I have always been interested in electronics and did a lot of reading and studying on my own, and I was very good at buying things at swap meets and repairing them and reselling them as a teen. For my first real paying job, a friend of my mom knew a guy who ran a place that supplied answering machines to businesses. They were new tech back then. She said he was desperate for someone who could fix them as he had ones with issues spilling over the shelves, so I went to see him.

It was an interesting meeting — a middle-aged businessman and me. I was fifteen or so. We kind of eyed each other.

Owner: “Can you fix these machines?”

I was pretty sure I could, and when he pulled out the service manuals for them, he had a couple that were based on the same base, and I was quite sure.

Owner: “What do you want to be paid an hour?”

Me: “I get $3 an hour for watching the kid next door on occasion, so… $3 an hour?”

He pondered that for a minute and made me an offer I could not refuse: $10 cash for each one I fixed. I quickly agreed, and I agreed to stop by after school the next day with my tools to dig in.

The next day, I showed up, and he took me to the back. Sure enough, he had a couple of big sets of industrial shelves overflowing with the things. I started pulling them off and looking at them. He gave me a smile and drifted off and left me to it.

I quickly discovered this guy had no tech skills whatsoever. None. Nada. Most of them had a brainlessly simple problem. The outgoing message was kept on a big loose loop of tape with a metallic splice at the end/beginning that went past two posts; this told the thing the tape had gone all the way around and to stop and turn on the cassette recorder for the incoming message. The splices and the posts got dirty and did not make good contact, so the tape would just go on forever.

About three minutes with some alcohol and a Q-tip cleaning those parts as well as the other things in the tape path not only had them going again but sounding like new. I cleaned the front panels up with some spray cleaner and hit the wooden cases with some wood cleaner, and they would look like new. I spent more time carefully coiling up the power cords than repairing them, but when I was done, they looked and sounded like new.

The owner came back to check on me a couple of hours later.

Owner: “I just came to see if you’re going to be able to crank one out for me tonight.”

I pointed to a pile of five or so.

Me: “Check those out.”

His eyes just about popped out of his head.

I got nearly ten done a night for a while. It did slow down a bit once I got the easy ones knocked out, but I just kept picking the low-hanging fruit, learning more and more about them, and getting deeper and deeper into them. He also had units coming in all the time, so I did still have some easy ones mixed in with the bunch.

I thought he was going to soil himself when we settled up at the end of the first week; I had spent like three afternoons there and gotten nearly thirty of them fixed. It was a really good payday. He was not super happy with our agreement, but he had proposed it, and he had someone who was kicking a** getting them fixed, so he was cornered into honoring it. It was not lost on him that he could have been paying me like $12 a night and I would have been happy with that, but he thought he would get the better of me.

A woman walks in.

Customer: “My husband sent me in to buy an adapter.”

Me: “What kind of adapter do you need?” 

Customer: “He said you’d know what kind.”

She had no idea what kind of adapter, nor for what purpose said adapter was for, and she got increasingly angry with me for just not knowing what kind of adapter her husband needed.

Me: “Ma’am, pretty much everything in here is an adapter for one thing to another. You’re welcome to pick up a few and take them home to see if you guessed right.” 

She stormed out.

It is 2000, and the Sega Dreamcast has a pretty hefty discount advertised in the Sunday circular. A customer storms up to the Upgrades counter (not where the video games are) and starts yelling.

Customer: “Why did you put the Dreamcast in your ad if you didn’t have any in stock?!”

Me: “We had some in stock earlier today, but we sold out, unfortunately.” 

Customer: “Then why did you put in in your ad? This is ridiculous!” 

Me: “…that’s a national ad.”

They don’t like that answer. The complexities of supply and demand, not to mention the logistics and lead time needed for designing, printing, and distributing millions of newspaper advertisements, are not working out in their favor. We have wronged them in the most grievous of ways.

The customer turns to my coworker, hoping for a better answer.

Customer: “Why did you put the Dreamcast in your ad if you didn’t have any in stock?!” 

Coworker: “…that’s a national ad?”

He let out an exasperated gurgle and hurled the ad at my face. Luckily, being paper, it left me with only emotional damage.

Customer: “I need an external hard drive.” 

I show him our selection and he quickly dismisses them.

Customer: “None of these are big enough!”

Me: “Sir, these are 1TB, 2 TB, 4TB, and 8TB. What do you need more space for?”

Customer: “Don’t be stupid! These are all the same size! And they’re all smaller than my current one!”

To “demonstrate”, he gets an older HDD out of his bag and puts it up against our models.

Customer: “See? They’re all tiny compared to mine!”

Me: “Sir, are you equating the actual physical size of the unit with the amount of stuff it can hold?”

Customer: “Duh! What other way is there?!”

A customer comes up to the tech support counter.

Customer: “My brand-new laptop won’t turn on!”

I do what I normally do when someone tells me this, which is press the power button. Sure enough, the laptop turns on without a problem.

Customer: *Excitedly* “What did you do?”

Me: “I just used the power button.”

Customer: *Sheepishly* “Oh, I was pressing ‘Enter’ ‘cause, you know, I wanted to enter into the computer.”