- cross-posted to:
- 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- 196@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- 196@lemmy.world
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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’
Having to explain to my grandma over the phone how to work the tv remote.
Same but with my mom. When the labels of several of the buttons have worn off from repeated use over years, and she can’t figure out why the screen is blue because she’s accidentally changed it to the wrong input. And all she would tell me before ten minutes of detailed questioning as far as what the issue was is “it’s not working”, I had to get from “not working” to “on the wrong input” over the phone. And when the first thing I asked was “what’s on the screen?” and she answered “nothing.”
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?”
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
Fortunately 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.
Same here. The only part that doesn’t fit me is the Bluetooth - there are much better protocols for that.
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 :)
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 countsPainful 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.
Unsubscribing from emails. Couldn’t figure it out myself.
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.
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.
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.
Step 6. Grab a bat and perform percussive maintenance
Waste of two goats. Better to have them mow your lawn.
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!
This session is over then, I’m unable to help you. Take it to the repair center.
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.
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.
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.”
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 ???
At least he understands that windows is installed, and on that drive.
It’s possible he did have a C drive and just wasn’t looking correctly
But it is possible to install Windows on non-c drives, It just isn’t standard. The main reason is because you want the operating system to be on a different drive to the files. I have Windows installed on C but there’s absolutely nothing else on C just Windows everything else is on the E drive, but there’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t reverse that it’s just you’d have to start off with Windows on C, then remap D to not the disk, then installed Windows on D, set D to be the boot drive, And then finally uninstall it from C.
It’s unlikely that you would do all that by accident. Especially because setting anything other than C to be the boot drive usually requires changing the BIOS. You can’t do it from within windows because then you end up with a “the call is coming from inside the house” situation.
My nerd man says it’s less of “the call is coming from inside the house” and more of a “you can’t go back in time and kill yourself” situation XD
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
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.
🚨
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Thanks. Yeah, she’s a horrible and abusive person, and I’ve had zero contact with her for a year and a half now.
I can feel my blood pressure rise as I read through this comment section.
