I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe.

One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequency, and the inkjet released its entire content of magic smoke, which incidentally was enough to fill a very large penthouse apartment. I ran her out of the apartment, then I remembered it was still plugged in, so I had to stagger totally blind through the apartment to find the damned thing and unplug it lol

That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP in the world and a dump site for most of the top pirate groups like Razor 1911.

But I had a much different experience. They were kind, more humanizing than middle class housewives, and very proud of their homes which were often fully custom to their spec. Most had built a successful business. Perhaps my curiosity went a long way to flatter them, or they saw themselves in me - young and hustling.

Honestly most "rich rich" people I've come across are like that. Most "snobby" rich people are not honestly that rich at all, comparatively, or are very new money etc. (think of "dude who sold their startup for 20 million").

Statements like this seem to agree with the anti-piracy groups' narrative about piracy being closely related to organized crime, a claim that initially seemed questionable to me.

“HK silvers” were industrially pressed and printed CDs and DVDS you could buy in any market street in SE Asia. Later they started flooding into Europe. For a few years you’d often see illegal DVD sellers outside supermarkets in the UK with all their warez spread out across the pavement for sale.

There was even a local enterprising porn DVD seller in our local area that went around all the local pubs flogging pirated porn DVDs to the inebriated chaps just before closing time. Illegally pressed pirate disks that he purchased from another criminal who mass illegally imported them for resale. These weren’t disks he burnt off with his home PC.

Many of the large FTP sites when I was involved in the piracy community 20 or so years ago certainly seemed to have nefarious links as well if you dared to look or think (so you generally didn’t). Sure, some were just illicitly set up on fast college/university networks by enterprising students, but there were certainly many running around that time that were funded by organised crime.

*edit - I mention above I doubt organised crime is interested in media piracy now, but on reflection I suddenly realised how I’m probably quite wrong on this. There are plenty of illegal IPTV services (re streamed PPV, commercial channels, streaming providers) being illegally sold through the same people & channels as narcotics.

My gosh, it is not very good. I get advertised TV shows I cannot watch all the time. I have legally purchased several streaming services (netflix/disney/prime/apple/etc.) but I have to open each service as a separate application to just browse.

I do not own a TV license, but I will be advertised shows on iPlayer which I _legally_ cannot watch.

My friend has an illegal IPTV subscription, something in the order of $100 for 12 months of access. This has one single interface that lists thousands of live channels, across multiple countries. It has streaming content from every paid streaming service in one searchable / sortable / listable interface. The provider also has their very own branded 'streaming service' which has content in true 4K HDR. Films ripped from 4K disks in full bitrate.

With the rise of Steam / Netflix I have only not paid to consume media when it was not available in my region, now we have another half-dozen services the content has become fragmented.

I currently pay 4x for 1/10th of the service my friend does with illegal IPTV.

Piracy has become attractive again. I'm not sure how this is going to get solved.

Really I want a service where I pay my $10 a month and can stream/watch _everything_ and the royalties just get paid to the content creator. Much like Spotify does for music. I wonder if we will get the same content fragmentation in music streaming in the future; Swift's new album only releasing on Tide, for example. I hope not.

My first job I had a peer, a low-level contracting employee. We worked in the NOC of a regional ISP. Therefore our backbone was a powerful T1-T3 in the early 90s, and we had comparatively massive storage capacity. This fellow was basically college-age, and he amassed a gigantic repository of pirated software which he termed "AHAB". Most of the other staff in the office knew about his AHAB repository, and he distributed the stuff via anonymous FTP. Often we would partake in such AHAB hauls, but I tried to stay away and stay ignorant of the inner machinations of this stuff. I was ostensibly a legit employee for a legit ISP.

Then not too much later, still mid-90s, I went to work for a VAR of SPARCstation clones. The IT boss guy was a prolific pornographer. He was well-known on the relevant Usenet groups by a pseudonym. I had no trouble figuring out his identity, and his office was obviously set up so coworkers couldn't find out about all the porn he viewed on the job. His big Sauder desk was facing the door and the monitor was not visible by anyone in the room except him. So he also took advantage of the employer's decent Internet connection and our sizeable Novell storage network, to store his porn and trade it, I guess for free, with other Usenet posters.

