When I finished high school I spent about 8 months working as a cable-internet installer before heading off to college. It paid well, and I was basically a glorified network card delivery boy. I’d drive to your house, install a network card in your computer (this was like 1999-2000), reboot it, and you’d be on the internet. Someone else was in charge of actually drilling holes and running the cable to your computer. Fun times. Well, unless you had NT4, then I needed to goof around with IRQ addresses for like half an hour and miss my lunch 
.
I turned down tips when they came up, heck, I also turned down drinks. Though the occasional mother would rephrase her question as “water or juice” and force the pimply dehydrated teenager to drink something. I’d take the water.
Our role was pretty clearly defined, we install the NIC, we give them a 5 minute “tutorial” on how to use the Internet, we leave. We don’t do anything else on their computer, and under no circumstances do we ever use the CD that came with the install package, it bricks computers.
One day I did the install for an older gentleman from the middle east. After I connected him to the web he tried to load up a webpage, some news site from his home country. It wouldn’t render. He was missing the Microsoft font packs. Now our role was drilled into us pretty hard, if we did anything else and it went wrong there was liability on our company, and a serious amount of flak was about to come in our general direction. It could also create skewed expectations “Hey! The guy who did Sally’s internet installed a free virus scanner, and upgraded her Windows, why won’t you do that?”. Lots of problems.
But I installed those font packs.
Now, the gentleman didn’t speak a lot of English, so I had no idea how long he’d been in Canada, or how much news he’d been getting from home. But the emotion on his face when that page loaded… I understood what I’d really done. He handed me a crisp $20 bill, I tried to hand it back but I’d already lost him into that screen, there might have been a tear on his face I don’t remember, but it wouldn’t have been out of place.
That was a great day, and the $20 had nothing to do with it.
.I turned down tips when they came up, heck, I also turned down drinks. Though the occasional mother would rephrase her question as “water or juice” and force the pimply dehydrated teenager to drink something. I’d take the water.
Our role was pretty clearly defined, we install the NIC, we give them a 5 minute “tutorial” on how to use the Internet, we leave. We don’t do anything else on their computer, and under no circumstances do we ever use the CD that came with the install package, it bricks computers.
One day I did the install for an older gentleman from the middle east. After I connected him to the web he tried to load up a webpage, some news site from his home country. It wouldn’t render. He was missing the Microsoft font packs. Now our role was drilled into us pretty hard, if we did anything else and it went wrong there was liability on our company, and a serious amount of flak was about to come in our general direction. It could also create skewed expectations “Hey! The guy who did Sally’s internet installed a free virus scanner, and upgraded her Windows, why won’t you do that?”. Lots of problems.
But I installed those font packs.
Now, the gentleman didn’t speak a lot of English, so I had no idea how long he’d been in Canada, or how much news he’d been getting from home. But the emotion on his face when that page loaded… I understood what I’d really done. He handed me a crisp $20 bill, I tried to hand it back but I’d already lost him into that screen, there might have been a tear on his face I don’t remember, but it wouldn’t have been out of place.
That was a great day, and the $20 had nothing to do with it.
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