Father’s Day

Five bits of dad tech advice that were actually right

“Did you turn it off and on again?” He was right. Annoyingly, about most of it — and the IT industry has since caught up.

Comstel ICT · September 2026

Every one of us has rolled our eyes at dad’s technology advice. Most of it has since been formally adopted by the actual IT industry, usually with a longer name and a higher price tag. Here are five that aged well.

1. “Turn it off and on again”Genuinely the correct first step. A restart clears memory leaks, closes processes stuck waiting on something that will never arrive, releases file locks and reloads drivers. It’s the first thing our technicians try too — we just call it a power cycle and charge more for it.
2. “Don’t click that”Now formal security policy at every organisation in the country, delivered through annual awareness training and phishing simulations. Dad was doing user education before anyone had a budget line for it.
3. “Did you save it?”Autosave has softened this one, but the instinct holds. Anyone who has lost an afternoon to a browser tab, a crashed application or a file open on two machines at once knows exactly why he kept asking.
4. “Write it down somewhere safe”He meant the back of an envelope in the kitchen drawer, which we cannot endorse. But the underlying principle — don’t rely on remembering, and don’t reuse the same one everywhere — is precisely why password managers exist.
5. “Just ring them”The most underrated of the lot. Email chains that run four days get resolved in a two-minute phone call. It is also, as it happens, the single most effective defence against invoice fraud: a call to a number you already had, before any payment detail changes.

That last one is worth taking seriously

The businesses that don’t lose money to invoice scams have one rule: any change to payment details is verified by phone, on a previously known number.

Business email compromise costs Australian small businesses more than any other category of cybercrime. It has no technical signature — no malware, no alarm — because it’s just an email that looks exactly like the last twelve from that supplier. The phone call is what breaks it.

And when turning it off and on again doesn’t work

That’s roughly our job description. Comstel ICT looks after phones, internet, mobile, cybersecurity, managed IT and print for Australian businesses, from our office in North Sydney.

Happy Father’s Day from all of us — particularly to every dad who has ever been handed a laptop across a kitchen table and asked to “have a look at it.”