WIBTA if I stopped being the default "tech person" at every single family event
I'm 27, work in IT, and I have three siblings none of whom work in anything remotely technical. This combination has slowly turned every family gathering into an unpaid support ticket queue and I've reached the point where I'm genuinely dreading showing up places.
It started reasonably enough. A few years ago my parents got a new router and asked me to set it up during a holiday visit. Fine, took twenty minutes, no big deal. Then it was showing my mom how to use her new phone. Then my dad's laptop was running slow. Each individual thing was small and I didn't mind at the time. The problem is that nothing I've ever fixed or explained has been retained by anyone, so every visit starts fresh. My dad's printer still doesn't work properly and I have explained the same solution to him probably six times across different visits. My mom has asked me to show her how to do the same thing on her iPad on at least four separate occasions.
What's made it worse recently is that it's expanded beyond my parents. My sister now brings her work laptop to family dinners "just in case" and last christmas my brother in law handed me his phone before I'd even taken my coat off. I wasn't asked, he just handed it to me with a problem already open on the screen.
I haven't said anything because I don't want to seem like I'm being precious about it. These are small things and they're my family. But I'm at a point now where I feel a kind of dread when I see my dad's name on my phone because there's maybe a 60 percent chance it's a technology question, and I'm noticing I'm less present at gatherings because part of my brain is always waiting to be assigned something.
Would I be wrong to just start saying "I don't know" or "try googling it" instead of fixing things? Or is there a better way to handle this that I'm not seeing?