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.
Sometimes I worry they are being purposely dense because they want to spend more time with us.
Ouch. That hit me hard bro. I was the computer geek for my fam and felt this way as well. This was commadore 64 years. Now I wish my son would call me.
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.
My 4 year old similarly struggled. I finally taught her to click the icon then hit enter which she’s stuck with
The most painful moment went something like this:
Dad: Hey, the computer isn’t working, can you take a look at it? Computer: Full of porn popups because he was googling ‘brittany spears nude’
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.
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.
What a legend!
All the old person BS is just that. Anyone who chooses to stop learning has actively made a choice, being old doesn’t just turn your brain to mush.
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.
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.
If you can, get a photo of his remote and save it. (bonus if it’s his actual remote with the worn down buttons or whatnot)
Draw a circle around the button (arrow pointing to it optional) and text the pic back of which button to push. Repeat as needed.
If you can get him to text you a photo of the TV screen - circle and repeat.
I have an older friend with a TV/remote that is close to ours, but slightly different. Having these reference photos helps with the “language barrier” and the minor differences in layout.
Since I started making it visual and texting photos, it makes it much easier. Because even I, with my CS degree, can stare at a screen (or grocery shelf), frustrated, and not see the very obvious blinking whatsit that I’m looking for.
We used to say, " if it was a snake it would have bit me" but snakes are also well known for blending in , so it makes sense that we don’t see things until we see them, especially when we are stressed.
even I, with my CS degree, can stare at a screen (or grocery shelf), frustrated, and not see the very obvious blinking whatsit that I’m looking for.
At least it’s not just me then. I sware my girlfriend stores things in some secret pocket dimension in the fridge. I open the door I look very very closely and there is definitely no butter in there, then she goes to the fridge opens it and pulls butter out. Where did the damn butter come from?
Trying to get my elderly mother to understand the difference between wifi and mobile data. Maddening.
I have had plenty of painful moments, but a recent one is that my parents just don’t seem to understand that the first result on Google is an advertisement and that they shouldn’t be clicking on it. They literally can’t see the difference between a sponsored search result (which can often be a bad faith actor or a scammer paying to get their result to the top of the search results) and a genuine link to the real site they were trying to reach.
I have tried installing adblockers for them, but they end up disabling them for certain websites that require popups to be enabled and then they never re-enable it again and end up clicking on bullshit links.
I got mine on a reduced privilege User Windows account, Installed Firefox, saved passwords to profile with sync to phones, Installed uBlock Origin extension for FF, hid all extensions so they can’t disable, I also wrote a DOS script to nuke all system caches/history on reboot. Not a peep from them in over a year. If they hit a website with a popup, I’ll just tell them it’s a virus and do something else. It’s never an important site that ever has popups.
When I was younger having to fill out timesheets in Excel for my mum.
Always forgetting their passwords to their accounts and having to reset their passwords for them.
Providing them access on my Netflix account and then when Netflix had the changes where you can’t have it in two homes asking me why they can’t get on, cancelled my subscription in the end.
Email attachments and when they go over the max attachment limit complaining about having to upload their files to the cloud.
Volunteering my help to others…
The list could go on and on.
I appreciate my parents but when it comes to helping with technology it sometimes drives me up the wall.
Trying to explain to my Mom the difference between turning off her phone and locking it.
She also called me recently saying she played something on Spotify but wasn’t able to stop it.
Installing TeamViewer Quicksupport on her phone has been the best thing I ever done.
I set up my parents with Ubuntu. One afternoon, they let my sister’s ever-so-helpful boyfriend try to “upgrade” it to a short-term unstable version. He broke it and left the thing in shambles.
Now they have Apple computers and I don’t get involved. They still use the same password for everything and just go to the Genius Bar when it gets slow.
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.”
Family Basic keyboard! I was surprised that the keys were so tiny.
While helping my mother troubleshoot her phone:
I can’t do anything because the keyboard keeps going away
Everything I click on tries to take me to WalMart
It keeps saying the phone is overheating but it’s not overheating, should I download this program it’s recommending?
No! I didn’t download anything! I don’t download things! Wait… Is the app store considered “downloading”?
I can keep going lol
Fortunately my dad is a retired cybersecurity architect so they live as modern-day Luddites.
No smart home crap
I use Home Assistant for my smart home stuff. As soon as I have a free afternoon I’ll be setting up a VLAN to keep it off the internet.
I wish.
My father currently works in IT and has “smart” everything (except locks, thankfully)
He has multiple Alexa thingies (used to be Google homes), Internet thermostat, smart light switches, smart cameras/doorbells, smart plugs
Idk why he does. The only thing that really provide any value are the light switches and plugs (scheduled lighting) and maybe the doorbell thingies
Could have gone the self-hosted route, but he might just think it’s a lost cause as long as you’re carrying phone that spies on you.
Unless you are running grapheneos without the spyware apps and services :)
JFC, that white text is me to a T.
And my printer is a 1998 HP 4050DTN that could probably survive the apocalypse in fair shape.
Even my planned CCTV system will be completely hardlined with shielded cables, technically airgapped, E2E encrypted between the cameras and the server, and with a mechanically-driven RJ45 connector that will allow one-way backups to BackBlaze once a week through a specially configured Bastille server.
OMG - that’s the same printer we have… it’s the only one that still works!!
Some of the plastic pieces have gotten brittle and broken - I’ve been trying to figure out how to 3-D print replacements. (they broke before 3D printing was a thing and I don’t have the broken bits anymore)
I’ve replaced the rollers once and serviced it myself over the years.
It’s valuable enough to fight over it when my Last Will and Testament is read… If there’s a fire, save the people, save the cats, save that 1998 printer - the rest can burn and be replaced.
Same here. The only part that doesn’t fit me is the Bluetooth - there are much better protocols for that.
I love how it’s the people who know the most about how modern tech works that want nothing to do with 90% of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Thanks. Yeah, she’s a horrible and abusive person, and I’ve had zero contact with her for a year and a half now.
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