Well, that’s my good deed for the day. My evening spent doing my community service to an elderly gentleman convinced his websites had been hacked. They hadn’t been. On the first site, he’d just got himself into a pickle running multiple security plugins which decided he was a brute-force attacker, locking out his IP address. The second one caused by an ancient website theme stuffed with deprecated code.
It can be time-consuming unravelling the mysterious machinations of these enthusiastic but completely amateur publishers, but there is a sense of satisfaction that comes supporting folk at their most desperate, who have no idea where else to turn. They don’t think to contact their web hosts, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t feel satisfied that they had addressed their concerns.
Fortunately, my years spent supporting technophobic incompetents at work has bestowed me with the unending patience the official helpdesk would never be able to muster. I have spent hundreds of hours through the years supporting elderly folk with computer issues such as these. If it’s not worry about a website, it will be a malfunctioning printer or laptop.
I don’t begrudge them, eating up my evenings when I’d rather be watching some randomness. Such requests, I always feel, are really a gift: an opportunity to do some good in our lives. Never refuse someone who asks you for help, whatever it may be. Embrace it as a gift from above.
Last modified: 7 November 2022
