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.”

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.

Cave woman that I helped: “You’re not installing porn are you?”

Me: “Uhh, no?! Is that what you meant by helping you to setup the computer. Are you mistaking me for your husband?”

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.

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.

Fortunately my dad is a retired cybersecurity architect so they live as modern-day Luddites.

What’s the start button? Every time I say click: they don’t know if it’s left or right.

My dad had a printer that wasn’t working for months. I finally looked at it when I was over there and found that the USB cable was plugged into the ethernet jack.

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.

I had to text my mom a screenshot of the browser menu with the ‘share’ button circled so she could share a link to me of the website she called me to help her use

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.

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

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.

Any time my parents, on Whatsapp video, want to turn the camera round to show me something.

My parents are fine with it, my grandparents don’t use it. So no issues with tech support. Also they moved over 100 miles away so I rarely see them.