I’m real proud of my mom actually. She couldn’t even navigate the desktop when she started, but she has turned into a real techie. I used to have to do everything for her, but these days if she has a problem she looks up solutions online and is usually able to sort things out herself. She’s 79. The only “old person” thing she still does is store files on her desktop and also keep a billion tabs open on her web browser lol.
For what it’s worth, I’m a mid 20s software developer and I store lots of files on my desktop. Ive heard the main argument against it, but imo the convenience is just worth it.
My dad’s the world champion with his tab usage.
At one point they booked a holiday in Spain, that was about 6 years ago and the damn tab is still open. 6 years.
Dad calls me randomly one evening. He can’t find the youtube app on his smart TV. I try to help him navigate it but over the phone communication isn’t really working especially since things I assume anyone would know (like the home button on the remote) don’t translate well to him. He gets pissed and tells me “why do you even work as a programmer what did you even learn in university?”. Apparently I missed my Samsung smart TV UI classes.
Having to explain to my grandma over the phone how to work the tv remote.
Same but with my mom. When the labels of several of the buttons have worn off from repeated use over years, and she can’t figure out why the screen is blue because she’s accidentally changed it to the wrong input. And all she would tell me before ten minutes of detailed questioning as far as what the issue was is “it’s not working”, I had to get from “not working” to “on the wrong input” over the phone. And when the first thing I asked was “what’s on the screen?” and she answered “nothing.”
Trying to teach my dad to double click.
Click twice really fast kept translating to two slow clicks. Took 2 hours of showing him how to do it.
My 4 year old similarly struggled. I finally taught her to click the icon then hit enter which she’s stuck with
Sometimes I worry they are being purposely dense because they want to spend more time with us.
same for touch screen tapping. They just hammer their finger and keep it there for 5 seconds, then wonder why it didn’t work
I do this when the shitty touch screens for Kiosks don’t work. It is a compromise between my inner caveman who just wants to destroy it and the part of me which thinks that’s a waste of effort.
Its not the tech issues themselves but my dad always worried about anyone changing any settings on the family computer (even the screensaver) and he had the attitude that he had to do things himself. He’s computer illiterate, can barely see to read and a slow 1 finger typist. Even him inputting a postal code into a Sat Nav takes so long, so many repetitions, it’s truly painful. So imagine when things stop working. I’m not a tech person either, so I’m trying to figure out a solution while he’s talking about some random computing issue he heard about on the radio decades ago and telling me not to change the settings and break the computer lol.
This is the worst part. Not just the lack of appreciation but addressing their issue gives you the blame for anything that goes wrong forever after
“The computer’s not working and you were the last person to use it”
Really, because I haven’t seen you in like a month.
They needed me to help them because the Flash drive “wasn’t working”. They ended up shoving it in backwards and completely destroying the port. I asked why they did it and they said it wouldn’t go in.
I had a boss who once told me that there are two things you should never force: love and machines. If you have to try that hard, you’re doing it wrong.
Until it comes to seating RAM, or plugging/unplugging the 24-pin motherboard power cable.
The power cable of my nightmares… Everytime I feel like they want you to brake it, just so you need to buy a new one
Every time my grandma needs help with her phone I always have to go and delete like 10 apps because she just keeps installing random useless ad ridden crap. She has like 6 diferent weather apps. She keeps installing random fucking gps navigation map apps. You open them and boom immediately ads. They just don’t learn.
Why does she download so many duplicate functionality apps? Has she told you why?
Because they have different data providers. Not like you can just use one app with several different data sources.
Is this sarcasm or not? I can’t tell.
That is what she said.
Dad: “I don’t have my wallpaper anymore on my desktop !”
Me: “Ok, what’s in C:\User.…\Pictures” ?
Dad: "I don’t have C:, I juste have D:"
Me: “WTF ? You don’t have a C:\Windows folder ?”
Dad: “No, I just have a D:\ drive. Windows is installed on D”
How th fuck did he managed to not have a C drive ???
It’s possible he did have a C drive and just wasn’t looking correctly
But it is possible to install Windows on non-c drives, It just isn’t standard. The main reason is because you want the operating system to be on a different drive to the files. I have Windows installed on C but there’s absolutely nothing else on C just Windows everything else is on the E drive, but there’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t reverse that it’s just you’d have to start off with Windows on C, then remap D to not the disk, then installed Windows on D, set D to be the boot drive, And then finally uninstall it from C.
