Family Tech Support Hats

Every family has one, and the qualification is not competence — it is age. Somebody once fixed a laptop in 2009 and has been the help desk ever since, on call permanently, across holidays, for a support contract nobody signed and nobody pays. The tickets arrive by phone call. The escalation path is your mother. There is no queue, because you are the queue. What makes this funny rather than merely tiring is that the job is almost entirely performance. The famous first question — have you tried turning it off and on again — is famous because it is genuinely the answer most of the time, which means the family's designated expert spends a good portion of their career power-cycling things and accepting the credit. The other portion is spent saying the truest sentence in the whole field: I don't know why it works now. These hats belong to that person. They are not complaints about relatives, which would be unwearable at the exact gatherings where they would be funniest. They are the job title, claimed with a straight face, by someone who did not apply for it and cannot resign.