It just cut in their profits of selling pirated CDs with movies or software

I eventually got raided by the cops and they took all the stuff at my house, but not all the servers which were shoved directly on the JA.NET.

Funnily I would rip off the criminals. Especially on hard drives. They would bring me bags of HDDs and they would say "Hey, we got this 5GB drive for you" and I would bullshit them, "No, that's a 500MB, you're reading it wrong", or "That's unformatted capacity.. it's only 3GB formatted mate".

Fairly well-off elderly chap wanted me to fix his laptop - was an underpowered machine that somehow got Vista installed on it (but no graphics drivers, so everything was in 640x480) so was unusably slow.

Now the proper answer to that would be to just tell him to buy a new computer, but I didn't want to let him down so I figured this machine might be salvageable with a lightweight Linux distro.

Couple months pass by and then I get a call. He's asking why videos aren't working. I ask him what website it was - "double-you double-you double-you... dot... x... hamster... dot com".

Now I didn't particularly care about his extracurricular activities, got him to curl|bash a script I wrote on the spot to get SSH access and installed the Flash player I forgot and sent him on his way. I was surprised he'd just openly admit to it though.

Now, in the early 2000s I had to buy dozens of smartphones to test out an SMS relay (SMSC). I bought them all on eBay. Like 70% of them had homemade porn of the owners on them still...!

yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nokia-6600-review/

> You can also capture the moment on video with the handset's video recorder, which renders brief (10-second), fuzzy images and lo-fi audio. The 6600 stores clips as QCIF files in resolutions of either 176x144 or 128x96, and you can play them using the phone's onboard RealOne player. We got an undeniable kick out of shooting video with the 6600, but the actual clips aren't exactly Oscar worthy. As with the phone book, picture and video storage is limited by only the phone's available memory, but if you're running low, you can store your recordings on the included 32MB MMC media.

Nobody’s saying they were hour long HD professional porn productions

Even then you have no defense for taking them too literally, there could be 1000 reasons you're actually just angry and taking it out on them, have a personal dislike, etc.

Another way to talk about why it's clear: inter-alia, multiple rich "bored housewives" throwing themselves at computer repairmen is about as likely as obtaining multiple smart phones with video capabilities and videos and selfshot porn videos on them in the early 2000s. Much less when you start throwing stuff in like "actually I was warned of [the housewives x computer repairman problem] before I took the job!" Lmao.

Usually you wanna be thinking about the cumulative probability of what they say, not the one-off probability.

This was the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925205401/http://txtstar.co...

What op said very much lines up with my own experience.

I remember flip phones with all kinds of stuff on them.

I know exactly what you are talking about.

It is incredibly common that people think they can just go back in holding their breath or stay low or cover their mouth with their clothing like in hollywood...but they take a bit of a breath, cough, and suck in lungfuls of the smoke, and are almost immediately incapacitated.

A lot of things, like PVC for example, release chlorine gas when they burn, which immediately turns your lung mucus into hydrochloric acid. All the other things in the smoke is incredibly bad for you both short and long-term, too.

The smoke is also flammable. Opening a door lets in oxygen, and oxygen + fuel + heat = a fuckton of heat, very suddenly.

I really wish that writers would suffer legal liability for shit like showing people entering a building with their shirt over their mouth - it's where people get the idea that they can so that sort of stuff.

Most important, I must have a reasonable suspicion that there are lives inside that might be savable.

Without all that, screw it. That building gets to burn.

o7

The whole ordeal was 1-2 minutes before I had to evacuate the house and watch it all burn, helplessly.

Even a good plan isn't always enough; most don't have any plan.

How did the fire start, and where was it initially spreading that went up so fast?

Thanks, I had the slight impression that this was true and now feel incredibly stupid.