It’s unlikely that you would do all that by accident. Especially because setting anything other than C to be the boot drive usually requires changing the BIOS. You can’t do it from within windows because then you end up with a “the call is coming from inside the house” situation.
My nerd man says it’s less of “the call is coming from inside the house” and more of a “you can’t go back in time and kill yourself” situation XD
Tech Support?
Bruh, my parents forced me to file their taxes for them. 😭
Not a specific incident so much as a running theme in logical inconsistency… What on God’s green Earth possessed these people to think that I, the “nerd” of the family, having gone completely digital except where legally necessary since about the late 90s, would have the faintest idea how to fix a fucking printer?
Oh hey I’ve got this. I have to deal with printers for my hobby. This is the only tool you’ll ever need.
My parents are generally pretty good with tech. But where I end up pulling my hair out is when I look at my mom’s notifications. She lets any app notify her, and she has lots of apps. The other day when I looked she had two different weather apps reporting the temperature as a non-dismissable notification, and neither one of them was right.
I honestly don’t know how we’re related.
The other thing is when my mom says “but you told me to use this!” I got her to switch to Chrome from Internet Explorer, a dozen years ago. Now when I want to switch her over to Firefox (not even Waterfox!) she says, “but you told me this was the one to use!” Yeah, it was, during the Obama Administration. Same story with LastPass and Bitwarden. Sometimes the best tool changes, mom.
Ugh.
Yeah, I’ve dealt with the whole “why does my phone make noise all the time”
“Cause you have tons of bullshit apps that arent doing anything but dinging your notifications. Let me remove them”
“No, what if I miss something?!”
“You don’t even read the fucking things!”
“but I could still miss something!”
My Dad will ask me to help him with a tech issue then, because he spent 20-odd years doing spreadsheets and databases, he will decide that he knows more about the thing he’s just asked me for help with so I don’t help him anymore.
Most notably, when he was having issues with his video editing and I was doing a couple things with his export settings (we had a few classes about video editing in college- photography major) and half way through he decided I was wrong and the way he was doing it was best. The videos are now huge and unwieldy when they’re only going up on YouTube. 🙃
My mom called me a few years ago, after she clicked the big red warning message in a pop up. After the nice tech support man got on her phone. After she let him install “some program”. Then she thought, maybe she should check with Perish. Yikes.
My mom (78) got a new kindle a couple years ago, after the previous one lasting over 10 years.
She’s not been using it now because “it’s not okay” anymore. After a lot of poking and prodding remotely (we live in different countries) to get to understand what the issue was for the kindle to “not be okay”, I managed to get her to tell me that “the screen is blank”. I said I’d check it soon after when I went to her place.
When I travelled there, not long after, I checked the kindle, turned on the screen, and it was blank. Because she’d finished a book and the last page was blank. All worked fine.
I have told her, but she refuses to use the kindle because “it’s not okay”.
In a separate conversation I offered to give my sister my really old kindle as hers is actually broken. My mom heard that and said she wanted it because hers is… Not okay.
The insistence and willful ignoring of what I said is the most infuriating part.
My parents each have a Kindle but they share the same account and are always reading the same book at the same time. I made the tragic mistake of trying to get them to use Airplane mode so that they don’t keep getting popup messages about the read progress on the other device. I have now heard “so should I be in Airplane mode or not in Airplane mode?” one million times.
Sounds like you can give your mom’s “not okay” kindle to your sister and give your really old one to your mom.
But she can’t possibly endanger her child, OPs sister, by giving her tech that is “not okay”. It might explode on her or something.
Just don’t tell her that it’s her “not okay” kindle. Slap a different case on it and she’d never know.
Many of life’s problems can be solved by a web of lies.
I laughed too hard at this.
Don’t know about most painful, but it definitely sticks out.
My mother screamed for me at the top of her lungs on the other side of the apartment. I hurried into her office, where I see her pointing at the screen saying “FIX IT!” So I look at the screen and… it’s a save dialogue in Word, asking her if she wants to save her document.
Me: It’s asking you if you want to save the document.
Mother: Well how am I supposed to know that?
Me: Do you want to save the document?
M: I DON’T KNOW!!It’s like she saw the dialogue and her brain crashed. She definitely could’ve read and understood it, but just chose not to. That sort of thing was a frequent occurrence sadly.
🚨
