[Closed] Aarghghg! Being default remote tech support for elderly parents IT

Been there feel your pain.

I particularly like the bit when my dad rages at Apple, Microsoft and me whilst I clear up his self inflicted techno Armageddon.

I very much feel your pain. My mum forgetting passwords is the bane of my life. I haven't suggested LastPass as it'd just be another thing to go wrong. I did buy her a notebook to write them down in (not the most secure option but it'd not leave her house) but that went by the wayside.

A lot of her problems are caused by crappy wifi because she lives in an old house with very thick walls. I did suggest a solution that involved getting an electrician (who was in anyway) to run an ethernet cable from the router to the loft where I'd then fit a switch and a few access points the next time I was up to create a solid wifi network. The first part didn't happen so I end up now repeating that the wifi is a problem with her forgetting every time.

Been there feel your pain.

I particularly like the bit when my dad rages at Apple, Microsoft and me whilst I clear up his self inflicted techno Armageddon.

Same, Only with my mother. Literally drives me bonkers.

scene opens: phone is ringing, the word "Mum" is on the display, a 42 year old (mainly tired) man answers the phone;

Me: Hello

Mum: Hello.... i can't print, or get onto the bank website....

Me: ...............................oh

Not me, but my wife gets this all the time. An innocent ‘Could you just look st this, ...’ turns into a 2 hour session of trying to figure out what the hell has been done since the last intervention, accompanied by hovering over her shoulder to ‘check you don’t mess anything up like last time’. I don’t know where she finds the patience

I bought my mum an iPad. Solved the problem.

I have been unpaid IT support for various members of my family for years.

Mother on her iPad. “Nothing’s working!” “Is the WiFi on?” “How should I know!” “Open Safari” “What!” “Press the home button” “I haven’t got a home button!” “The dimpled round button, at the bottom or side of the screen” “I haven’t got one!” “Yes you have” “I’ve got one at the top!” “Well press it, now open Safari” “I can’t, nothing’s happening!” “Is it charged up?” “I don’t know, I charged it last week and I haven’t used it much!”

FFS!

I once watched my dad pull his laptop to pieces (for some unknown reason), then he berated me for days because I wouldn't/couldn't put back together again. He ended up buying a new laptop in the end, because it was totally fubbarred.

Ah, yes.

The Parent returning to child status.

Its an old one, but a good one.

Feel your pain, try talking to a belligerent Yorkshire Man who has just pulled all the innards out of a WiFi router “because he wants to make it faster”

And undoes the back of a Windows laptop to “take a look inside” whilst pulling all the cables and boards out.

Forget the amount of times i’ve re-installed Skype for them and backed everything up.

Its almost routine to be welcomed with those words “while you’re here, can you...”

Make sure the old man is running in a user account.

Change the admin account password

Keep said password out of grubby mitts of old man.

put up with initial whinging.....

bask in a (relatively) quiet life.

VNC will give you remote access to a Mac, but also set him up with a 'user' account, not an administrator.

You'll probably need to setup a port-forward rule on his router (assuming his Mac doesn't have a public facing IP) to allow the VNC traffic through.

"it keeps coming up that the internet isn't working"

Yep...mother in law who regularly phones......

1) and then uses the magically interchangeable words of windows, word, google, office and Microsoft to describe a problem and then is disappointed when I can't home in on the problem and solve it within 5 min as "she didn't want to bother me when I'm working".

2) Phones as the email they've just opened telling them there may have been a security breach on their bank account and to contact them, looks a "bit" suspicious

Deep joy.

I work in IT. That means I am IT support to my entire extended family, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the lot.

Its great, because after spending 40 hours + fixing user problems during the week there is nothing I like more than doing it for free at the weekend for my family.

Best so far was the phone call from Dad, "Microsoft just phoned me to tell me I had a virus, so I let them connect to my laptop so they could clean it for me"

My favourite one is 'the printer is not working".  Hours of fun, trying to figure out if the printer is turned on, is she trying to print from the PC or iPad, is the Wi-Fi working, is there paper, does the print cartridges need changing, etc.  Last one turned out to be was that she had unplugged the cable from the PC to it because it looked messy!  An hour of my life wasted.

