“Satisfaction is…” [A thread about helping others with their Mac]

[B S Magnet]

I’ll start:

Satisfaction is being invited over to a friend’s place (who’s raising three kids alone) and who just inherited an early ’07 iMac (an A1224), but wasn’t able to get it to boot or even turn on.

They asked if I might be able to help, and I was glad to. First thing I did was just walk in and hold the power button to reset the SMC, when suddenly their well-cared for second-hand gift booted and now runs like a charm (and was given a clean install of Yosemite by the donor). One of their kids was on it and gaming within the hour.

That made me feel wonderful

What about your satisfaction is… moments, either recently or way back?

 

[1042686]

Satisfaction is coming home each day & seeing my kids faces. I also like sitting them up in the counter to watch me make food. For example making an enriched pizza dough for calzones was very interesting to my 3yo although he wasn’t keen on its supple, glutinous texture.

 

[bobesch]

Satisfaction is family and sort out peoples problems at work.
Cinema.
AND sharing experience about computing:
mainly keeping old stuff running properly despite all stupid Mantras to buy it all new.
Unfortunately sometimes I forget about the priorities ...

 

[eyoungren]

Satisfaction is helping someone figure out how to make a program or feature of a program work. It's especially satisfying when you can explain how to do it when that program or feature isn't necessarily designed to work that way.

Immense satisfaction is realizing on the first day back to school that because of your investment of time, computers and network, your family is all online at once attending and instructing class using Zoom and Google classroom, while you're downstairs surfing the 'net before you go to work yourself (from home). Because of all that your network is handling the load with ease and no one is having any problems.

 

[TheShortTimer]

way back?

Not Mac related but still on the topic of Information Technology and helping others. Satisfaction was volunteering in the most wonderfully unexpected and random circumstances. I was in South America, facing homelessness and my nearest relative lived more than 1,000 miles away from my location. A new friend gave me the address of the office complex where his NGO is located and invited me crash at the building.

After I'd settled in and got comfortable, I saw that the NGO's resources were woefully inadequate. There was one PC between ten people - absolutely impractical. During a look around the basement, I discovered that there was easily GBP £100,000 worth of IT equipment, piled up on pallets whilst one PC is being shared upstairs! I learned that none of them had the skills necessary to get the hardware up and running: the computers didn't even have OEM Windows versions.

To pay back the kindness of my new friend and help the people at the NGO, I basically became their head of IT services and brought the equipment upstairs, set everything up and configured it all for them, sourced software where necessary, ensured that their Internet security measures were up to date and I provided tutorials and assistance on everything from video editing to creating social media accounts.

By the time I was ready to return to the UK, they had an entire suite of computers at their disposal and it felt great to watch the drastic change that this made to their lives and day to day operations at the NGO, all from a chance encounter between a very kind soul and someone who was on the verge of homelessness.