When you applied for the job did they list this under the benefits?

Not sure I believe that.

[Not that there's anything wrong with the things I mentioned - I just mean it's refreshing to see something not written with an obvious motive. Gah. I still sound like a wanker.]

This post reminds me of my youth. I had a Mac and the motherboard died. AppleCare told me it was out of warranty. But I had the receipt of the extended warranty we bought from Sears. They wanted me to pay for the repair and send them the invoice. I told the Sears CSR "this is my schoolwork computer and we don't have money like that. Which is why we bought this warranty. Because you told us it would take care of any problem with our Mac." That CSR jumped on a 3-way call with me and AppleCare. I think they did a purchase order but all I remember was it was handled and the Apple repair tech was there the next day.

Just the thought of someone even having that much autonomy nowadays is completely foreign.

Even at relatively small companies, with internal tools and support teams this happened pretty rapidly in the 2010s. I've worked at all sorts of small companies with as few as 500 employees where we initially just had a list of "guys" to call for different issues.. and eventually some Big Company MBA Type would come in and kill it. Next thing you know there's 5 different ticketing system queues obfuscating the fact that it's still the same 1-2 guys supporting each queue.

Turnaround time got worse, users were unhappier, support team was unhappier, we had to pay SaaS companies for their ticketing system, and probably hire a Global Head Of __ to run the whole thing. BUT.. we now could measure all the misery! Incredible!

Definitely not the same as it was, though :(

I would prefer to accept this as the baseline and not have to explain why my purchase is important. A large amount of situations involving ownership of a computer are similarly important when it comes to someone being in a pivotal part of their life and not having extra money.

I would travel around NYC fixing things for mostly clueless people. People attempting to screw me on payment was common. The frequent move was to offer drugs or sex in lieu of payment after the work was done. The only sane response to this though was to tell them to just pay what they could afford and then get out of there as fast as possible.

I had a few rich and famous clients. It was a fun time, but I got tired of taking long, extended train rides after a full day of work only to do more work and have a long train ride home.

Never got offered sex on lieu of payment unfortunately, I would have taken it :) Nor drugs but I don't do those.

Much better (IMHO) to put in the time and effort to cultivate a loving long-term relationship with a good partner.

Maybe not the most attractive people no, but regular middle-class people at the very least. Especially when you were fixing macs which were even more premium priced here in Europe back then than they are now. I fixed all sorts of stuff but I would not have marginalised clients.

I guess it's also why I didn't get such offers :P I didn't charge a lot so people could pay my fees easily.

In fact I think sensitivity to paying money (or receiving financial incentives) is more of a US thing. Only last month I spoke to a fairly rich American guy because a friend asked me about a problem he was having with his WiFi. I gave him some advice and he offered me money to come to his place and sort it out myself. I said no, because I already have a day job (enterprise architect) and I just don't want the responsibility. Once I start taking money it comes with expectations to show up if something goes wrong. So I help friends for free but that's it (and he was only a friend of a friend). I don't mind giving some advice but actually going there and taking care of his stuff is a bridge too far. I have zero entrepreneurial spirit anyway, I'm a typical "salaried employee" and happy with that.

The guy was a bit offended, he said that in the US everyone would be eager to do some work for money on the side and here he's always having issues getting IT help. His way of finding such help is apparently talking to friends and offering them money then. It surprised me a bit. I don't think many people here would be too eager to do that.

A large percentage of these folks were very into drug use... in a way that it hindered achieving the goals that they moved to NY to accomplish.

I took on these clients specifically because my store was going to fleece them and not fix their problems whereas I could and reasonably quickly. As broke creatives with broken computers their lives were likely to spiral into a dark place otherwise.

I dealt with way more desperate situations than middle-class people with regular computer problems. This was the "I pirated Adobe Creative Suite and have a deadline but the virus has taken over my computer" era.

Well that’s just bollocks. Perhaps young teenagers are typically okay with earning a bit or forced by their parents to help but it certainly is not the cultural norm that grown ass salaried professionals jump at the chance to earn $50 sorting their neighbors WiFi out.

