memes

Fortunately my dad is a retired cybersecurity architect so they live as modern-day Luddites.

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.

I'm real proud of my mom actually. She couldn't even navigate the desktop when she started, but she has turned into a real techie. I used to have to do everything for her, but these days if she has a problem she looks up solutions online and is usually able to sort things out herself. She's 79. The only "old person" thing she still does is store files on her desktop and also keep a billion tabs open on her web browser lol.

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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