the internet
as you might know, i'm a biologist by education. quite often when people find out about this, they immediately ask for help with their indoor plants, slug pest control, or their compost piles.
that's when i usually tell them that i now work with computers. unfortunately, this immediately triggers the dreaded "oh, excellent, then you might help me to set the clock on my VCR" or "activate the combox on my mobile phone", or they call you up in the middle of the night just to tell you that "the internet is broken".
i usually try to respond with the "mumblemumble... only do software development... mumblemumble... don't know anything about hardware... mumblemumble" kind of thing, which only makes the problems worse (fonts and encodings, word formatting styles, two-sided printing on [insert cheap japanese brand here] printers, younameit).
todays daily WTF offers a promising solution:
Just tell your relatives that you work only with mainframes. The kind that takes up an entire room, prints on green-bar paper, and has a whole bunch of blinking lights. Trust me, it works. That's what most people think The Internet looks like.
i think i'll give this a try.
