Like Mandi, I spent the last week with family, cruising around an area decidedly more "wooded" than NYC. But while she avoided the Internet in Vermont with one relative (click here for her report), I slurped my way through California wine country with three. This is just one way in which Annie Barrett is a little cooler than Mandi Bierly (WHOA: We should have an ongoing tug-of-war in this vein! But digitally, on PopWatch…ix-nay on any sort of physical effort, obviously.)
Anyway, on our flight back east, the noise level was so intense that my dad needed to use my mom’s iPod Nano to avoid having a breakdown. But like a frazzled PopWatch editor trying to dissuade Slezak from writing another post about Fantasia, it just wasn’t that easy. Enter…this:
HANDWRITTEN NOTE
It’s the HANDWRITTEN NOTE my mom passed to my dad across the expansive, two-foot aisle of row 16. I just thought it was amazing and had to post it on my first day back.
What’s the most basic technological instruction you’ve had to explain to the tragically unhip? Quick, scribble your story down on a scrap of looseleaf paper and pass it on!
I had to show my then-80-year-old mom how to use an electronic calculator.
Mom, when you download something, make a mental note of where it is you’re telling it to save to. That way you don’t have to go hunting for it afterward.
My co-worker “to send a text, select SMS text”
+ I once had to walk my dad through attaching an email to send me my homework. It took about 20 minutes, because I couldn’t picture where the “Send” button was and he couldn’t find it on the screen.
+ My friend’s mom triple clicks instead of double clicks and nothing ever opens, so she screams at the computer in Chinese.
When we bought my grandmother a new tv/dvd/vhs combo, I had to write down the instructions for how to play movies (which are on a piece of looseleaf paper, taped to the inside of her tv cabinet…too bad I don’t have a picture). For the VHS, the instructions are “Push in the tape and it will start playing on its own.”
She still only watches movies when we come over because she thinks it is too confusing.
My personal favorite is trying to explain double-clicking to someone who’s never used a mouse before. The first couple times they try it, it’s always like an eternity between the clicks. They never understand that you have to do the clicks in quick succession, even though it seems so obvious to anyone with a remedial knowledge of computers. Then once you explain that you have to do it fast, they grip the mouse way too tight to gear up for their double-clicking adventure and inevitably end up moving the mouse all over the place, which results in either icons being dragged across the screen or them clicking on empty spaces or something entirely different from what they were trying to click on. It’s frustrating/funny every time.
I had to explain to my mother last week what a blog was, even though she reads them all the time. It was hard to define it without using blog in the definition as either a noun or verb.
I had to put down instructions to my mother and father on how to work the DVR for DirecTV. It included instructions like, “Push play (big, round, black button).”
My mom is a lot more technologically hip than most, but sometimes she gets frazzled. When trying to play something on our DVR, every once in awhile I have to remind her how and that the ‘big triangle button means play.’
I always have to type detailed instructions for my mom to work the tv/dvr/dvd when we leave town. The list also includes the channel numbers of her favorite channels so she can find her “shows.” However, i always leave off the religious channel she watches and tell her we don’t get that channel, even tho we do.
Oh Lord…every time my in-laws visit my husband has to tape little handwritten instructions to each of our three TV remotes so that they can actually watch TV. We tried explaining the TiVo remote, but it was just too much. The bad part is that we have to leave the little notes on the remotes until they leave to go home, so anytime you use a remote there’s an annoying little piece of paper dangling from the bottom.
Hubby used to teach a beginning computer class for senior citizens. Among the hilarity, attempting to differentiate “click” from “right click” and issues with “click on the (blank)” when mice inevitably were moved to the screen for clicking.
My mother calls me with computer issues all the time, so we’ve gone through it all, but the time I had to walk her through checking all the connections on the back to make sure the mouse was attached was no easy task.
The worst with my parents is alarm systems. At my previous place, you had to stand still when turning it on because of the motion dectector and my Dad would always bob and weave trying to read the numbers. Worse was when my sister-in-law was about to birth a couple of months after moving into the new place. My parents drove down to watch my niece and they called me to get the alarm code for the house (‘how am I suppose to know? I never been there!’)
I work with volunteers and each of them has to use Excel to put the number of hours they serve into the computer. We wrote a step by step instruction guide to do this (basically adding information into 4 cells each time) My favorite was
1. Double click on your file; double clicking is hitting the left button on the mouse two times, really fast.
I still get asked what double click means.
As a public librarian, I am always asked how to cut,copy, and paste on to a WORD document. I show the people whom have asked this question that the left button on the mouse is for highlighting and the right is to cut,copy and paste. They STILL don’t get it. :-\