He just thought he’d found another sucker and was annoyed when you turned out to have a backbone, because you are absolutely right this guy would become what is often called in the trades a ‘sinsya’.

‘Sinsya’ fixed my printer my WiFi doesn’t work as well. Did you break it?

‘Sinsya’ fixed my WiFi my washing machine doesn’t do the hot cycle properly. You were messing with the ‘wires’ weren’t you?

Etc etc fucking etc.

If he called a professional company to help he’d have no issues ‘here’ but he’d also have to pay the going rate.

What he means is back home he has a network large enough to exploit and doesn’t have to worry about learning how to do it or pay a professional.

And yes the "sinsya" thing was exactly what I'm worried about. With money come commitments.

Not sure why you're being downvoted because I really appreciate your insight.

And when I did this kind of work I was a shy horny teenager so I wouldn't have cared about looks :P

Edit: Did not follow Wiha and didn’t know that it became this big! When reading it, I only remembered stories of my mother how she took care of the children and was totally blown away to have such a personal connection from a seemingly unrelated story.

These were serious houses. Huge houses out in the Hamptons or four-story brownstones on the Upper East Side.

One call, I was doing work to resolve an issue with a customer's network, which consisted of a number of AirPort Extremes. One of these was in their bedroom, under a bed.

For fifteen minutes or so, I lay on my belly, working away at my laptop trying to reset the godforsaken thing, when I spotted a small chair a few feet away. Pulled it over, and began working in a much more comfortable seated position. As I grew comfortable, I'd lean back on the back two legs of the chair and kind of rock back and forth.

As I'm doing this, the owner pops her head in, saying, "Hey, anything I can get--oh my god please get up."

Turns out the chair was pre-federal (ie from the early 1700s) and was probably worth at least my annual salary. Fortunately no damage, but it scarred me. I was not invited back to do repair work at that house.

> Like all of my bosses early on, his primary quality was he was a bad judge of character.

> As smartphones became more of a thing, the number of "please spy on my teen" requests exploded. These varied from installing basically spyware on their kids laptops to attempting to install early MDM software on the kids iPhones. I was always uncomfortable with these jobs, in large part because the teens were extremely mean to me. One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say "I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up".

> I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct. I took the $500 and told the mom the tracking software was all set up. She nodded and told me she would check that it was working and "call me back if it wasn't". I knew she was never going to check, so that part didn't spook me. I just hoped the kid didn't get kidnapped or something and I would end up on the evening news. But I was also a little short that month for rent so what can you do.

That's the thing. Once they realise that they have to put effort in it, the threats stop.

I got to meet a ton of different people. There were the computer-illiterate business owners with ridiculous expectations; the lonely middle-aged guys with esoteric hobbies who talked my ear off; the single moms on a tight budget raising three kids; the ultra rich people wanting to keep a ten-year-old PC alive; the author who had lost years of data and would pay "whatever it takes"; the religious father with gigs of porn; the helpless college students whose lack of basic computer knowledge actually impressed me....and more

This was like a trip down memory lane. Great read. Thanks for sharing!

I had read a similar story of a man who worked at car showrooms of various brands (such as Honda, Toyota).

> Look it's important that if you see Oprah, you act normally, please don't ask her for an autograph or a photo

I never understood why people drool when they see celebrities.

Movie actors, musicians, sportspersons etc — I like watching them when they're in a movie, or when have sung a song, or when they're on the field playing, but I never really had any inclination to actually meet them. Even if I did meet them, I wouldn't have anything useful to say.

Those genuine interactions are better than any autograph or selfie.

His patient roster was a who's who of Hollywood: Groucho Marx, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, etc. He told me the secret of getting these famous people to follow his orders: he always included something in his post-op instructions that would force them to do something they'd much rather not do.

Making them compliant created a kind of master-servant relationship with the surgeon as master; these megastars were so unused to following orders that the harsher the Rx, the more they regarded the doctor as a demi-god.

