There is a weird thing that goes on inside my brain when someone close to me does their own tech support instead of asking for my help. Generally speaking it’s a disaster if I hear about it. People do their own tech support all the time and I don’t hear about it but when I do it means that everything they tried didn’t work, and more often than not it has made fixing it even more difficult.
With my immediate family it’s been even worse. My mom wouldn’t ask for help and go online or try and figure things out to make it worse.
Now I live with my sister who’s a very strong and independent worker with pride and she likes to do things on her own especially if I’m asleep which is quite often.
The irony to which I referred to as a paradox in my pun-based blog title, is that when they do actually ask for my help I get upset because it’s something that they could look up online and do themselves.
My brain is wired to make me unhappy either way. Today I am tasked with trying to find out something for my sister that generally speaking would be the kind of thing you would self solve.
it involves Google though so who knows how difficult and how many days it might be before we solve this problem. A simple problem. How to access the admin for Google group without knowing what address was used to log in and where we log in and how we log in as admin when all of her history and email and web passwords were on a work computer through a VPN that she no longer has access to now that she has retired from that.
So we have a user group that she’s in charge of and no way of knowing which of her multiple email addresses was used and even where we log in because I can’t figure out how to get past the part that just says to me you don’t have any Google groups.
So it’s frustrating because she spent a bunch of time on it and got in a bad Google mood, and then she asked me to help after I’ve been pestering her to get more help from me these days since I’m living in the basement
But I can’t figure it out. And when I do I’m going to need it to be interactive cuz we’re going to have to get passwords changed and stuff like that.
I’m going to catch 22 of my own design I want to be helpful but I hate being helpful when I can’t be helpful.