My Mother-In-Law Is A Moron. My Wife Agrees.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

My Gran

She keeps trying to join the information age but she’s bought two or three “computers” now and keeps getting ripped off. Every single time she decides she’s had it with the old one I tell her to wait until someone who knows anything about computers is there to pick one out with her, every time she agrees, and then every single blasted time she takes herself of and buys a “bargain” electric typewriter or some bizarre 15 year old contraption that you can’t get disks or printer cartridges for.

We’ve finally managed to get her to buy something that approximately resembles a PC and requires consumables that actually cost less than the machine itself to obtain but she’s reluctant to actually learn how to use it.

She also is firmly convinced of the evils of the internet, a view reinforced when my two idiot cousins managed to leave some porn files on her computer after visiting :eek: (I have no idea how they managed this because the wretched thing has never actually been connected to the internet, near as I can figure out they must have had it on disk), She is adamant that she doesn’t want to connect it to the phone lines at all and so far I haven’t had that much luck convincing her that this isn’t especially compatible with her stated objective of using her computer to email people.

22

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2004-05-07

MiL doesnt want a computer. She actually seemed afraid of it when we let her type an email on my laptop when we were there. SiL isn’t quite that skittish but doesn’t want to get one. Last time we were out ther way showed her hubby eBay and he seemed to be hooked as he’s a serious collector of investment grade coins. My wife bidded on several for him and actually won a few at prices he knew to be bargains. Still it wasn’t enough to motivate him to get one.

23

I have it on both sides.

My mother really wants to use the computer, and feels like she ought to be able to figure it out since she can type 100wpm. But she’s also a shop-aholic, and her favorite thing to do on the computer is shop. It didn’t take her very long to learn how to order things, and she gave out her e-mail address to any website that asked for it. She now no longer reads e-mail because there is too much junk mail for her to sort out, and she can’t seem to understand that she doesn’t have to open a message to delete it.

My FiL has pretty much decided that he doesn’t want anything to do with computers. We tried to get him interested in a few games, and tried to show him how he can do geneology research (his only real hobby) using the web, but it’s beyond him, and he just doesn’t see much point in learning it. At least he’s honest.

My MiL, though, uses a computer at work, so she wants one at home, too. The first computer she got was a Gateway. Not bad, but it had its glitches, and I couldn’t always fix them for her. That computer became outdated, so they gave it to their daughter. She asked for advice on what to get for a new computer, but ignored me and got another Gateway.

She does actually use it for e-mail, word processing, financial things, etc., so I think it’s good for her to have the computer. However, when they first got it, we would send her e-mail, and she would call us back to reply to the e-mail. (Now she understands what the Reply button is for, but she has also learned how to use the Forward button…) She also called me for anything that went wrong, even though it was long distance. The worst thing is that most of it had to do with ISP connections, and since I don’t use the same ISP they do, there wasn’t always much I could do. I would tell her to call her ISP, but she normally called Gateway first, then got upset when Gateway didn’t know what was wrong, and would call me again to see if I could figure out what Gateway told her to try.

Her mother also had a computer for about six months. I tried to teach her how to use it, at least for e-mail, but I think she had the “too many features” problem, too. She eventually gave the computer to someone else since she couldn’t really get the hang of it.

24

I love my mother very, very much. But Lord, do I cringe when I see her name pop up on the Caller ID.

Some backstory – she got her first computer several years ago, secondhand. Very outdated, but it was enough to serve her needs (e-mail, mostly). This thing was was ancient – it had a 80 meg hard drive. Since she would save any pictures family sent to her, she needed to copy these pics to floppy every now and then or they’d quickly take up all her HD space.

This trained her to always be very conscious of her drive space. To the point where if she didn’t recognize a file, into the recycle bin it went. After having to go and reinstall Windows a few times, I finally got it through to her that she should stop fricking deleting the operating system!

Last year, she got a brand-spankin’ new laptop…top of the line, with 60 gigs of drive space. No need for her to ever fiddle with floppies again. But it seems my lessons didn’t take. She had the thing two days before I had to go over and reinstall Windows on it. Her reasoning was “It should come with an empty hard drive”. :smack:

She’s not the only one I’ve seen do this, either. I just can’t understand the phenomenon. Would anyone buy a brand new car and start ripping out engine parts they don’t recognize because the car would probably go faster without the extra weight?

I won’t even get started on my brother and his $2,500 paperweight. Suffice it to say, I wish I could find this computer for him so it would actually get used.

25

Don’t be an enabler. Tell her to call tech support. It isn’t your problem.

26

That reminds me a lot of my dad a few years ago. He was just flat out computer dumb. I had to spend two whole Saturdays showing him how to operate Ebay… then I realized that the problem was that he just didn’t have a basic understanding of what his computer could do/was made to do.

So I just went through every thing and gave him just enough to know whether or not he’d need to ever use or modify it. IF he thought he might need it then we’d go over it in depth.

Now he is actually savvy.

27

Well, that’s sometimes a valid issue. If your main computer is set to download your email and delete them off the server, you won’t be able to read your email from a different computer. But I’m guessing you’re talking about some sort of Web-based email here.

My dad got a secondhand computer a few years ago from my aunt. He’s a smart guy, but he didn’t start out knowing anything about computers. One day he deleted some system files, trying to make more room on his hard drive. Thus began the cycle of him driving down from Sacramento with the computer so I could fix it, me not quite being able to fully restore it because of obscure and discontinued hardware and missing Windows disks, and him breaking it again. In the course of this adventure I explained what I was doing in a fair amount of technical detail, and he began to understand. I haven’t heard anything about the computer lately, so I guess it’s working well enough. I told him next time I do a complete upgrade on one of my gaming machines I’d give him the old one, so he’d have a relatively modern computer.

