Less at stake on this one, but I had a friend in college whose father was a business owner. He was stuck with some database software that all his customer records were locked in; he wanted to migrate but had no way out other than copying them all over by hand. Up until one weekend when his daughter brought home her boyfriend, who dad had regarded as a dirty hippie up until then. Turns out dirty hippie was a pretty good hacker and in the course of a few hours, he wrote a program to export dad's database into a usable format.

Moral: your significant other may not be impressed by your hacking skills, but you might win the family over for life in a few hours.