The step-mother's youngest son got roped in to that one! I dodged a bullet as she is in the little knowledge is a dangerous thing camp.

For me it was my (now deceased) uncle.  I'd have weekly phone calls along the lines of "my printer wasn't printing in red, so I've reinstalled Windows and..."

My final solution was to install Acronis.  So whenever he'd *ed it up, again, he could reboot, hit an F-key and restore everything to an un-*ed state.  He stopped calling after that.

But yeah, my first IT job was tech support to the general public.  It was the early- to mid-90s so we had a lot of "my first computer" calls.  I could tell you many, many tales that are so insane you wouldn't believe me.  You can never overestimate the ability of people to do really batshit things.  Had one guy ring up with a RAM upgrade that wasn't working.  Long story short, he'd bought the wrong SIMMs - the ones he'd purchased were physically bigger than the ones he needed - so he'd hacksawed an inch off the end of each one, somehow wedged them in the sockets and was surprised when it didn't work.

Another that springs to mind from the comments above, had a lady who complained that she couldn't print in yellow.  Went through Tech reinstalling drivers etc, new print cartridge, ended up RMAing the printer.  No fault found.  Sent a replacement, still didn't work.  In desperation we asked her to send back everything she was using - printer, ink, paper, PC, the lot.  Which is how we discovered she was printing onto yellow paper...

Thanks All! Superb, lots of giggles and support in that lot. I really thought I was the only one and half expected a tidal wave STW righteousness "you ungrateful son..."  etc etc

I do love them, of course I want to help, but, heaven help me, sometimes, like last night, its just unbelievable 😂

The rod for my back was made by me, as years ago when their PCs were ridden with virus' and issues, and I was already on apple, I said that I could no longer help them unless they got a Mac.

They did that, the issues reduced massively and have continued to do so, but there are a few things that pop up that I just can't control 🙂

Would it be a terrible thing for me to take Dad's admin rights away?

Make sure the old man is running in a user account.

Change the admin account password

^This - making sure the User account is very well locked down so he can't install / uninstall prgrammes etc too

Would it be a terrible thing for me to take Dad’s admin rights away?

Not at all. Think of it like stopping someone who's got a bit bad at driving's licence away. It's for everyone's benefit.

I could, and may very well one day, write the book.

The latest one, after refusing to even attempt to repair my mother's 12+ year old, knackered laptop that I'd previously condemned some 4+ years earlier, because it is absolutely needed to be able to burn CD's on.

Me - 'What on earth are you needing to burn CD's for?!'

Mum - 'So I can listen to music in the kitchen'

Me - 'So... you want to find mp3's from the latest hooky Russian site you've found (which, for the record definitely couldn't possibly be what's given every electric device in the house digital AIDS), download them, clogging up the last few % of hard-drive space left, buy blank CD's, burn said tracks onto CD's, then BUY a CD player for the kitchen on which to listen to them?'

Mum - 'YES!! Why are you so intent on making it so bloody difficult?!!'

Me - 'In silence, picked up the iPad she was using, pressed play on Spotify and walked into the kitchen with it...

I rue the day I brought a PC home for my mum. I truly do, it's my single greatest regret in life.

That was in 1999.

That's a full 19 years she's had and been using a computer daily. Sorry, but it's ****ing inexcusable not to have at least *SOME* idea of how something works after spending ~12 hours a day using the thing for almost two decades.

It'd be lovely to, even just occasionally, be called or messaged for something other than IT support.

Sorry, but it’s ****ing inexcusable not to have at least *SOME* idea of how something works after spending ~12 hours a day using the thing for almost two decades.

Oh, don't get be started on the gods damned Badge Of Pride brigade.

"I don't know anything about this computer shit." *big proud grin*

Firstly, thanks for referring to my entire career as "shit."

