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.

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?

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. 🙃

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 counts

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’

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?”

printers man. it’s always some bullshit about how the printer doesn’t work anymore, no wifi, no ink, it’s printing some random HP bullshit Instead of what they want

call me an asshole but I told my parents I would strictly not help them with printer stuff anymore

they would also make me scan like 40+ pages back and forth. I hate scanning as well which is part of the agreement I made with them. they need to scan 49 pages ? ok then go to the library they probably have machine where you can dump a stack and have it scanned

if you’re wondering about the frequency and volume of scanning the reason why is because I come from an ass backwards country that does not do e documents

Trying to get my elderly mother to understand the difference between wifi and mobile data. Maddening.

I bought my mother a laptop and she treated the touch pad like something that was to fragile to actually use. So she hardly used the computer because no matter how many times I showed her you could actually press it and move your finger across it and it wouldn’t break and she kept asking me how to move around the desktop using the keys cause “I don’t want to damage it”. I finally got fed up one day and found myself tapping the touch pad really hard repeatedly while saying “See it won’t break!!!” She ended up giving the laptop away cause she was too afraid to break it.

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.

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 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 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.

“C’mon you guys! There it is right in front of you the whole time. You’re dereferencing a null pointer! Open your eyes!”

Are everyone’s parents sundowning hard? And lol at all the elite hackerman comments too.