My dad.

I'm not technical!

Yes but... it is an electronic device. You need to plug it in, turn it on at the wall and press the power button. It's been like this for decades now. How the hell have you managed to use a toaster or a TV at this stage?

There are so many thoroughly entrenched problems that can’t be resolved without the turnover of a generation or two, but those fixes need to be built, tested, and battle hardened now.

The reason I know things can change for the better is because boomers spent half a century debasing society to the state we see it in today.

My mother-in-law stayed over and was having trouble understanding how to use the Brita water filter on the kitchen sink faucet.

In frustration she told my wife that the filter should just always be on. My wife tried explaining to her that you wouldn't want to filter water that you were using to wash a dish because the filters cost money...and she saw her mother just stop listening. As it was described to me, she just walked away and clearly didn't want to understand.

That's a faucet-mounted water filter with three settings: filtered, normal unfiltered, and spray unfiltered. However, the complexities of it frustrated my MIL to the point of ignoring her daughter.

She's also the most tech-literate of the parents.

Here's the proper response to a technologically challenged Boomer requesting tech support:

"Fuck you, pay me."

Then list your hourly rate, I suggest starting at around $50, at least.

With a gaggle of associated fees/charges for various levels of things and research you have to do.

No mercy, no quarter, fuck your idiot family members, stop enabling them.

Maybe these idiots can realize they've been getting free assistance that for decades has literally been a business model that many people have worked and lived off of.

That they don't know something and that makes them wrong and stupid, not literally everything other than them.

Think of it like tipping culture in reverse, or just an entire category of unpaid labor, if that helps.

I remember an incident from 20 years ago when my dad inisited he couldn't figure out how to set up his new DVD player and needed me to do it. And I was just like, how the fuck do you no longer understand how to connect the same color coded RCA plugs your VHS player or stereo has used for decades?

What gets me is that it isn't universally an age thing.

My grandmother isn't perfect by any means, but she is able to manage email, whatsapp (surprised me with leaving voice messages through it recently when her arthritis made her not want to type), texting, facebook (including chat), amazon, browsing the internet, video calls, and ordering from non-amazon sites. She's in her early fucking 90s.

She had something she wanted to do and decided to learn about it. She didn't make it everyone else's problem. She has people, including me, who she will lean on for support sometimes, but when she does she takes notes. She wants to know how to do these things and puts in the effort.

Meanwhile her daughter, my mother, has this attitude that "Everything is supposed to be easier with a computer, so if it's not easy it's the computer's fault not mine." If she can't figure out how to do something in two clicks, or if the menu option isn't exactly where it makes intuitive sense to her, my mother effectively throws her hands up and gives up. Combine that with this intense fear of somehow cratering the whole machine if she clicks the wrong thing and she's fucking useless.

She literally couldn't manage getting music off of CDs onto an iPod. You know, the horribly complex set of steps of: plug the iPod into your computer using the charging cable, iTunes will open automatically, put the disc in the drive, it will automatically ask you if you want to rip/import the disc into iTunes, click yes, wait for it to complete, click sync on the iPod in the iTunes menu, wait until it's done, then click eject.

Something that's only going to make this worse over time is the constant attempts to make all of this more simple. Android and iPhones have built in password managers, which can be great (especially linking a Mac laptop's keychain with the person's phone) but if something fucks up all hell breaks lose because it wasn't something they ever had to think about.

I think it's because there was a time when technology actually required things like reading manuals or typing something specific. Like, VCRs and universal remotes and DOS weren't super intuitive so they just decided it was someone else's thing and turned their brains off for anything requiring electricity. Four decades later they've still left them off.

I so feel this. Last holidays I just decided I’m done.

“All my contacts are just gone!”
“I know I put the right password in”
“Why doesn’t my mail work?”

Amen

https://youtu.be/Qmdtx_VlJR8

Tumblr does hyphenation?