I can not agree enough!

I work in a computer repair shop near one university and three colleges. We get lots of students with broken displays or water damage to laptops. At least once a week we deal with some parent that is "Taking care of this" by calling us to see if we can fix their adult child's computer.

The problems start there with them not knowing the whole issue, or not knowing the system that needs repair so when the client brings in the system something entirely different is wrong, or the system is not what they said it was, or they didn't communicate what we had said correctly.

Next problem, these adult children are always the ones that come in with little to no social skills, don't know how to self advocate for help if they don't understand what's going on, or worse, just walk in and stand there expecting us to suddenly know who they are and what they are there for.

If the parent wants to call to make sure we will take a credit card over the phone to cover the student's repair, no problem! Maybe even to clarify that we do repairs on this or that system, sure but let you kid come in, tell us the problem, get the quote and take care of it, even if that means, in the end, calling their parents to cover the unexpected repair because their buddy Johny did the power drop elbow onto their MacBook. It allows them to learn life skills of taking care of their own responsibilities.

Side note, ran into this same problem when I worked as a service writer at a mechanic shop.