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 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.

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.”

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 :)

Just don’t. You’re wasting your time with this IT stuff anyway and now theirs too. And you should have fixed the printer not printing yesterday already.

It’s a thankless job.

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 dad once asked me to copy files from his desktop to his disk, and then double and triple asked me if he can now delete the files on his desktop safely

you’d think he’d have had copying files figured out after a decade of owning a laptop, but alas

Teaching slowly how to convert pdf to mobi to my mom for her kindle, each step, doing it with her, and 0 success. I don’t mind it, I know she gets very frustrated with technology but it still sucks.

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 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.

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!”

What’s the start button? Every time I say click: they don’t know if it’s left or right.

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.

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