What's Cookin'?
Being "The Computer Guy" in my circle of family and friends means I'm usually the one who gets cornered with tech support questions. Although my actual profession is web developer, meaning I program things that make websites crash, people are often of the mistaken opinion that a "web developer" can troubleshoot any and every problem - hardware or software - that they or their Uncle Phil have ever had with any computing device ever produced up to and including the imaginary machines they've seen in movies.
While I have been known to work support magic, this generally isn't the case.
In fact, I have spent a fair amount of my life poking around the innards of several generations of desktop computers, so I'm probably slightly more adept than your average joe. In fact, building and fixing computers isn't all that difficult once you've wrapped your brain around the basics. This plugs into that...ya gotta have one of these...don't ever blah, blah, blah. It's not hard - it's like playing with Legos, with the added possibility of electrocution.
You know what the hardest thing about computers is? Communicating what's going on with someone who doesn't get it.
The one crutch I tend to lean on a lot is the kitchen analogy. When the person I'm talking to is starting to get glassy eyed, I know I'm losing them, so I try to find some real world thing that a normal person can identify with and draw parallels to the concept I'm trying to explain - and most people are familiar with their kitchen. Allow me to demonstrate.
One concept people are frequently confused about is memory vs disk space. I'll tell people "your computer's slow, you need more memory", and they say "oh, should I delete some things?". That's when I shake my head and launch into this:
Imagine you're cooking a meal. You go into the hard drive - your fridge or pantry - to get the ingredients out and set them on your countertop - your memory - for preparation. But you've got a very small countertop. You're juggling raw chicken, peas, potatoes, pots and pans, knives, bowls. You can't just throw out (delete) some of the ingredients to have more room - you just need more space to work - more countertop - more memory.
If they don't understand it after that, I hit them over the head with a waffle iron.