Tech Support

This morning I got a message from a friend of mine asking if I got demands from my parents for tech support. He told me his father had given his mother a Flip video recorder. My friend said, “This piece of electronic equipment may be easier to work than a toilet, yet my parental unit has yet to figure it out.  My 4 year-old son grabbed my Flip one day and had it figured out in about 30.6 seconds, yet my mother is baffled.”

He then said that she might have lost her literacy as well since he got the following message from the former English teacher:

would like to make appointment w u to learn how to operate video camera. No..I have not read directions + wld rather not. Mom

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a computer geek. In fact, my mother likes to remind me how I used to say that I would never have an internet-connected computer in my house. Ever. That changed when I went to work in retail. Tech support for retail stores is sketchy at best, and it’s not so much timely either. I realized after my first battle with a line of fifteen people standing in front of me, waiting for the register to magically fix itself, that I needed to be The Guy. I needed to learn to fix the damn things. I needed to be, as my husband says, “The person who isn’t afraid to push the button.” So I asked questions like, “The thing is doing that weird thing again. Can you show me what I’m doing wrong?” And, “Uh, that was really cool what you just did. Will you teach me how to do that?” And, “Hey, tech dude, I’m going for coffee. Want some?” Do not underestimate the power of caffeine bribes to fix a token ring problem. No, my familiarity with products containing chips and more than one button comes from necessity rather than desire.  My parents, and their generation, seem not to see the necessity. And why should they? They have us.

This is the mistake that my parents make: They treat the computer—or anything with a digital readout, for that matter–like a tiny baby who has a broken leg and speaks Estonian. It’s small, it looks delicate, it’s foreign, and it might not make its needs known in a language they can understand. They need to treat it like they did us. Decisively and mercilessly. As my good friend says about her mother, “She was smart enough to tell me to come in and give her a kiss when I got home so she not only knew what time I came home, but what I smelled like, but she can’t make the freaking clock on the DVD player stop blinking?”

Many of my friends who are the children of the Pan-Baby Boom Generation wonder what happened. This was, after all, the generation that created the computer age. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are Boomers, for the love of Pete! Norman Thagard, a SPACE SHUTTLE ASTRONAUT, is the same age as my mother. Good Lord, Patrick Stewart is the same age as my dad and he commanded the freaking Enterprise. The STARSHIP Enterprise.  I bet Patrick Stewart can program his freaking DVD player.

My friend with the vowel-deficient mother says the tech thing is just the tip of the iceberg. He says that because our parents are in this phase of life where they are doing less—they’re done raising children, they’re retiring—the use the old noggins less. And this contributes not only to brain farts on the tech side, but breaks with reality as well.

Here’s a little jewel he shared with me:

You know that Dude (No, not his real name. It’s been changed to protect him from his mother should she find out about this discussion) moved back a couple of years ago to run the family business.  He’s up there like six days a week while his dad is rarely in. He plays golf, farts around, whatever. Now, the other day, in the middle of the week, Big Dude calls Little Dude to drive to New Orleans (about 130 miles away) and—get this—pick up a gallon of gumbo from Herbsaint because he and Little Dude’s mom love it so much. I think that the biggest thing I cannot wrap my little mind around is that the parents don’t even think about these requests before blurting them out. “I’m hungry. Drive to New Orleans and pick me up something tasty.”  WTF?

I’m constantly hearing tales of programming thermostats, setting up televisions, finding pictures—oh, the poor, misplaced pictures floating around in cyberspace. My dad, a very smart guy, regularly sends me a message that invites me to check out some pictures. Not only is there no picture, but there is no way to find a picture. No attachment, no link, nothing. Oh, I suppose I should also mention that the message has usually been rerouted all over cyberspace because he’s typed the wrong address the first go around. Doesn’t he have my address in his contacts book? Yes, he does. In a literal address book. Not his email contacts list. My friend cringes when her parents want her to visit because she knows that she’ll be used as a tech slave to clean out internet caches, program phones, and show her father how to use the new remote control the satellite company sent. My father-in-law, also a smart and lovely man, sends us pictures by the thousands. I know when he’s sent some because my email program takes forever to load. I told Himself that I was thinking of sharing the wonderful world of photo compression with him, but decided maybe I should just bang my head against a brick wall instead. Himself thought this was a fine idea.

I know people get weird around technology. I was once training a group on a new register system when I noticed a woman staring at her screen, clearly stuck. I asked her what was wrong. She said she couldn’t get the sale to total out. I asked her if she had told the register she was ready to check out, and, my hand to God, she looked at the screen and said, “I’m ready to check out.” Then she started crying. My grandmother was at my dad’s office one day several years ago and gave him a birthday card for him to send to me. She kept hanging around, and finally my dad asked if she needed anything else. She said she wanted to see him email it. Granted, this is a woman who thinks you have to strap your furniture down if you have a central vacuum system so that your furniture won’t be sucked into a swirling vortex.  I know I’m not immune to The Stupid. I was about to replace my whole sound system the other day until I realized the speakers were turned off. Did I panic? Did I start calling people to demand they show up posthaste to fix my problem? Nope. I remembered Rule #1 of Tech: Did you check to see if there’s power?

I do find it interesting that the people who do not want to take the time to learn about the technology are the ones who expect it to do the most. I suppose it’s just payback for stuff like teaching me to drive, but dear Lord. I didn’t spend ten years learning to drive.