My mom has been working with computers since the PC was invented. She’s now a retired Technical Translator (mostly engineering). She went through all the windows versions. She’s been using computers for over 25 years. Used both Macs and PC’s, had a graphic designer as an assistant for 10 years. She’s still completely clueless. Can’t install a program. Doesn’t understand what compatibility means. She’s completely incapable of comprehending what a network or a router is. And everytime you fix her PC, she immediately screws it up. I finally gave up and gave her a very restricted user account. It’s the only way she won’t mess things up. Every so often she calls me and somehow, she did something that’s not even possible. It’s not even fucking POSSIBLE. But she manages to do it. “Everytime I hit the space bar, Word closes!” WTF? permalink | 2:26 am, 17th October 2010



permalink | 3:10 pm, 7th July 2010



My mom writes “E-mail” on her calendar because it takes her so long. a few more things off the top of my head from both my parents: (i’m at college and my parents are home) A while ago a “black thing” fell out of her laptop, and it wouldn’t turn on. it was the power cord, i eventually figured out

“the printer started making noises and kept making paper” (ha, it kept printing blank sheets).

“Can I change the color of the light like my screen?” in reference to the laser mouse

Grandma: “i’ve figured this thing [remote] out! All these buttons other than these 5 are rubbish”

“How do I do youtubes?, my friends tell me there’s videos there. Maybe I could find exercise friends to help me on youtubes?”

“that copy paste thing trick you showed me has really taken off at the office” (face-palm)

more later after I talk with my mom today, haha. I should buy her a webcam more stuff i remembered: me: “hey mom, what’s up with the smiley email you have now, why did you get it?” her: “Oh, an ad said it was free, and it comes with 500 smilies” me: “don’t download stuff without asking me fist please” *proceeds to run antivirus and uninstall a bunch of things"

i was woken up by my mom at 5am because the printer was making noises again and wouldn’t stop printing a pdf my mom sent to the printer the night before. she said she pulled the plug on everything

found the usb plug for the mouse in the Ethernet port a few times. WHY DID THEY MAKE THEM THE SAME WIDTH??

“dad, you have google search in the upper right, there. You don’t have to go to www.google.com” him: “yeah, i’m not used to that”

mom “why can’t I shrink images like you did but I email them, then let them blow them back up on the other side to save space?” That made for a nice 10 min car conversation on how image files work.

“I don’t want it to do that. Make it do this instead” (shouldn’t have told my mom Ubuntu can be made anyway you want it to)

“OHHHHH that’s what the underscore does next to the x and the squares” 10 something years on the computer not knowing what the minimize button does. my mom kept closing windows to switch between them. A little credit to my mom: I installed Ubuntu on my dad’s old laptop for her to use. It uses a Linksys wifi card, and I got it to work by entering a few commands in the terminal every time you turn on the computer. With a 20 step guide to going root and entering codes, my mom could get wifi (which she did, until I fixed it and it worked automagically). My dad’s been on computers since when he got a laptop with…..1 GIGABYTE of hard drive space (big at the time). He still double clicks links, doesn’t use a scroll wheel, and uses no keyboard shortcuts (other than ctrl-c and v after I told him). courtesy permalink | 3:09 pm, 7th July 2010



My dad works in IT, so unfortunately, no funny stories there. My in-laws, on the other hand, are a gold mine. My mother-in-law was trying to order something from Macy’s, and first got frustrated that there weren’t enough boxes to put in all the information because she didn’t know you had to scroll, and then got mad because for some reason she thought the X all the way up in the corner was the button you’d click to send the order. My father-in-law fell for an AOL phishing scheme about a decade ago, and the worst part is that it was just an AngelFire page. Well, really the worst part is after the page failed the first time, he went back and filled everything out again. More recently I told him that Rocko’s Modern Life was on Amazon, and he ordered the discs and what showed up were 4 DVD-Rs in white sleeves. I knew the Amazon ones came in actual packaging, so we asked where he got them, and he’d searched for “Rocko’s Modern Life” on Amazon, then scrolled all the way down to the Sponsored Links, where he bought some bootlegs because he thought that Sponsored Links were the same as private sellers on Amazon. courtesy permalink | 7:28 am, 7th July 2010



I had a job at an incoming call center for Officemax several years ago and in the training class, HR came in to show us how to fill out the timecards. We filled them out in a web interface; to run it, we opened a shortcut they placed on all our desktops. It opened in Internet Explorer, so it behaves just like any other website (hint: it was a website), but HR didn’t understand that. HR: Okay, before we begin, I want to clarify this program is different from most programs you’re familiar with. There is no double-clicking.

Me: …

HR: This program was written by Germans and in Germany they don’t double-click. Do NOT double-click, or the program will crash.

Me: (Dumbfounded)

Everybody else: (Terrified) courtesy permalink | 5:01 pm, 6th July 2010



This is how my mother gets to her hotmail: Open IE browser. Default page is some random thing her ISP has set up with a google search bar in the middle. She performs a google search for: “Yahoo”. She doubleclicks on the first search result for the yahoo homepage. When she reaches Yahoo, she performs a search in the Yahoo search box for “hotmail”. She doubleclicks on the first link to get to the hotmail homepage. Voila! She can sign in and begin using her mail. As someone whose primary job is designing products for the web, I pretty much spent the rest of the day face palming and slamming my head repeatedly against hard surfaces. courtesy permalink | 4:40 pm, 6th July 2010



