Man Threatens to Charge Roommate $10 for Every Tech Help Request After Constantly Relying on Him for Basic Tasks

A man is sharing his frustrations with his roommate's technological inabilities after repeatedly helping him with basic computer issues that the roommate refuses to learn to fix on his own.

In a post to Reddit, the man, 27, writes that he and his roommate, 31, are "good friends," attending college together and playing card games in their spare time.

The man writes that he considers himself to be "pretty good with technology" — "nothing crazy but comfortable enough to do some pretty neat stuff with it." His boyfriend, 33, is also pretty "sharp" with computers and has an IT job. The couple loves playing video games together, especially "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" where thousands of people can join and play together online.

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The man ran into trouble recently when his roommate wanted to be included in the video game fun.

The poster writes that his roommate is "terrible with technology to an inexcusable level. And to make matters worse, despite knowing how to google things or use trial and error, every time he runs into something challenging with technology, he’ll just say he doesn’t know what to do and sit there waiting for someone to fix it for him."

The man writes that his roommate's actions make him feel like a nanny, "constantly running into his room to help do the most basic stuff as if he were a baby. I’ve tried telling him to just follow a tutorial, or google it but even then he’ll whine that he doesn’t get it. I’ve gotten fed up because no matter how many times I show him how to do something, the minute he comes across it again he again just sits there and waits for someone else to fix it."

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The man writes that his frustrations with his roommate have reached a tipping point, and that he's started to "get harsher in telling him he can either google it or log off because I’m not helping, I am so tired of this."

His roommate's excuse for not figuring out his tech issues?

"He tells me he never had a computer growing up and simply never got good at using them. But I think that’s ridiculous as I didn’t have a lot of things growing up that I know how to use now," the poster adds.

The man gave his roommate an ultimatum of three options for when he and his boyfriend are playing video games:

"1. Don’t join. 2. Join and google stuff and stop being a chore for others to deal with because he’s too lazy to figure it out on his own. 3. Pay $10 per occupancy of incompetence and asking for help until he gets tired of wasting money and figured it out himself."

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People in the comments were quick to defend the original poster, with one user commenting: "I think you’re in the right here. It’s frustrating to constantly help someone who doesn’t make an effort to learn or solve problems on their own...Charging him a small fee might be a wake-up call that he needs to put in some effort instead of relying on others."

The original poster replied with some context, saying he only came up with the idea of charging money because his boyfriend mentioned that that thanks to his own IT job, he doesn't have a problem helping people with their tech issues.

This prompted the poster to realize that his boyfriend "makes a living wage doing it" and "that it was work and a job that I was essentially providing for free, so he suggested I should probably just start charging for it."

Read the original article on People