Second, you have a problem with Excel.  You are an accountant.  This is literally your ****ing job.  I use Excel like once a year and I can work out what you're trying to do in about 30 seconds, WTF is wrong with you?

I'm not a Mac fan - I really don't get on with the operating system. So it's a great relief that my dad has a mac, and so does my brother 🙂

So my IT support role is limited to wife+kids, which is a lot easier to sort out.

I used to get this.  Mum bought and ipad which I know nothing about so when she has issues with that I can happily say I" I know nothing about ipads" and also on her windows desktop she stopped asking me as my first answer would be - are you still using Norton?  Thats probably your problem.  She wouldn't uninstall norton.  she stopped asking me.

These are wonderful, what catharsis! 🤩

Mum and dad are obsessed with "memory" to the point where mum deletes almost everything she does on her iMac in case she runs out. After 6 years she is using about 90gb of a 1tb system.

The best one dad had last year was: "photoshop keeps crashing, maybe the new camera files are taking up too much 'memory'"

not an unreasonable statement given the new files sizes were huge, and he'd bought a ridiculously small HD'd MacBook. Couldn't find an issue remotely however, and the next time I went to the house the issue was discovered.

Dad's card reader/USB hub was hanging out the side of the machine, the wee cable supporting the weight of 4 massive thick USB cables feeding various printers etc - there was so much weight on it that the bare wires were exposed, causing short circuits and then full kernel panics on the Mac

it only happened when he tried to plug the CF card into the reader, jiggled the cables, and hence "photoshop keeps crashing"

wonderful.

It tends to be the other way round in our family - my dad has had computers since the early ‘80s and was tech support for his company until he retired.

The only time I ever had one of “those” calls was when I’d been using his computer and had swapped the mouse buttons over to use it left-handed...

Just... this

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/05/07/baby-versus-rhino

"Google doesn't work" is a classic one, or "Google is slow"

Err?

And support for things I have never used. I write software but doesn't mean I know how every bit of software out there works. Likewise fixing hardware.

I used to get emails from the mother-in-law telling me she cant send emails....I mean wtaf?

Anyway, she is minted so I took her to the apple shop and made her buy an ipad.
I've been living the dream ever since.

I found Teamviewer a god send

Oh, don’t get be started on the gods damned Badge Of Pride brigade.

“I don’t know anything about this computer shit.” *big proud grin*

Regularly... 🙁

My mother is reasonably literate with computers, she can use them fairly competently once she's been shown and has practised it a few times. We bought her a tanblet a few years ago for Christmas and since then she's got well into reading the paper online, she likes Google Earth & Streetview and she's happy watching stuff on iPlayer now (after a long time complaining that she'd forgotten to set the video or had missed a programme, we showed her the novelty of streaming on demand and that was it, she was captivated!)

However she is RUBBISH with filing things, there's countless thousands of photos that have been backed up, copied, moved, deleted, undeleted and which is all a total mess. I regularly get "while you're hear can you just sort these pictures out...?" and the answerr is no, it would take all week!

This – making sure the User account is very well locked down so he can’t install / uninstall prgrammes etc too

Can cause a few, "I want to install this...." (insert hooky download of choice here) "and the computer won't let me" calls.

You can also hide items in System Preferences to restrict fiddling and inadvertent cock-ups.

My mum can't get into her email, lost password, Brother in law (who allegedly works in IT) sets her up with a new account.......because that'll fix it better than "I forgot my password"

My mum has two facebook pages.......because she forgot her password and thought that meant she lost her facebook page

I have to leave shortcuts to the pages my dad wants to look at on his desktop otherwise he'll be on the dark web ordering drugs accidentally within about 5 minutes.

You should have to take a test before being allowed on computers..........don't even get me started on the state of their phones

I sense this thread may become a source of comfort and therapy for many. As such, I'll continue contributing to it.

Another one.

My mum had a - perfectly working - old wee Nokia phone. One of the pensioner-proof ones (she was in her late 50's at the time).  Decided she needed an iPhone. Remember - she struggles with her iPad and refused to believe it was just a smaller version of this.

