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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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
Sometimes I worry they are being purposely dense because they want to spend more time with us.
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
I set up my mom on Microsoft Outlook many years ago, back when you had to set the server and so on.
She called me a few days later and said her email wasn’t working, so I walked her through looking at the options, making sure the right addresses and preferences were checked, etc.
After about 45 minutes, I remembered that I already set everything up correctly and it was working. Then I decided to ask, “are you typing the @ symbol, or are you typing the word at in the email address?”
Yep.
The first question after “it’s not working!” Is always “what isn’t working?” followed by “show me what you were doing”.
Used to have to deal with getting information out of customers that were having issues with our app (as a software dev, not sure why that was my job). Eventually we just asked for a video of what they were doing first thing when anyone called.
There’s so many tech illiterate people out there, even young people who grew up with their phones often don’t really know how to use it besides opening apps.
show me what you were doing
Nothing! I did nothing! Things just happened!
Me when I corrupt New Vegas with a simple texture mod.
“are you typing the @ symbol, or are you typing the word at in the email address?”
…wut??
My father is 86, is fairly far down the slope of dementia, has a 5th grade education, has a hard time typing because he can’t really see the keys on the keyboard anymore, and still doesn’t do things like this.
…maybe I got lucky?
This occurred about 20ish years ago. Mom had never touched a computer in her life before getting the laptop.
And, this is the same woman who got a new phone and sent me a text that said ‘do you like my new phone?’
This occurred about 20ish years ago.
Oooohhhhh…
Now that makes a lot more sense.
My own father has been using a computer since the 90s, initially just to track his own investments and finances, but later on to keep in touch with family back in the old country. So he’s got a bit more experience under his belt.
Still, he manages to suss out all scams that target him, and does a fair bit of his own troubleshooting. And while the latter is decreasing in effectiveness as of late… the fact that he can still do this with a 5th grade education while in the grips of dementia at 86 makes me proud AF. I have to swing by more and more these days, but he always has detailed notes of what he’s looked up and what he’s tried and didn’t work, so I can have a full roadmap of what has happened. Honestly, I have clients half his age that are far more useless, and that’s why I still jump when he calls for help.
That’s cool! My grandmother was similar–discovered email in her early 80s and loved it, got herself a printer to print out letters to send to people. Last I saw her before she died, she asked me to help set up her phone so she could answer emails on it.
She loved getting emails from people too. It made me remember how exciting that stuff was when I first started using it and it still felt like a great, new thing to make it easier to connect with folks and explore the world.
Painful would be the several (!) times I had to check the computer over after they fell for a tech help scam and lost money. The stupid thing was that if someone tried to sell them something on the street or phone they were smart enough to refuse, but for some reason a popup on the computer makes things legit. Even after it was a scam the last time it happened. Why?
There are many more lesser events that aren’t painful as much as just tedious, but I think having some patience and knowing what to tell them (vs. actually explaining it) helped. I tried to reduce the complexity and lock things down, but in the end it was just easier to come over and fix the problem every now and then.
my parents are too tech savvy :/
But in school i removed a gum paper from the disk drive with a screw taped to the end of a brush if that countsFortunately my dad is a retired cybersecurity architect so they live as modern-day Luddites.
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.
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.
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 :)
Friend of the family but still…
Had to travel by boat to an island with no road connection to turn on a printer, after having been promised that it was, in fact, on.
Once turned on it was working. Well as much as a printer can work.
Unfortunately there were no other parties present to provide a second opinion, only their cat. Which, to be fair, is probably less tech illiterate than the human.
Well as much as a printer can work.
Only after a ceremonial blood sacrifice on the Tuesday after a blood moon. Got it.
Waste of two goats. Better to have them mow your lawn.
Step 6. Grab a bat and perform percussive maintenance
A trick for that is to tell them to now try actually unplugging it from the wall and turning it back on again. This gets them to actually do it instead of lying and/or not understanding what it means to actually turn it off and on again
I worked tech support for an ISP, and i did this more often than i want to think about it.
It didn’t help that one of the cable modems we gave out to our clients had a standby-button, which made the CM look like it was off - there was no indicator at all on the device, so i couldn’t even blame the client for that (but i did blame my employer for not thinking about that. just like i blamed him for buying another modem series with power sockets which failed pretty quickly. did i mention that repairs were done in-house, and not all too well? it’s been 20 years, and i am still a bit salty for all my wasted time)
The problem was more of a disagreement between the end user and the printer in what constitutes an on button.
A sentence that shouldn’t be this normal.
