memes

Having to explain to my grandma over the phone how to work the tv remote.

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.

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.

My parents: "You're a nerd, can you help with our computer?"

I reluctantly overlook how insulting they always are and help

Many months later

My parents: "Our computer isn't working right lately. It's probably your fault from the last time you were messing with it."

I can feel my blood pressure rise as I read through this comment section.

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 ????

Family Basic keyboard! I was surprised that the keys were so tiny.

Clearing about 5 rows of taskbars from my mom's internet Explorer years and years ago. Finding out she was paying for McAfee recently.

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?

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.

My cousin was way older than I so his kids were my age. He brought his laptop over because it was showing weird porn ads at very odd times. I usually charge a bottle of alcohol and then throw a big party with that alcohol because I was the go to guy for the neightborhood. Anyway, the porn he was watching was really intense and not at all what you think of as "normal" porn. So I told him everything I found and he said his 15 year old grandson borrowed it when ever he came over. I was genuinly scared of that kid from that moment on. Clown porn was the lighter side of what I saw.

My mother is very smart. She knows her shit, but her shit does not include tech anything, which, unfortunately, makes her obviously afraid of it. She claims otherwise, but it's true. If anything goes wrong once, it will forever be that way to her. She's also incredibly stubborn.

To touch on that last point, she went through her advanced schooling in the 60s, at a time when typing was apparently taught at universities. Her professor made one comment about the women in the room going on to be secretaries, which my mom has clinged to, like so many other things, and now spitefully refuses to learn how to type properly.

I've shown her every single time I touch her laptop how to scroll through sites using two fingers on the touch pad. Nope, she must very slowly, squinting, find the tiny, hidden scroll bar, and, even more slowly, drag it down.

Her ability to read seems to completely disappear as soon as she turns on her computer or looks at her phone. After over a decade of holding her hand to do super basic things, the answers to which are almost always found by reading and comprehending, I made it a point to not outright tell her what to do if it's plainly obvious anymore. She still tries to get me to do it for her by staring at the screen for a moment and then looking at me like she's completely lost, or asking in the most annoyed way possible what to do, when the only options are click OK or... nothing.

"How do I do (x)?" Where (x) is something like opening Firefox from the desktop, going back to her browser-based email from a different tab, etc.

"You know how. You've done it several times before."

"That doesn't mean I remember how!" While actively doing the thing.

And the gestures - dismissive hand waving at the screen whenever something mildly inconvenient appears, the annoyed sighs, all of it.

My father is 85, used to be a dev. No issues, maintains his file sync between his two sites by himself via various clouds. Sticks to Windows.

Can't get him to use proper passwords (as in random generated stuff from his password manager) though, he insists on needlessly peppering the weak-ish passwords he comes up with and storing that in his decent password manager instead. I guess you can't win them all.

I cannot tell you how many times I've had to help family members and friends "fix the sound" on their computers because they somehow changed their default audio output device without knowing it. I really wish people would just check their audio settings when they have a problem with it, instead of calling me to help every time.

The forgetting everything I took the time to explain even after “dumbing it down” to the simplest terms. Can’t blame them too much as it’s age related, but frustrating nonetheless.

Refusal to use a password manager. They write down the passwords plaintext in a physical pad. Not awful, all things considered, but then write down the password alphabetically without maintaining consistency in naming. Say it’s a password for a streaming service on a Sony TV. It might be under Sony, TV, or the name of the service; and all three titles might be entered in the pad because they couldn’t remember what they’d written it down under the first time. Then had to reset it and wrote it down under something else. So now you have passwords for TV, Sony, and Service, guess which one is right? Heaven help you if there’s more than one Sony TV in the house or something. At least the password managers go by website and a user created name so you have two chances of finding it.

When offering help over the phone they click or tap the wrong thing that leads to an incorrect page or menu, swearing they did it right, and being unable to locate the thing I’m telling them to look for after I led them step-by-step to the correct solution. This one’s pretty infuriating when many menus look the same and my questions about what they’re looking at only gets generic enough responses that I think they’re in the right place. It’s often only corrected when I ask them to take a pic with their phone and send it to me so I can figure out how they f’d up. I ended up installing remote desktop apps on their computers eventually so I could just do the work myself, quickly, with far less fuss.

My nephew wanted to play games on my computer while I was at work. He was arriving later so I wrote down all the steps on paper the way I had showed him before.

Mom calls upset hours later saying they can't get the game running. She gets flustered powering on the computer, refuses to take a picture of the screen while in a fit, and powers off everything without letting me even try. Good god. 😂

The silver lining is that he's a little older now and can do it on his own.

my parents always having a difficult time remembering password, just one password. and asking me to help to login their health insurance app on their phones, sadly idk what is happening with the app. its always logging out account after a while of not being used.

the worst part was they once asked me to remove the password system from the app, so they can always use the app peacefully, im not an IT person. so im having a hard time to explain why can't i remove the password system

pardon my english :)

A few weeks ago, my parents complained that the laptop kept going to a "screensaver" while they were trying to work on it.

So I changed the screensaver setting from like 3 minutes to 15 minutes... but it kept happening. I knew something was up when they said "well it wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to reopen the Internet every time."

Guys... it was a touchscreen laptop. They were grabbing it by the corner and closing out the window. 😆 And one of these people showed me how to make a website in HTML when I was younger...

Are we all doomed to be daft in our old age?

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

My parents had a new printer installed by a "professional" but it wouldn't show on the network. I tried everything, reinstalling drivers, unplugging and plugging cables again...

After hours of nothing working, i got desperate and just flipped through the menu of the printer on this small LCD display. There is a DHCP setting. The DHCP is set to a fixed address. The router every now and then reboots and gives new dynamic addresses. The printer refused its dynamic address all this time.

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.