So, the 'nice lad in Tesco' sold her a Motorola on Android.

She's never been able to make or answer a phone call in the two + years since she got it.  An absolute waste of the top up credit needed to keep the number live and electricity required to charge it.

Refuses point blank to replace it with another wee non-smart phone style Nokia.

https://giphy.com/gifs/follow-dreams-remake-9fn7ogiJHmYG4

I've never understood that mentality either.

"I want to knock some nails in, and I want to do it using this cheesecake."

"Well, really you'd be better off with a hammer..."

"NO!  I have to use this cheesecake!  Why won't you tell me how to do it?  I thought you knew about this stuff?!"

My Mum is actually pretty good. She's got the hang of the fact that the first thing I would do when asked a question was to type the exact words into google, so that's always a start. I know she's at least made a bit of a go at the problem so I tend not to mind helping. She also writes things down so hopefully she won't have to ask again.

Thanks to a troublesome printer and dogged persistence she was actually the one I would go to for fixing printers for quite a while.

My Dad on the other hand is more of the 'fix this' "why, what's wrong" 'it's not working' school. It's not that he can't do it, he's just not even slightly interested so you end up showing him the same thing several times. The frustrating thing is he can pick up something he's interested in and figure it out, or master it after one showing, quite happily.

Oh the phone one above ^^.

My Mum "acquired" my sister's old Motorola. First time she'd ever had a mobile phone, this was about 2005 or so. She'd turn it on, send a text then turn it off again. Turn it on, make a quick phone call, turn it off.

Then she wondered why she was never getting any replies. Took us ages to convince her to leave the bloody thing on. I pointed out that she didn't unplug the home phone after each call and she was able to relate to that so eventually left it on (normally permanently connected to the charger because she "didn't want it to run out").

This had the dual effect of her rarely taking it with her and the battery beng fried. On the odd occasion she did take it with her, she'd be so surprised whenever it did ring that she'd be blissfully unaware it was hers or she'd spend so long rummaging round for it that it would go to voicemail.

<p><p>Jamesmio - that could be my mum you are describing.</p><p>Thankfully they moved to macs. She still installs utter crap but at least now it's not *another* web browser toolbar/plugin/whatever to slow eerything down to a crawl or another antivirus. Of course she's totally blameless, it's always my dad installing stuff when she's not there since he has exactly the same interest in best deals and coupons and pish that she does.</p></p>

<p>However she is RUBBISH with filing things, there’s countless thousands of photos that have been backed up, copied, moved, deleted, undeleted and which is all a total mess. I regularly get “while you’re hear can you just sort these pictures out…?” and the answerr is no, it would take all week!</p>

<p><p>My "Unsorted" folder is becoming something of a problem, I really need to do something about it. Blanket application of ISO 8601 for pictures would be a good start.</p></p>

As I said, I dealt with a lot of "my first computer" calls.  Here's a couple more.  I know these might sound like something #neverhappened that I've pulled off the Internet, but I swear they're true and I know they're true because they happened to me.

One guy, sounded pensioner age, had bought our top-of-the-range deluxe everything package.  IIRC it came out at about £2,500 (some 25 years ago, remember).  He rang us up, he'd got it all up and running, asked "now what?"  He'd bought this thing with no notion of what it was for or what it did.  I can't remember now exactly how that call ended, I think I left him playing Solitaire.

Another guy called in complaining that the footpedal wasn't working.  I looked on his account for some sort of game controller or something - we didn't sell these, but usually the first time we found out that new kit existed was when a customer rang for support on it so it wasn't wildly unlikely.  Nothing there I could see so I asked him where he'd got it from, he said us.  After much confusion, it transpired that he'd taken his shoe and sock off and put the mouse on the floor.

A woman called in to ask for a bigger mouse-mat, only the one she had wasn't big enough for her to reach the edges of the screen.  Also had a request from someone for a transparent mouse, as when they put it on the screen they couldn't see the pointer.