28

I had a twentysomething coworker who was doing something like this - she was trying to put those files she didn’t “use” into different folders. :smack: I stopped her before she got too far in the process, but I think we still ended up calling IT to deal with her idiot move.

29

*****@juno.com is their e-mail address. Yes, it’s a web-based e-mail.

30

My in-laws are in their late 70s. Three years ago we gave them one of our old Mac G-3s we had the bare bones basics loaded. We spent several weekends carfully spoon feeding information to them.
They would, of course, ask the same questions every week. They live 100 miles away, so every weekend got old quick.
We found a wonderful Mac tech repair guy in their town. They love him. They feed him. They send us pictures of him.
He charges them “half price.” He doesn’t charge them for calls asking the same questions. He only charges them for actual visits. (Like when they’ve deleted the OS, or made 200 aliases of the trash, and couldn’t explain it over the phone.) He’s honest. He likes them.
They no longer call us with computer questions.
Life is good.

31

What Padeye said. Once my mother had to start paying for service calls, she stopped tinkering.

Robin

32

You know, I’m really glad that my 80-some year old grandfather has no problem sending email.

Of course, almost every email starts with:

“I hope you get this damn thing, I’m not sure how this works.”

E.

33

My mother has yet to figure out how to check her voice mail on her cell phone (and why she even thinks she needs one is beyond me). She’s also bad about not having it on, or just letting the battery run out without re-charging. She claims she only got it for ‘emergencies,’ so the first few times we got a ‘test’ call from her when she wasn’t sure it was on or charged, it freaked us right the hell out.

My FIL thinks he’s some kind of computer genius because he briefly worked in a store that sold them (he sold in another department, but I guess it’s that osmisis thing), but…well, he’s just not. We took my laptop with us the last time we visited them, and he was just flummoxed by it. He apparently thinks getting a cable modem will not only put all the ‘bad’ stuff on the internet on his pc, but also all the ‘bad’ stuff from TV. Oh, and he’s never grasped the notion that even if you’re on DH’s own site, ordering a shirt or something is done through CafePress, not DH personally. We finally gave up and just decided to let him go on thinking that DH is printing tees and ‘painting’ coffee mugs in the garage. It’s less head-explodey that way.

34

My dad helped his MIL buy a phone. Sweet lady, but she’s under the impression she HAS to use all the minutes on the phone each month. So, she checks regularly, then says, “I gotta go…I have 15 more minutes I have to use up before the end of the month!”

35

Goodness…2copies of the same Lewis Black joke within a week of eachother? Guys, we need to get out more.
-foxy

36

My neighbor (same one that’s suing the complex for her tumble) asked me several times to come help her figure out how to “get on the email” with her “new computer”.

I finally got around to visiting the other day. Her new computer was a dusty Apple monitor she’d procured from a dumpster and nothing else.

Even more comical, when I asked her where the processor was she told me to hold on while she went looking for it (she’s also one of those weird packrats so it didn’t seem so odd that she’d lost a whole processor). She came back a few minutes later with an AOL disk…*and nothing else! *

37

I guess I’m pretty lucky. My mother and father (59 and 65 respectfully) have become fairly computer-savvy over the past few years. In just a few months my mom went from being afraid to turn the computer on to learning basic html and making her own Web pages. They’ve become pretty good at comparison shopping online, too.

The problem in my family is my uncle, Mom’s younger brother. He sees himself as a computer expert. A few years ago he decided to start building computer systems as a business. Many people in my family, including me, my brother and Mom’s older sister, had him build computers for us. Mine stopped working after about a year and a half. My brother, who later took computer classes in college and actually knows what he’s doing, ended up gutting his for parts. When my brother took my tower apart to install a new hard drive he started cursing up a storm – it took him forever to undo all of the twist ties holding the various components in place.

My uncle hasn’t said anything about his computer business for years. My family thinks he built a few bad systems for non-family members and ended up with a lot of unhappy customers. But that doesn’t stop him from thinking he’s an expert. My aunt caught him taking apart her computer during his last visit, trying to “fix” nonexistent problems. His logic was, “I built it, so I’m allowed to work on it.” :mad:

38

These stories make me so happy that my grandmother took a computer course at the local community college, and that she and my grandfather both know enough to not ‘play’ with their computer.

Also that my mum’s pretty savvy with her machine, and usually calls her brother for tech support and not me.

But I had to cry a month or so ago. My 17 year old brother went to Japan for a fortnight. He gets back and we get a (semi) panicked call from my mother - “Your brother’s locked his computer, and can’t get back into it again!”

He’s done what?

He’s set a password for his normal and admin-level access on his XP machine. 12 hours before leaving for Japan, he then changed said password… and didn’t write it down. :smack:

So we find one of those XP password restore programs and have to go boot his computer from the CD and reset his passwords so he can log in again. 48 hours without his computer seems to have impressed the importance of noting down your password somewhere if you’ve just changed it to something new. But we’ll see if it happens again.

39

I just have to brag that my 69-year-old mother not only knows her way around a computer to the point where she’s taught herself Photoshop Elements with only a minimum amount of help, but she even refuses to forward on most email, and checks Snopes when she gets stuff that doesn’t ring true.

She’s a smartie, no doubt about that.

40

MIL bought a VHS copy of Dirty Dancing because she liked the music and wanted to listen to it while she drove. She couldn’t quite get it in the tapedeck, though.

When my mom went to buy her DVD player, I told her to be sure to get a DVD rewinder to save wear and tear on the player. Yes, she asked for one.

I’m such a dick. :slight_smile: