What's been your most painful parent tech support moment?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

the fact that my grandmother absolutely, hard ass refuses to do anything that would improve her situation. Just removed 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 mother once threatened to evict me (was still living with them) because I asked her to back up her important files for me to carry them over to the new office computer I had set up for her.

She flat out refused to even attempt it or answer any of my investigative questions. This woman had been using windows computers for work for over 20 years at this point, but the thought of opening an explorer window apparently terrified her so much we got into an actual shouting match over it.

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?

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.

Friend of the family but still...

Had to travel by boat to an island with no road connection to turn on a printer, after having been promised that it was, in fact, on.

Once turned on it was working. Well as much as a printer can work.

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?"

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

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 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.

Not a specific incident so much as a running theme in logical inconsistency… What on God's green Earth possessed these people to think that I, the "nerd" of the family, having gone completely digital except where legally necessary since about the late 90s, would have the faintest idea how to fix a fucking printer?

Dad: "I don't have my wallpaper anymore on my desktop !"

Me: "Ok, what's in C:\User...\Pictures" ?

Dad: "I don't have C:, I juste have D:"

Me: "WTF ? You don't have a C:\Windows folder ?"

Dad: "No, I just have a D:\ drive. Windows is installed on D"

How th fuck did he managed to not have a C drive ????

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.

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

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.

When she was trying to explain File Allocation Tables to me as we attempted to fix my disk as a kid.

Thankfully, both of my parents worked in IT from the '80s, so they're generally pretty good at getting things figured out.

I can feel my blood pressure rise as I read through this comment section.

Clearing about 5 rows of taskbars from my mom's internet Explorer years and years ago. Finding out she was paying for McAfee recently.

My father is 85, used to be a dev. No issues, maintains his file sync between his two sites by himself via various clouds. Sticks to Windows.

Can't get him to use proper passwords (as in random generated stuff from his password manager) though, he insists on needlessly peppering the weak-ish passwords he comes up with and storing that in his decent password manager instead. I guess you can't win them all.

Every time my grandma needs help with her phone I always have to go and delete like 10 apps because she just keeps installing random useless ad ridden crap. She has like 6 diferent weather apps. She keeps installing random fucking gps navigation map apps. You open them and boom immediately ads. They just don't learn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dad calls me randomly one evening. He can't find the youtube app on his smart TV. I try to help him navigate it but over the phone communication isn't really working especially since things I assume anyone would know (like the home button on the remote) don't translate well to him. He gets pissed and tells me "why do you even work as a programmer what did you even learn in university?". Apparently I missed my Samsung smart TV UI classes.

The most painful moment went something like this:

Dad: Hey, the computer isn't working, can you take a look at it? Computer: Full of porn popups because he was googling 'brittany spears nude'

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 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. 🙃

I don't know about most painful, but my dad bought a phone many months ago and last week, he wanted to know how to turn on the flashlight on it. I was ready to edit the notification dropdown or give a five step explainer or whatever.

Turns out, nope, you just pull down the notification bar and there's a pretty obvious flashlight button right there. The problem is, you see, he did not know you could drag down the notification bar. There were dozens of notifications there.

I really cannot blame him either. I don't know what UX designer came up with just putting a bar at the top and expecting users to know that you can drag on it. But yeah, still, ouch.

My parents had a new printer installed by a "professional" but it wouldn't show on the network. I tried everything, reinstalling drivers, unplugging and plugging cables again...

After hours of nothing working, i got desperate and just flipped through the menu of the printer on this small LCD display. There is a DHCP setting. The DHCP is set to a fixed address. The router every now and then reboots and gives new dynamic addresses. The printer refused its dynamic address all this time.

my parents always having a difficult time remembering password, just one password. and asking me to help to login their health insurance app on their phones, sadly idk what is happening with the app. its always logging out account after a while of not being used.

the worst part was they once asked me to remove the password system from the app, so they can always use the app peacefully, im not an IT person. so im having a hard time to explain why can't i remove the password system

pardon my english :)

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.

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

Its not the tech issues themselves but my dad always worried about anyone changing any settings on the family computer (even the screensaver) and he had the attitude that he had to do things himself. He's computer illiterate, can barely see to read and a slow 1 finger typist. Even him inputting a postal code into a Sat Nav takes so long, so many repetitions, it's truly painful. So imagine when things stop working. I'm not a tech person either, so I'm trying to figure out a solution while he's talking about some random computing issue he heard about on the radio decades ago and telling me not to change the settings and break the computer lol.

The forgetting everything I took the time to explain even after “dumbing it down” to the simplest terms. Can’t blame them too much as it’s age related, but frustrating nonetheless.

Refusal to use a password manager. They write down the passwords plaintext in a physical pad. Not awful, all things considered, but then write down the password alphabetically without maintaining consistency in naming. Say it’s a password for a streaming service on a Sony TV. It might be under Sony, TV, or the name of the service; and all three titles might be entered in the pad because they couldn’t remember what they’d written it down under the first time. Then had to reset it and wrote it down under something else. So now you have passwords for TV, Sony, and Service, guess which one is right? Heaven help you if there’s more than one Sony TV in the house or something. At least the password managers go by website and a user created name so you have two chances of finding it.

When offering help over the phone they click or tap the wrong thing that leads to an incorrect page or menu, swearing they did it right, and being unable to locate the thing I’m telling them to look for after I led them step-by-step to the correct solution. This one’s pretty infuriating when many menus look the same and my questions about what they’re looking at only gets generic enough responses that I think they’re in the right place. It’s often only corrected when I ask them to take a pic with their phone and send it to me so I can figure out how they f’d up. I ended up installing remote desktop apps on their computers eventually so I could just do the work myself, quickly, with far less fuss.

I cannot tell you how many times I've had to help family members and friends "fix the sound" on their computers because they somehow changed their default audio output device without knowing it. I really wish people would just check their audio settings when they have a problem with it, instead of calling me to help every time.

my parents are too tech savvy :/
But in school i removed a gum paper from the disk drive with a screw taped to the end of a brush if that counts

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

Trying to get my elderly mother to understand the difference between wifi and mobile data. Maddening.

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.