Had someone call in saying their mouse only worked at night.  This one went through a lot of techs before it landed on my desk, and it took some diagnosing.  It turned out that their computer desk was next to a window, and when the sun shone on the cheap-ass mouse we supplied it bled in through the gaps in the plastic and confused the optical sensors detecting ball movement.  At night, no sun / curtains closed, no problemo.

Had the classic CD-ROM / cup holder one, sort of.  Guy rang up to ask for a new CD-ROM drive, he'd been using the old one as a stand for his brew so habitually left it hanging open, and had tripped and fallen on it snapping the tray clean out.  (Thinking about it, I've half a memory that this was a call-back for something and he said he'd done it just then in running to answer the phone.)

don’t even get me started on the state of their phones

Encouraged parents to go the Nokia Win Phone route some years back, as they were happy with Nokia stuff and Windows Phone just is easy to use and difficult for the user to screw up. Also, it's consistent so whatever they get I can understand what they're talking about.

Win Phone died obviously and their phones died so have ended up with Android. Now all kinds of junk gets installed, can't understand what they're describing because it's a different version of Android and each version is radically different.

At least they went Nokia again which is roughly stock Android so not so alien to me. Taken a while to understand it and especially how the notifications work and that they need swiping to dismiss. They're using Outlook and Windows on desktop and contacts, calendar etc are all in there so got Outlook on the phone, but that gets confused with the GMail and Contacts apps built in which are tied to Google's ecosystem.

Had a memorable call from one George Gallagher-Daggett.  (I think it's safe to name names here as he's probably long since shuffled off this mortal coil.)

He sounded exactly as you'd expect from the name.  I was going to describe his voice, but I realise just now that he sounded exactly like Colonel K from Dangermouse.  Wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest if he was a retired colonel.

I can't remember the issue he'd called with now, seemed a nice old boy but he had a pompous bluster that he knew all about computers and this was all clearly our fault.

I try to talk to people at a technical level that suits the audience so I started discussing the techie stuff and it rapidly became apparent that no, he didn't actually have a clue what I was talking about.  So I gradually dumbed down the language and explained things in ever more basic terms.  Suddenly I managed to trip over something that he did in fact already know.  And his demeanour turned on a sixpence.

"Don't you patronise me, sonny!" he bellowed, "I've been in the IT industry for FIVE YEARS!"

I replied, "oh, is that all?"

He went full on weapons-grade gammon, absolutely apoplectic.  I let him rage for a good couple of minutes waiting for him to calm down, I think I ended up putting the phone down in the end.

Funny things, people.

After watching her struggle with the concept of an iPad after 15-ish years on Windows, I just can't face the prospect of moving onto Mac. I just can't - it'll be the ending of me.

She had a laptop; wee Acer. Great wee thing. Windows XP. 'Windows' upgraded itself to Windows 7 (of course it did), wiping everything that was on it in the process.

'The Internet' in my mum's eyes is the list of around 2500 favourites that she insists *must* be open at all times, clogging up approximately 1/3rd of the available screen space.  For this purpose will only entertain IE, because it's the only browser stupid and backwards enough to actually let people carry out this self-defecating practice.

At the time, she had a laptop and a desktop. With 2 x sets of Favourites (both of a similar quantity and quality of dead/deleted sites etc) - a complete and utter cluster**** of a thing.

Me - 'I use Chrome. It saves all my favourites in a single account that I can access from my laptop, phone, iPad etc...'

Mum - 'No. I want my favourites.'

Me - 'Your favourites will still be there, I'll even shift them across for you'

Mum - 'It's rubbish, they've all gone, just put it back'

Me - 'They're there. Look - Chrome just calls them 'Bookmarks' - click that.'

Mum - 'That's useless, I need them down the side'

Me - 'Fine. Have 3 x different lists, stuff missing all over the place and the need to scroll sideways on half the sites you visit because of that monstrosity down the side.'

Some years later she now has

Every week, I mutter a little prayer that my dad had a stroke and then passed  away before he could get his hands on a computer and the internet..