memes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Helping my octogenarian mom with her iPhone is the most painful experience. She often calls me about something that has "popped up" in some app that she's using. I tell her to just close it and she says "how?" I then say something like "just click the OK button ... or the Done or Close buttons, that will be some unknown color ... or click the X in the upper right or maybe the upper left corner ... or click "Done" or "Close" in the toolbar, on the left or right sides ... or maybe the thing has slid up from the bottom and you need to swipe down to get rid of it ... or maybe you need to click the Home tab on the app's bottom bar."

I've actually been an iOS mobile developer for 15 years now. Anybody who thinks there's any sort of consistent, intuitive design principles behind Apple products is insane.

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.

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.

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.

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.