PEBKAC

[angharad_gam]

My father-in-law could be the butt of one of those Help Desk jokes which always make you think 'surely people aren't really that stupid?' It's not that he's stupid, he just doesn't seem to get computers at all, in any way whatsoever, and doesn't seem to be capable of learning about them. Since Andy is usually at home during the day this means he gets to be unofficial tech support. He's forever getting phone calls along the lines of 'Andy, the printer's not working' etc etc. Once, when Andy was out, he asked me how to get a letter into an email. I was a bit confused at first by what he meant (I thought he wanted to scan something). It turned out that he had written a letter in Word and he wanted to copy and paste it into an email. Yep, just copy and paste.

Anyway, we came back from Victor Harbor to an urgent phone call from him. You know those scammy phone calls from India where someone rings up and says 'We have detected a virus on your computer, please can you go to it now?' The ones where you go 'Yeah right, sure you have.' And then you might string him along a bit...'Which computer do you mean....no we have five in the house...no I am not switching my computer on...goodbye'. Well, he fell it for it. Sent them money and everything. They installed some kind of extra layer of security on his computer, which meant he had to enter another password to use it. Then he refused to pay them anymore so they changed that password. Now he can't use his computer.

*sigh*

Comments

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

If it didn't work then they wouldn't do it. Enough people fall for their approaches to make it profitable to repeatedly cold call, although they do tend to do it when their ideal demographic (old retirees that don't understand computers) are the only ones likely to be at home.

[angharad-gam.livejournal.com]

Yeah I guess so. It just seems a little strange to me. My father, for instance, is not much younger, but is still pretty technologically savvy. But then he got into computers in the 80's when home computers first came out. But FIL is not slow to adopt new technology - he always has to have the latest gadget - he just doesn't understand how they work (on the most fundamental level - I mean I wouldn't claim to be au fait with fast fourier transforms) or how to use them.

You know a little while ago, someone at work running a fraud survey told me that Australians are the most gullible people in the world (and I believed her ha ha!) and fall for fraudulent schemes quite a lot. I wonder if there's a bit of that going on (I also wondered at the time if this was related to the oft-noted Australian characteristic of 'will bet on anything').