I have similar desires to not meet them but its mostly because I do not care that much and they probably have enough randos bothering them. I would probably dive under the table as well as in the article :)

And “Live in a city for any amount of time and you'll start to develop a subconscious odds calculator.” was very relatable.

The anecdotes about the rich in Chicago match the ones I hear about the rich in California. The divide is nearly complete.

Just an example about a parent requesting tracking be installed on her daughter's phone

"One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say 'I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up'."

I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct."

Part of what made this such a fun read is knowing it's 100% all true.

  s/year. I know we're not very far into the year but I do read a lot./week, and I read a lot./

> The golden rule that every single one of these assistants warned me about was not to bother the husband when he gets home. Typically these CEO-types would come in, say a few words to their kids and then retreat to their own area of the house. These were often TV rooms or home theaters, elaborate set pieces with $100,000+ of AV equipment in there that was treated like it was a secret lair of the house. To be clear, none of these men ever cared at all that I was there. They didn't seem to care that anybody was there, often barely acknowledging their wives even though an immense amount of work had gone into preparing for his return.

You often hear anecdotes of the rich family that's got it all yet the kids are all screwed up and the marriage is on the rocks. For me this paragraph offers a glimpse into why that's the case and why people say "money can't buy happiness". I don't know I may be way off base here but that's the impression I got.

It was one of the weirdest experiences being there and the mom was super prepping everything for The DAD arrival, down to having prepared him a completely separate meal of different food to be consumed on his own later. It was clear that whatever she cooked for him was better, and off limits, to her, kids, and me as a guest.

Was super weird. One of those moments where you suspect decent odds the dad was a wife beater.

My job was primarily as a programmer for the control systems these installations used so I spent the majority of my working day in clients homes. They were without exception the most sterile, vapid, soulless environments I had ever been in. They had everything in them but nothing felt homely. Another thing was the lack of responsibility for cost. You know the line from Arrested Development “it’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost, $10?” Well, this is their real lives.

I was asked to visit a client to arrange a laptop for them to use for day trading. I turn up, start going through options for MacBooks, their pros/cons, costs of models vs features and the guy turns to me, exasperated, and goes “I don’t care about the cost, just give me what I need”. Ok, I say I’ll let my manager know what I picked. I find out a couple weeks later, he’s actually rented a Bloomberg terminal for thousands a week. He then gets me back in to set the thing up. I’m sat at this machine, on the phone to Bloomberg being asked by them for the clients usernames and password, me leaning over to them to ask for the details, being told, relaying that back to Bloomberg, about three times. Until, exasperated, he takes me notebook and writes down every username and every password for every account and service he used. Bloomberg, banking, email, everything. It was worth poor old me having that to not bother him any more than necessary.

Plenty of experiences from that too brief 12 months but was a massive eye opener to a side of society that I’d never have got the chance to see.

It’s a different world, but not entirely sure it’s one I’d want to live in.

Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data vendors at $25k/50k/100k per year, etc. If you are professionally managing money (like a family office or something) at a scale of say $1B then having all these soft costs add up to say $1M/year is basically nothing.. 0.1%. In that world, a $1k vs $4k MacBook is basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures.

That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one.

Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour.

For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.

>That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one.

Poignant! There are plenty of people and businesses happy to pry off a chunk along the way. :)

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-t...

Most of the other "oh I drive a Honda" or "I live with roommates" origin stories turn out to be factual, but incomplete as we find out they have roommates in a $20M penthouse / commute in the Honda for optics but have a garage full of luxury vehicles / own 27 homes / etc.

Kind of like the classic Steve Jobs "hide the Porsches" story.

That said, I bet Buffett owns at least 2 MacBooks?

And really at the end of the day, anyone with a FAANG level job should have backup compute in the case of failure. It's a nothing expense next to the income we derive from using compute.

Fun machines. I still have two SE/30s, including my upgraded SE from childhood!

