of the best articles i've read on the web in a long time, thank you for writing it.

There’s a certain type of person who looks for enterprise type it contractors over Craigslist. A bizarre combination of money and insanity that usually makes for a fun time.

Tools specially for Mac repair. Anyone else remember the "case cracker"? It was a very broad hinged wedge you had to use to open up the original all-in-one Macs (with the 9" B&W screens). There were some capacitors in those machines that blew out frequently. Fantastic computer for its time though, if you could afford it.

Don’t forget its two friends — the long-handled Torx and the screwdriver with the 10M resistor and the alligator clip, to bleed the charge out of the CRT.

Fun machines. I still have two SE/30s, including my upgraded SE from childhood!

It reminds me of this book:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii

Oh cool, I’ve been meaning to check this out ever since I saw her do a reading from a new book of hers. Her family runs a pretty well known restaurant in the city with a 900 item menu (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopsin%27s). Maybe she talks about in the book. Thanks for the reminder.

It was enlightening to learn about obscure parts of the Mac repair world and to ponder the lives of all the people you met.

Awesome article

This is a great read! I am fifty years old now, but for many years during my twenties I supported myself as a one-man Mac/PC repair shop...in a college town. I made house calls almost everyday, and every evening was spent in my home shop working on drop-offs.

I got to meet a ton of different people. There were the computer-illiterate business owners with ridiculous expectations; the lonely middle-aged guys with esoteric hobbies who talked my ear off; the single moms on a tight budget raising three kids; the ultra rich people wanting to keep a ten-year-old PC alive; the author who had lost years of data and would pay "whatever it takes"; the religious father with gigs of porn; the helpless college students whose lack of basic computer knowledge actually impressed me....and more

This was like a trip down memory lane. Great read. Thanks for sharing!

This was superb. Thanks to the author for sharing.

Excellent title, better article. This described worlds I didn’t know existed.

Ironically enough, one of the rich people who did not have a large household staff was Steve Jobs himself. One thing that money often seems to buy you is a bunch of strangers in your fucking house and he hated that.

Great read

What a great story. This is the kind of writing I encourage many of my retired friends to try. Start by a few short anecdotes and stories of things or people you remember. Even though we are not Cicero, our history has changed dramatically in our life times (maybe it was always like this?) Many of them have lived thorough some interesting part of history and witnessed social and cultural, technical, change that will be very interesting in the future. Imagine the characters, the anecdotes, the humor, the disaster that retired: teachers, farmers, mechanics, doctors, and so on, can tell.

Great read, this guy is going on my daily RSS feed list.

That isn't what "door to door" means though.

Close. GSX, not ASX.

what an enjoyable read

i felt as if i was teleported to the OPs job

- great anekdotes

- excellent writing

- small observations that imply a ton

loved this writeup

I did that for about 10 years from 2000 to 2010. The part about "being part of the furniture" is really on point. It is incredible how little they think of you. This has a side effect, they thrust you. Ebanking logins, emails, personal conversation, photos... You get it all. I was always very discrete and never did anything "bad", but there were moments when I was treated like a nuisance where I really wanted to. There is also a few times when you find out that the husband or wife is cheating, that is always very difficult to handle especially when the other one is here with you saying how great their partner is.

fairly entertaining morning lecture :-) many thanks

I love these well written, slyly comical in a dry way, articles.

Finally a comprehensive guide on how to arrange ones home/life once that YC deal goes through.

There's also the tip on bus station prey, should it not.

Great read (seriously).

He writes well. This is the blog post I'd really like to read:

Like all of my bosses early on, his primary quality was he was a bad judge of character.

Pretty sure a friend around 2014 had one of these callouts for their Mac Pro tower in NYC. This article just reminded me that even happened. thanks for writing!

I was once an Apple Certified Technical Consultant, mostly doing managed services-type work for small businesses in NYC but would sometimes get the call to go to someone's house, usually an owner or other senior-level exec at one of these businesses.

These were serious houses. Huge houses out in the Hamptons or four-story brownstones on the Upper East Side.

One call, I was doing work to resolve an issue with a customer's network, which consisted of a number of AirPort Extremes. One of these was in their bedroom, under a bed.

For fifteen minutes or so, I lay on my belly, working away at my laptop trying to reset the godforsaken thing, when I spotted a small chair a few feet away. Pulled it over, and began working in a much more comfortable seated position. As I grew comfortable, I'd lean back on the back two legs of the chair and kind of rock back and forth.

As I'm doing this, the owner pops her head in, saying, "Hey, anything I can get--oh my god please get up."

Turns out the chair was pre-federal (ie from the early 1700s) and was probably worth at least my annual salary. Fortunately no damage, but it scarred me. I was not invited back to do repair work at that house.

Reminds me that what we really crave is authenticity. It’s the number one rule for writing. Also shows why AI content is so pointless.

interesting

Great read and a trip down memory lane for me as I cut my teeth being a field engineer for a small IT support company in London for 2 years was back in 2005.

Good story.

As someone who has lived here for going on 15 years, he really unintentionally nailed the whole spectrum of experience of living in Chicago.

And “Live in a city for any amount of time and you'll start to develop a subconscious odds calculator.” was very relatable.

Hah! I did the same thing for a few years in the early 2000s, but I wasn't affiliated with Apple and just did upgrades, fixes, etc. I rode my bike all over town and charged by the hour. I had all my tools and wallet of CDs for all kinds of stuff with me. Good times!

Imagine being a Mac fixer turned pirate king - only in the 90s, right? From smoke-spewing printers to brushing shoulders with the digital underworld, those were the days of real tech adventures. Makes you miss the wild side of tech.

The tales from the 90s of fixing Macs are like pages from a tech thriller novel. Each story is a mix of high-end luxury, unexpected social encounters, and a descent into the murky waters of digital piracy, all wrapped up in the day-to-day life of a computer technician. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a past where the lines between technology, adventure, and moral ambiguity were constantly blurred.

These anecdotes from the front lines of 90s tech support are nothing short of astonishing. It's a vivid reminder of how the tech industry, often seen as mundane or straightforward, has its share of wild, almost unbelievable stories. From tech mishaps turning into hazardous situations to an inadvertent descent into the world of digital piracy, it's a stark contrast to the current, more sanitized world of tech support and IT.

Talk about tech gone wild! Those 90s Mac repair tales are straight out of a heist movie, complete with inkjet smoke bombs and an accidental dive into the piracy deep end. Makes today's IT work look like a walk in the park!

The 90s tech scene? More like a crossover episode between 'Ocean's Eleven' and 'Silicon Valley.' From luxury house adventures to dodgy dealings with digital pirates, fixing Macs was like a rollercoaster ride in the tech underworld.

I used to fix computers for doctors when I was a teenager, this brought some memories, fun read.