Ric Martin is handy enough with computers that friends and family often ask for help. Once, he recalls, he took a difficult trouble-shooting call on his mobile phone while shopping at the grocery.
“My problem is I can’t say no,” said Martin, whose regular job entails managing Apple Macintosh computers for the publisher of the campus newspaper at Southern Methodist University. “I guess it’s like owning a truck. You get all these extra friends.”
Personal computers are a lot easier to set up and use these days, but most everyone still needs assistance with vexing glitches from time to time. In some workplaces, a professional help desk handles such problems. But at home as well as at the office, flummoxed computer users often call upon any of the technically proficient people they know for favors.
Members of this volunteer digital guard often work in technology-related jobs, but they have a wide range of skills. Some simply know more about PCs than the folks they’re helping out. Some are highly proficient, though still humbled by what they don’t know.
“I would never consider myself a computer expert, though I work with them all the time,” said Joe Dishongh, whose job at Lawson Software involves figuring out how corporate programs can be tailored to a business’s needs.
“In a technical sense, some of the guys I work with have forgotten more than I’ll ever know,” the 44-year-old Coppell, Texas, resident said.
How does someone know he has joined the ranks of the neighborhood geeks?
“When you walk through a computer store, you have to bite your tongue not to correct the salesperson helping someone else,” said Todd Copilevitz, director of interactive strategies for the Richards Group, a marketing agency in Dallas.
The neighborhood geeks regularly pitch in not only because they want to be helpful, but also because they enjoy the challenges.
“It’s me versus the problem,” said Martin, 34, of Carrollton, Texas. “It’s a duel, a challenge, kind of like a video game.”
Another helpful techie, James Grim, likens computer trouble-shooting to crossword puzzles.
“It’s kind of a hobby, and it’s always different,” said Grim, 21, who attends Collin County Community College and works with his dad in a small data services firm.
Grim has even worked on two PC crises simultaneously. Once he was visiting his grandfather, tweaking corrupted files for a printer, when he got a call from a friend in New York having trouble with a video card.
More Top Picks Ratings
The fact that so many people still need help with their computers–more than two decades into the PC revolution–represents a failing of the industry, said David Goldstein, president of Channel Marketing Corp., a Dallas-based technology research firm.
“We keep claiming that things are interoperable, that everything is compatible, that things are easy to use–and it’s simply not true,” Goldstein said. “And this complex technology keeps getting more complex, not less so.”
Professional help desk services are too expensive for most consumers, Goldstein said. “People are insulted to have to pay $125 to $150 a hour to have someone fix their problem–all to fix a $700 PC. It’s very frustrating.”
But going it alone often isn’t an option. Computer manuals can be difficult to understand, and many people seek assistance because they can’t get through them or have learned not to even attempt it, Copilevitz said.
Most technology companies offer telephone or online assistance, though consumers can be frustrated by long waiting times, often followed by instructions they don’t understand.
Melody White Beall, who has a business creating Web sites in DeSoto, Texas, recently helped neighbors who had been thwarted for months in getting a high-speed Internet connection to work.
“They would be on hold for like an hour,” she said. Finally, after reaching a technician, her neighbors were told to hook a cable to the PC’s USB port, but “they didn’t know what any of that meant.”
Sometimes, the neighborhood geeks say, they have to call technical support themselves. They effectively act as translators for their friends, using computer jargon with the representatives.