A frequent experience of people in IT is that it’s a huge, huge field and once you are in it, your friend and relatives will try to get you to do all manner of IT related tasks for them. Most of these tasks are highly unlikely to have anything to do with your actual area of expertise.
Chris is what in the UK is called a systems administrator, and in the US appears to be more likely to be called a systems engineer. Either way, it entails looking after servers and installing software on a large scale. So yes, he does install software for a living, but this isn’t exactly installing Windows on a personal computer. Despite that, he has definitely fallen prey to being asked to do what is basically like asking a chemist to make you a cup of tea or bake you a cake because it involves mixing chemical substances found on Earth. If anything, I don’t know about the rest of the poor tech guys who get roped into this, that or the other thing, but Chris most frequently gets asked to do things he never does himself, ever, under any other circumstances, as neither of us use Windows or Mac OS, but rather have been using various distributions of Linux (a series of free open source operating systems). Linux has virtually no viruses, so the task at hand over Christmas was no exception.
Watch the pure joy of Chris uninstalling Norton anti-virus and then installing a different anti-virus for his aunt in a very nice flat in North London.
Here’s the video:
Here’s the nice flat:
