Tuesday, November 23, 2004

The Pros and Cons Of Turkey Tech Support 

Newsweek reports on a new Digigen phenom: this week, millions of young adults will spend Thanksgiving doing tech support for their parents while the bird's in the oven. A subsequent Slashdot discussion on the topic gives voice to those young techies, making for a neat net-based call-and-response across the generational lines while providing a solid compendium of those patches and tricks most likely to be needed while fixing mom's ancient PC.

If you want to avoid screensaving in favor of family, the easy solution here, of course, is to host Thanksgiving. Or, better, do what my family used to do: head to some quaint New England seaside country inn for the big meal. You lose the leftovers, but it's a fair tradeoff for the lack of screen-time.

That said, though these days we'd rather have time with the folks than time with their AOL account, if you're young and tech-savvy, don't begrudge or dismiss this opportunity offhand. The accrued lifestyle legitimacy opportunity is pretty solid here -- it's hard for parents to decry your lack of vocational direction when you've just saved them hundreds of bucks in tech support. And strutting your stuff might be better than sitting through Uncle Harv's war stories for the 23rd time.

posted by boyhowdy | 11:01 AM |

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Comments:

Oh, I'm sorry. Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant? For shame! The sacrilege!

# posted by  Anne : 10:41 AM, November 24, 2004

 

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