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My parents are generally pretty good with tech. But where I end up pulling my hair out is when I look at my mom's notifications. She lets any app notify her, and she has lots of apps. The other day when I looked she had two different weather apps reporting the temperature as a non-dismissable notification, and neither one of them was right.

I honestly don't know how we're related.

The other thing is when my mom says "but you told me to use this!" I got her to switch to Chrome from Internet Explorer, a dozen years ago. Now when I want to switch her over to Firefox (not even Waterfox!) she says, "but you told me this was the one to use!" Yeah, it was, during the Obama Administration. Same story with LastPass and Bitwarden. Sometimes the best tool changes, mom.

I taught my dad a lot of things in his 70s that there is no way my 30 something son would be able to handle.

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.

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

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?"

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

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.

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 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. 🙃

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've got a stubborn father. Years ago, back when our old family computer was working and was something we actually used, all I wanted to do was remove a simple toolbar from the single web browser we all used that might have been caused by a virus (probably caused by me being dumb) and uninstall something that caused it (also probably caused by my idiocy). This was around 2019.

The problem was my parents didn't want me on it all night so they had something like an admin password, but I figured it out long before this because they wrote it down in a notebook. The other problem is they didn't know I knew the password, so I didn't wanna let them know I knew it. Also, with the computer being in the living room, I couldn't just fix this at any point because my parents (at least one of them) were usually in the living room at any given time besides at night.

In the end, it pretty much devolved into me telling my father that I'm just trying to remove something that could actively harm our PC, but he refused to let me do it. Don't know if it was because he didn't wanna type the password or what, but it was a short shit show... until he finally relented and for a measly few seconds he had to enter a password instead of spending minutes fighting me on this.

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

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.

Oh I am still tech support for some of my kids (and definitely for my husband). But yelling at my phone to "turn on the flashlight!" and leaving bluetooth on are the things I think drive the kids batty. "Mom! Just drag down from the top!"

All of them