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.
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
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My grandfather had directories full of young teens, even his desktop wallpaper. They were definitely over 18 but still... I never said a word, just acted normally.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why does she download so many duplicate functionality apps? Has she told you why?
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.
All of them
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.
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 ????
How th fuck did he managed to not have a C drive ???
It happens. You should have just told him to go to the D: drive if its the only one
At least he understands that windows is installed, and on that drive.
I love it though
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.
Clearing about 5 rows of taskbars from my mom's internet Explorer years and years ago. Finding out she was paying for McAfee recently.
Could be worse, my grandma paid for Avast and she was actually using the free version unknowingly.
AVAST VIRUS DATABASE HAS BEEN UPDATED
That bitch will forever haunt me.
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.
Android is on board with that crap too. Software Buttons that don't always pop and gestures are trash.
But at least Android still has the option to enable the old button bar at the bottom of the screen, it has a back button that pretty much closes everything that opens up.
Pixel changes the navigation mode to gesture only by default. You can go and turn that back to three button mode and it is pretty successful, If you know it's there.
I find Samsung's one UI implementation to be dodgy when apps go full screen sometimes it doesn't like to stay on, sometimes when apps come out of autohide there's a race condition and the app will appear over the bar rendering it unselectable. That bugs been there for years. It's also irritating that the button positions on vanilla and one UI are backward of each other.
The gestures in Android do the same thing as the button bar, so even when I use gestures I always have a dedicated back gesture.
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.
Tech support over the phone is torture. Especially when people don't know what a home screen, a menu, a file manager or a browser, a tab is, that in order to leave an app you don't have to close it and so on...
Tech support over the phone is torture.
Heck yes, both giving and receiving.
I always write password hashes on my notebooks.
spoiler
/s
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?
Oh hey I've got this. I have to deal with printers for my hobby. This is the only tool you'll ever need.
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 observe the exact same thing in my parents - it's as if they somehow can't see some things on the screen, or lose the ability to comprehend written text, when it's unexpectedly displayed on a screen. They always fixate on some irrelevant UI element, ignoring the one that's currently important.
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."
It's probably your fault from the last time you were messing with it.
"Ok, you better ask someone else then. Clearly I'll only make it worse."
You'll never prove them wrong by falling for the manipulation tactic.
People who are bad at understanding tech and logic coincidentally tend to be very competent at these kinds of tactics.
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.