There's also the tip on bus station prey, should it not.

Great read (seriously).

This was the only part that really got me. I have visited a few major US cities but never really lived there, but now I’m wondering how common it is for American city dwellers to be afraid of the dark.

There’s plenty of cities worldwide with rough neighborhoods where I would absolutely not want to be lugging apple branded stuff through at night.

I and the laptop got out unscathed thanks to me knowing shortcuts and back streets.

Fun times.

Like anywhere, I would suppose, being aware of your surroundings, keeping your wits and not making yourself into an easy target will go a very long way to keeping you safe.

The only thing I can think of here is that I’m a fairly heavyset 6’1” male, who wears chunky jackets most of the time. Maybe trouble sees me coming and decides it’s not worth the hassle (which is for the record hilarious to me, I’ve been in two fights in my life, and got my ass kicked both times).

Maybe cameras still have a chilling effect on law-abiding people but criminals have since wisened up to it.

Detroit police have launched Operation Greenlight and placed cameras with cooperating merchants mostly gas stations where a high levels of crimes occur. Part of the agreement with the merchant is they promise a high level of response when there's a crime in progress. Detroit dropping down the national list on carjackings I believe is a direct result of Operation Greenlight.

Or someone bumps into you at a light or stop sign. You get out to inspect the damage and exchange insurance cards and again they pull a gun and take your car while their accomplice speeds off in the attack car.

Last I checked St. Louis was the current king of car jacking although Detroit is still sadly is in the top ten.

I think we're going to learn in the next couple years that the Kia thing was a much, much bigger problem than we appreciate even now. I think it's a very big deal.

I'm fairly standoffish and I'm wise to a lot of the soft street scams that individuals tend to use. So I'm not likely to attract someone who will bully or mug me or rough me up. I've literally never had it happen to me.

One time I did make a lot of friends on the bus ride home, when I'd been to Fry's Electronics to purchase a large and ostentatious Corsair computer enclosure. It was literally nothing else but the enclosure, so no appreciable electronics, but there was no bag large enough to conceal it, and so the other passengers sat up and took notice of that. Of course, that was in daytime, going through some relatively calm neighborhoods.

I'm usually found on the way to or from a train station around here; train stations are fairly well-regarded as patrolled and safer than the surrounding environs, so it's sort of like getting home free when I end up there.

https://www.theverge.com/c/22713440/the-worst-thing-on-earth...

The author is a member of the semi famous Shopsin family

https://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/shopsins/

I just didn't get the part where he says teens are mean to him, but the only example is where a teen made his job easier...

> I was always uncomfortable with these jobs, in large part because the teens were extremely mean to me. One girl waited until her mom left the room to casually turn to me and say "I will pay you $500 to lie to my mom and say you set this up".

> I was offended that this 15 year old thought she could buy me, in large part because she was correct. I took the $500 and told the mom the tracking software was all set up.

Awesome article

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii

I'm not sure why he didn't take the $500 and set up the software on the little punk's phone.

I probably usually had >$300 in my bedroom as a teenager (and more saved in a bank account).

Also the kid can lie about what they spent it on. Or steal their parents'/siblings' money. Mistakes that lead to important life lessons.

It seems like poor kids have to get in to crime first to afford drugs, richer kids can just use their pocket money. YMMV.

Because you shouldn't spy on people?

> Often I'd show up only to tell them their hard drive was dead and everything was gone. This was just how things worked before iCloud Photos, nobody kept backups and everything was constantly lost forever.

Why not suggest sending the drive off to a recovery service? They certainly existed back then, wealthy clients could afford it, and you could add a nice markup.

I'm actually thinking about getting a training of electronics technician because I want to learn the soldering/desoldering part of hardware hacking -- which I believe any serious hacking may need such skill. But then the job prospect and salary are not really convincing...

He said he didn’t have a car a few paragraphs before. Has he earned enough by then?

i felt as if i was teleported to the OPs job

- excellent writing

- small observations that imply a ton

loved this writeup