Recently had to help my mom figure out her new internet setup. She wanted to keep her old phone number but it was not carried over to the new provider. My guess is she said that she wanted to keep it while ordering the new one but never followed any of the steps they gave her to make that work. So we called them and it was crazy how she was unable to explain to them what her current situation is and what needs to be fixed. Claiming that “nothing works” even though the internet works just fine and the only problem is the phone number. Also not really looking at the emails they send her and following the steps to activate the online service center where she could manage this stuff on her own.
Later I showed her that the laptop she got from work is able to connect to her new router wirelessly and does not have to be connected via cable. She already uses another laptop and her phone over wifi. Apparently she just has no interest in understanding how any of the internet systems work.
My father is an engineer, which has its ups and downs. He can definitely be trusted to read a dialog box and nearly 100% of the time even understand what it says. Abstract concepts, problems he’s never encountered before, all generally no issue.
My stepmother, however, once asked me if she needs to rewind a DVD before putting it away. We’ve been working on it with her over the years. She’s certainly better now, but she still has an acute case of just randomly clicking on things without reading them.
My stepmother, however, once asked me if she needs to rewind a DVD before putting it away.
record scratch
…come again?
It makes total sense if you’re of the generation(s) whose brains were fucked up by the American public education system pre-1980 or so, and were never taught how to understand abstract concepts nor any critical thinking skills. They learned everything by rote recitation.
Everything.
FYI, this is probably in no small part why your parents struggle with technology or at the very least anything with an on-screen user interface so much.
Up until then, “thing you stick in machine that plays movies” inevitably involved some manner of tape. I imagine the majority of the public has absolutely no idea nor any interest in how this actually works inside the machine; as far as they’re concerned it’s either magic or complicated nerd technology stuff that they have convinced themselves that they’ll never understand. It was just hammered into them that When Done With Movie You Must Rewind (or else mom/dad/the video store will get mad at you). However, no logical connection is made between the medium in question and the act of rewinding. Merely that it is a movie thing. Movie things get rewound.
I’m sure this is also why a particular generation insists on calling Nintendo cartridges “tapes.”
My father in law (age 78) just got a new phone. His last phone cost $100 new, was only a year old, and took actual seconds to respond to most things. It finally got stuck boot looping to recovery mode so I lent him my old OnePlus 7T to use because we were gonna get him a new one for his birthday, but he just went ahead and bought a new (used) Samsung for $200.
The Samsung is actually a pretty decent phone, but he refuses to learn how to use it. He badly wanted to use his old phone, but it won’t work anymore. He made me put the SIM card in his old phone. I told him he’s free to use that old thing, but I won’t be helping him with it anymore.
He is finally learning how to use his new phone a month after getting it. The man refuses to shell out for a half decent phone, despite having the money to. He’d rather spend $150 every 18 months buying a new crap phone than spend $400 on one that could easily last 5 years.
He doesn’t even need a smart phone. He doesn’t understand what a launcher is. So he downloads whatever crapware is advertised to him, then gets really confused why his home screen is all fucky. I’ve told him he should really consider getting a flip phone and using a laptop for anything else. He doesn’t want to. He wants a smart phone.
I can’t save this man. My parents are in their mid 50s and have finally caught up. 20 years ago, I was telling them they do not need the crapware DVD that came with the digital camera to import their pictures. All you need to do is put the SD card in the computer and copy the DCIM folder to the Pictures folder on the computer, then delete everything in the SD card’s DCIM folder to free up space.
Since I don’t use Windows anymore, I don’t answer Windows questions anymore lol If anyone calls with a Windows question these days, I just nope outta that.
He doesn’t understand what a launcher is. So he downloads whatever crapware is advertised to him, then gets really confused why his home screen is all fucky.
I don’t have these issues on an iPhone.
You’re gonna get killed for saying that on lemmy
Despite being absolutely right
For all their flaws, Apple devices are a lot more user-friendly (as long as your desires are more or less aligned with Apple’s).
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.
🚨
Your mom is not ok. You should see what is up with that.
Thanks. Yeah, she’s a horrible and abusive person, and I’ve had zero contact with her for a year and a half now.
My late mother-in-law’s phone had so much malware running on it that it was completely inoperable. She had poor vision, so would just tap the screen at random to try to get dialog boxes to go away. She didn’t really use ut for anything but making and receiving calls. I booted the phone in safe mode and removed basically everything from it, but it would inevitably reinstall. Eventually, I just factory reset the phone to make it usable again. Then I went through the accessibility options and increased the font size to obnoxiously large so she could read it. She really just needed a dumb phone.
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.
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. 🙃
