Tech Guy Sold A Laptop To A Friend Of A Friend, But Couldn’t Believe What The Buyer Did To It
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Whether you work in technology or are simply just a millennial, the chances are at some point in your life – maybe even right now – you’ve ended up being your family’s tech support. And that can mean anything from installing a new TV to fixing grandma’s iPad, troubleshooting the smart fridge or programming the thermostat – and honestly, for most millennials at this point, that’s all in a day’s work.
Come home from your actual job and put your feet up with a takeout and some good TV? Oh right, dad is calling because his WiFi is down (again). It’s the weekend and you’re about to leave for a football game – but first Aunt Brenda needs to be talked through how to change the HDMI input because the cat sat on the remote control.
It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it.
For the guy in this story, a tech-adjacent day job has naturally accumulated a whole load of friends and family calling on him specifically to help with their tech woes. But one recent situation was beyond anything he could have ever anticipated.
Read on to find out what happened.
Boot loop from too many emails
For context, I am not in IT support directly but in engineering where I manage a fleet of Ubuntu devices.
So I have become the de facto tech support for all known friends and family.
Recently I sold an old laptop to a friend’s friend. Cloned the drive and then did a fresh windows install. Office setup etc. Very standard.
My friend was happy and a few months go by no worries.
But eventually that situation changed.
But then my friend came back and asked me to take a look. The device was stuck in a boot loop.
I asked what happened and I was told, “My emails were too full so I did a factory reset”.
I could not escape the boot loop so I redid a windows install and no issues since.
I thought it was worth sharing due to how I am still in shock at the train of thought that went: Email spam –> Factory reset –> Needs fresh OS install.
Some people really shouldn’t be messing with stuff that they don’t understand.
Luckily this guy was on hand to fix the mess the buyer had made but wow, it’s no wonder he was shocked.
Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.
This person highlighted the sheer chaos of doing a factory reset to solve the issue of a full inbox.
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While others wondered whether the laptop itself was full.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a niece who takes down her aunt’s legacy after she steals her entire inheritance.
Meanwhile, this Redditor suspected that a driver might have inadvertently been deleted.
Whether it’s your home renovations or working on your computer, if you really don’t know what you’re doing sometimes it’s best to leave things to the experts. Sure, the issue got fixed in the end, but honestly, doing a full factory reset of a laptop is something that you need to know what you’re doing with anyway, but doing a factory reset because you email inbox is full? That’s both overkill and totally ineffective. Sometimes you need to ask for help with things, and that’s okay.
Honestly, it was really good of this guy to go and fix the laptop anyway – the friend of a friend had bought a laptop second hand from someone they knew, and had been happy with it to begin with. For most people that would have been the end of things. But to go and fix the laptop when the issues were caused by user error, and then be patient enough with this weird situation to get it all fixed up for the person to use again was very generous.
Kudos to this guy.
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