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.
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.”
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’
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.
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.
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.
What a legend!
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.
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?
My dad genuinely thinks Google is the internet. Every time he gets a new device he what’s me to put “Google” on it.
What he really means is a web browser but to this day he refers to all web browsers as Google. We were in Curry’s and he actually asked the salesman “does it come with Google.”
I wish I had my camera in-hand because the look on his face was priceless.
My Dad thinks Google owns the internet. I once had an argument with him saying something was fake news on some random site and he said that Google would not allow that to be published on the internet if that were the case.
Well that first part nit completely wrong
Trying to get my elderly mother to understand the difference between wifi and mobile data. Maddening.
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.
My mother once threatened to evict me (was still living with them) because I asked her to back up her important files for me to carry them over to the new office computer I had set up for her.
She flat out refused to even attempt it or answer any of my investigative questions. This woman had been using windows computers for work for over 20 years at this point, but the thought of opening an explorer window apparently terrified her so much we got into an actual shouting match over it.
God bless you
When I found out that my dad doesn’t know what the backspace key does on the PC keyboard. His whole life he’s only ever used the Del key and always positions the cursor to the left of text he wants to delete. He used to work at IBM for over 30 years and learned to program back in the day when computer code was printed on punch cards. But I’m pretty sure keyboards already had the backspace key back then.
IBM PCs definitely had backspace keys. I believe that IBM is the reason they have backspace keys. They weren’t standard features on a lot of earlier computers. IBM rather unintentionally standardized keyboard layout, because everyone wanted to build clones.
The only keyboard I have that doesn’t have a backspace is an old RadioShack computer and even then it has a weird equivalent.
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.
use parental controls and disable app installing
Why does she download so many duplicate functionality apps? Has she told you why?
I was never told “why” (My elderly relative did the same thing) but I was able to eventually figure it out. Every time a popup anywhere shows up saying “Your computer is in danger! Click here to remove the infection!” and she clicked there. Or if anything implied she needed to install this app in order to do Y, she would.
5 home launchers, 9 calendar apps, about 30 apps for screensavers (On a phone), etc etc.
I’ve noticed the tech illiterate develope tunnel vision and only see the tiniest portion of the screen at a time. They also are incredibly suseptible to the dark patterns that phones are riddled with so when the phone helpfully tries to offer a random app that paid to be promoted with a certain search term they don’t realize they’ve been had and blindly install it
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.
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.
That reminds me, a customer at a place I was working front desk for once managed to shove their money into a small gap between the cash slot and the outer case of a vending machine. I’m talking paper money and it was completely gone, so they really had to work to achieve this. Of course they got mad at me for being unable to open the case or get a technician to do it on a Sunday morning.
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.
I remember the old days, before RAM had little hydraulic presses to keep them in the motherboard… If you looked at the case wrong, the RAM would jump a mm so it was disconnected but still looked fine, or worse had an intermittent connection and would cause all sorts of issues.
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
meanwhile, farmers after the 78th kick on their tractor
