Agreeing to help someone can seem simple enough. But even the highest wages won’t make a technical mess any less infuriating.

Check out the bottomless hole this guy had to go through to do figure something out for someone else.

How a not printing printer turned into a mess to reset a password

I’m not formal IT. I work mostly with seniors doing small stuff like installing a printer or teaching them how to use a tablet.

I was in the building helping the daughter of the customer/friend with set up for a memorial. The lady she was staying with said she was having trouble with her printer and wanted to hire me.

The trouble begins right away.

I agreed and made arrangements to do the work. She says that it simply won’t print. In my mind I’m already running through the obvious things: plugged in? turned on? connected to the computer? drivers installed?

When I get there, I discover, it’s a Mac, I’m much more a PC guy, but with the help of Google I know enough about Macs to navigate to what I need. The obvious all checks out, even the drivers are installed.

I check connected devices and the printer shows up. I try to print a test page, I get an error about a paper jam. I check it all out and no jam. So I try again, this time nothing, no errors, no status, nothing happens on the printer. I check the queue and nothing.

So I download the drivers and prepare to reinstall. The system wants a password. She doesn’t know it. It was her husband’s computer and he had passed away.

But alas, another dead end.

She had a page of notes he had made and I tried all the passwords there and nothing.

I Google how to reset the password, and reboot into recovery mode. It want’s the old password to reset. We try again and are getting nowhere. It turns out there are 3 users listed, him, her and admin.

The problem is that the Apple account ID is linked to his email address. He was a retired professor at the local university and the university had gotten rid of all the retirees accounts about a year ago. So we couldn’t access the email.

So I’ve hit the limit of my knowledge and don’t want to waste her time spinning wheels going nowhere. So I decided it was time to talk to the experts.

I called Apple support and was surprised, I didn’t have to navigate through phone menu hell.

Here the dead end descends into hell.

I didn’t have to speak to someone who was just going off a script but had no idea. I got a real person within 2 minutes and she was very knowledgeable.

Turns out the MacOS version dates back to 2017. She said that’s going to make it more time consuming. So we go through a whole bunch of don’t have access to this account and we’re currently waiting for them to send her a new password.

Then I can finally get back to that troublesome printer. After some much needed updates of course.

The things I do for $30/hr. Luckily I love it and I meet some really interesting people along the way!

This is what folks are saying.

I’d hate to have to deal with that!

Does it ever prompt you to drink?

Always.

Nice. I love Macs.

Did the lady try to blame all this on you?

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.