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

Mother in law calls me during work, blaring warnings sounds blaring in the background, warning her that she has a virus and NOT to try to reboot or unplug the computer….

MIL: what do I do/why is this happening?

Me: you clicked on something… unplug the computer

MIL: but it says not to

Me: it’s ok, it is trying to get you to call the number so that you will give them money

MIL: I am too afraid

Me: ok, if you want to give them money or your credentials so that they can take all of your money, feel free. Just don’t drive to Walgreens to buy gift cards again… you will miss your soap operas

MIL: Ok, I’ll unplug it

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

the fact that my grandmother absolutely, hard ass refuses to do anything that would improve her situation. Just bitches and moans and has great big narcissistic pity parties until someone forces it down her fucking throat.

For example, her vision isnt great, she complaints its hard to use the computer cause she cant see to type (Shes one of those chicken peck typers). I tell her to get a large print keyboard with a backlight, it’d be easier for her to see and use.

She says no, it wont help. nothing will help. boo hoo pity me blah blah bullshit.

Long story short, it goes back and forth for a month, with her refusing the idea, refusing when I directly link her to a keyboard to buy (it was cheap, too), etc etc. Just making a big fucking woe is me pity party out of it.

I finally say fuck it, buy the goddamn keyboard myself, take it over to her house, put it on her computer.

within 5 minutes “Why didnt you tell me about this before? Its amazing! I can see it and use the computer again!”

Shes the reason i’ve been balding for 20 years.

My mom (78) got a new kindle a couple years ago, after the previous one lasting over 10 years.

She’s not been using it now because “it’s not okay” anymore. After a lot of poking and prodding remotely (we live in different countries) to get to understand what the issue was for the kindle to “not be okay”, I managed to get her to tell me that “the screen is blank”. I said I’d check it soon after when I went to her place.

When I travelled there, not long after, I checked the kindle, turned on the screen, and it was blank. Because she’d finished a book and the last page was blank. All worked fine.

I have told her, but she refuses to use the kindle because “it’s not okay”.

In a separate conversation I offered to give my sister my really old kindle as hers is actually broken. My mom heard that and said she wanted it because hers is… Not okay.

The insistence and willful ignoring of what I said is the most infuriating part.

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.

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.

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?

“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 mom called me a few years ago, after she clicked the big red warning message in a pop up. After the nice tech support man got on her phone. After she let him install “some program”. Then she thought, maybe she should check with Perish. Yikes.

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.

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.

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.

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.