The Dad Tech Support Hotline: Why Every Father Becomes His Family's Unpaid IT Department

I didn't apply for this job. There was no interview, no offer letter, no salary negotiation. One day I just woke up and I was the IT department for seventeen people.

It started small. My wife couldn't get the printer to work. Fine, I fixed it. Then my mom called because "the internet is gone" (she'd accidentally turned on airplane mode). Then my mother-in-law needed help "getting her pictures from the phone to the computer thing." Then my brother-in-law wanted to know why his gaming PC was "running slow" (47 Chrome tabs and a crypto miner he didn't know he installed).

Now I field tech support calls during diaper changes. I've troubleshot a Roku at 2am while holding a bottle with my chin. I once walked my tía through a factory reset on her Android phone using only WhatsApp voice messages and the patience of a saint actively being tested by God.

This is the Dad Tech Support Hotline. You didn't sign up for it, but you're on the payroll now — and the payroll is zero dollars and occasional homemade tamales.

The Greatest Hits of Dad Tech Support

After years on the job, certain calls become classics. Here's the setlist:

"The WiFi is down." Translation: one device disconnected and they didn't think to check the other four devices that are still streaming Netflix perfectly fine.

"My phone is broken." Translation: the storage is full because they have 14,000 photos and have never deleted a single screenshot. Also they have 47 tabs open in Safari. Also they installed an app that promised free ringtones in 2019 and it's been eating battery ever since.

"The computer is so slow." Translation: they have never restarted it. The uptime is measured in months. There are seventeen programs launching at startup including three different "PC cleaner" utilities that are themselves the problem.

"I think I got hacked." Translation: they clicked "Allow" on a notification from a website called definitely-not-a-virus.online and now their browser sends them to a different search engine.

"Can you set up my new [device]?" This one is actually legitimate and I don't mind it. Setting up a new phone or laptop for someone you love is kind of nice. It's the other 90% of calls that wear you down.

The Dad IT Survival Toolkit

You can't quit this job. It's tenure-track and the tenure is "until you die or they find a younger relative who knows what a DNS server is." So you need systems. Here's what actually works:

Why We Do It Anyway

Here's the thing. I complain about this constantly. I have a whole bit about it. My group chat with other dads is 40% tech support horror stories.

But I also know this: being the family IT guy is one of those invisible dad jobs that actually matters. It's not on anyone's chore chart. Nobody's going to thank you for clearing the malware off your father-in-law's laptop at 10pm on a Tuesday. But you're the person they call when something is broken and they don't know what to do. That's not nothing.

My dad couldn't set up a router. He couldn't help me with a computer because computers weren't his thing. But he could fix a carburetor, build a deck, and tell me exactly what was wrong with my car just by listening to it idle. He was tech support for a different era.

I'm tech support for this one. My kids are growing up watching me fix things — not with a wrench, but with a keyboard. They see me get the call, sigh dramatically, and then sit down and figure it out. They're learning that being the person who knows how things work is a form of love. Even when it's annoying. Especially when it's annoying.

So yeah, I'm the unpaid IT department for my entire extended family. The pay is terrible. The hours are worse. The tickets never stop coming.

But when my mom sends me a text that just says "it works again thank you mijo ❤️" — I mean, come on. That's better than any salary.