There are only two people who ever ask me for tech help. One is my father, who is decently tech-litterate for his age, helping him usually revolves around media piracy. I very occasionally lose patience with him because sometimes I’ll tell him to check something, he’ll say he did it, and I keep trying to figure out his issue only for him to realize half an hour later he didn’t actually check what I told him to.
The other is an older lady who used to be my neighbour, we became friends and still keep in touch since she moved. I absolutely adore helping her out, since it’s usually something silly that takes literally less than 30 seconds to figure out/fix. She’s always immensely appreciative and acts like I’m the smartest person in the goddamn world. It’s honestly a welcomed ego boost, plus it makes me feel great to see how genuinely thankful she is.
I think, especially with older generations, you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here. My old neighbour didn’t have electricity or running water growing up, and now we expect her to understand GUIs, OSes, settings, accounts, networks…
I get much more upset when I see people around my age (late twenties to early thirties) who can’t understand the basic functions of a desktop operating system. I understand that not all of my generation were tech-obsessed kids/teens like myself, spending their free time figuring out stuff like upgrading from Vista to XP or partitioning the hard drive on the family PC to dual boot Linux distros, but you’d think they’d at least understand the basics of a filesystem and how to change settings.
you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here
We all tend to think that the existing technology when we grew up was the benchmark and always existed. Many people are alive today that went to college before computers even existed. Back then the closest thing to a computer filled a room and worked with punch cards. On the smartphone side, how many even remember those pink pads that were used to write down phone messages. Or dial up internet over a phone line with those strange noises as the connection was made.
My father has been using computers for 50 years and hasn’t seemed to really learn anything. His work had one of the first personal conouters, an Altair, and we had C64s and early DOS machines when I was a kid. He could do excel, word, general word processing, had spreadsheets back in the early days of Lotus… at this point he gets confused and frustrated by like, the CVS website. Doesn’t ask for help though, just keeps doing his knows what and getting angry about it, then when I try to help (like, “oh, your credit card number is entered wrong”) he just gets angry and says “this is a SIMPLE THING! I DONT NEED HELP!” Like, okay, you’ve been overlooking this error message on a website and acting pissed for 15 minutes, but whatever.
There are only two people who ever ask me for tech help. One is my father, who is decently tech-litterate for his age, helping him usually revolves around media piracy. I very occasionally lose patience with him because sometimes I’ll tell him to check something, he’ll say he did it, and I keep trying to figure out his issue only for him to realize half an hour later he didn’t actually check what I told him to.
The other is an older lady who used to be my neighbour, we became friends and still keep in touch since she moved. I absolutely adore helping her out, since it’s usually something silly that takes literally less than 30 seconds to figure out/fix. She’s always immensely appreciative and acts like I’m the smartest person in the goddamn world. It’s honestly a welcomed ego boost, plus it makes me feel great to see how genuinely thankful she is.
I think, especially with older generations, you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here. My old neighbour didn’t have electricity or running water growing up, and now we expect her to understand GUIs, OSes, settings, accounts, networks…
I get much more upset when I see people around my age (late twenties to early thirties) who can’t understand the basic functions of a desktop operating system. I understand that not all of my generation were tech-obsessed kids/teens like myself, spending their free time figuring out stuff like upgrading from Vista to XP or partitioning the hard drive on the family PC to dual boot Linux distros, but you’d think they’d at least understand the basics of a filesystem and how to change settings.
We all tend to think that the existing technology when we grew up was the benchmark and always existed. Many people are alive today that went to college before computers even existed. Back then the closest thing to a computer filled a room and worked with punch cards. On the smartphone side, how many even remember those pink pads that were used to write down phone messages. Or dial up internet over a phone line with those strange noises as the connection was made.
My father has been using computers for 50 years and hasn’t seemed to really learn anything. His work had one of the first personal conouters, an Altair, and we had C64s and early DOS machines when I was a kid. He could do excel, word, general word processing, had spreadsheets back in the early days of Lotus… at this point he gets confused and frustrated by like, the CVS website. Doesn’t ask for help though, just keeps doing his knows what and getting angry about it, then when I try to help (like, “oh, your credit card number is entered wrong”) he just gets angry and says “this is a SIMPLE THING! I DONT NEED HELP!” Like, okay, you’ve been overlooking this error message on a website and acting pissed for 15 minutes, but whatever.