Lately, my mother’s been asking me to help her out on using the internet. Okay, good for her, she’s learning something new-no, I’m not being sarcastic.
However, having read Getting Mom Onto Internet A Sisyphean Ordeal, it’s a little too realistic.
No, I don’t mind, just that sometimes, she’s a little too confused, and she tends to ask me too many questions at once, and interupt me, when I’m trying to show her step-by-step.
I’m not sure my Mom was ever as bad as the woman in the article, but I’m not sure she wasn’t either. But I guess she does OK for someone who learned technology in her 60s.
My mother is actually worse. She’s 75 this year tho, so I don’t say much. I only let her on the computer if I am standing right beside her. She only uses it for her banking and even then it is an ordeal. I have offered a million times to just drive her in to the bank but no, she wants to “see” her account and pay the fucking phone bill on-line. This takes at least 1/2 an hour. With me standing over her shoulder telling her/navigating for her.
She asked me yesterday if I could show her how to do email. I said “Hell no!”
Then I had a drink. And then another.
I don’t work for Radioshack, but this article here pretty well sums up the state of the entire electronics retail market, IMHO.
As the one Mom calls to still walk her through SOME basic Internet tasks, I loved that article. She was mildly insulted.
I don’t have the link at the moment, but one was titled something like “New Therapeutic Soles Use Five New Forms of Pseudoscience”. A friend falls for every such product. I e-mailed her the article & she actually thought it was funny, adding “I want ten of them!”
The old “MaryKate is dragging Ashley down” (or vice versa) editorial is kinda … sad now.
Even worse is when they get enough skill to become the woman in this Onion article.
I can go to my Yahoo account right now and find 10 glurge bombs (my favorite is the true story where the atheist professor demands God prove Himself by knocking him down, so the Marine student back from Iraq does it for Him. Support Our Troops!)
Y’know, instead of making fun of people who have trouble understanding the Internet, those who design and tend it should work harder at making it easier to understand. I know the Onion article is a spoof, but inside every spoof is the seed of truth. Seriously, naming an identifier code a “cookie” is just juvenile jackassery.
I like the Onion article about Radio Shack.
But it’s pretty inaccurate. Radio Shack is phasing out its electronic parts business, and the one nearest me now has no parts at all on the wall. There is a short hallway at the rear of the showroom to provide workers with access to the storage and other areas behind it, and a cabinet of drawers in that short hallway contains the only electronics parts the store stocks. And the clerks tell me this cabinet stock will be dropped soon, too.
The clerks tell me that Radio Shack is now primarily a cell phone store. This beats the hell out of me - since Radio Shack drove Lafayette Radio out of business decades ago, they have long been the only parts distributor in most towns. Then, along comes the cheap and practical cell phone, and suddenly every small town has 3 or 4 cell phone stores. So why is it a good idea for RAdio Shack to stop being the #1 parts distributor and start trying to be the #4 or #5 cell phone store?
By the way, a “radio shack” is the room on an oceangoing ship where the radio operator works, sending and receiving Morse code.
Not that the last couple of clerks I asked knew that.
Radio Shack is an interesting animal anyway - their core business was leather and leatherworking tools and supplies, for people in the leatherworking hobby. For some reason they branched into HAM radio and electronics, which became bigger than the leather business. Only an hour’s drive away from here was the very last TAndy Leather store, which didn’t have anything in it to suggest it was related to Radio Shack. It closed just a few years back.
Ugh. My father-in-law comes over a few times a year to have my husband show him flight prices online. And then rental car prices. Then he says he’ll just call and usually later claims he got a better deal calling. Well yes, he gave them all his frequent flyer/gold club/whatever info on the phone, which he didn’t do on the web because he doesn’t have his own account for those sites and doesn’t want to make one because it’s not cheaper on the web, and we try to explain why and… never mind.
My husband’s siblings suggest every Christmas that they chip together and buy their parents a computer, and my husband always vetoes it. He lives closest to their parents and is usually thought of as “the computer guy” of the family, and so Any. Little. Thing. would result in him having to go over there (because doing it over the phone just would not work) and fix it when one of them clicked on a “Your computer needs a tune-up!” pop-up or gave away their bank account info to a phishing E-mail from “F1rst Muutuel B@nk Acount Maintnense.”
Not to mention the issue of trying to get them Internet access; their dad is trying to hold onto his old pay-for-use “emergency” cellphone that isn’t going to work on the networks very soon (or did they manage to get him upgraded? I might have repressed that memory) and super-ultra-basic cable account plus analog TV. I doubt he’s going to want to pay beaucoup bucks to get cable Internet, or have another phone line run into his old house and then pay for that too. Plus with the per-minute charge for not-that-local phone calls around here, long distance charges are often cheaper and they might send their phone bill through the roof if they pick the wrong dialup location one mile too far away.
There was one thing about a boy (something like, “Fat Kid Wears T-shirt in Swimming Pool”), where they just basically insulted him repeatedly about his weight to his face, and the kid went along with it. I don’t know how they get some people to go along with this kind of stuff. Maybe they pay them a lot.
That’s a whoosh, isn’t it guizot?
My favourite too-close-to-the-bone one: Area Girlfriend Still Hasn’t Seen Apocalypse Now
You just know the relationship’s doomed.
Fear not! Those of us with elderly, technology-impaired parents can always send them to Silicon Pines.
Well, there was this one.
You’ve got to watch this YouTube video, pronto! Medievil helpdesk. In fact, I suggest, when next working with your mom, that you download it for the two of you to watch together. The laughter was the only thing that kept my mom and I from killing each other the day she got a new computer and I had to set it up and transfer files from her old one. (Did I mention I don’t know shit about Macs? Yeah, that was fun.)
Good item. Reminded me of the time I once went into a Radio Shack looking for certain obscure analog electronic parts, and the folks in there had no idea what I was talking about. As it turned out, they did have what I needed, but I had to explain to them what the parts were.
What, you* claim that you cannot sell a battery without my name, address, and phone number, but you cannot be bothered to ask about what you sell? :rolleyes:
I’ve mentioned the article elsewhere, but I read “New Gas Bill Designed By Some Kind Of Freaking Maniac” just a few days after marvelling at the byzantine nature of my own gas bill.
The gas bill in the picture looks just like mine.
I used to work at a college for a program that served a number of older students. Many of these folks had a very low income and no computer experience. I am not exaggerating-I had folks who could not effectively use a mouse. Part of my job was maintaining 6 work stations for our students use. I had to explain practically every aspect of computer use, from library searches to printing on both sides of a page.
Just like with any skill, some of our students learned and some didn’t, some learned to be helpless. One guy in particular sticks in my mind. It was worse than learned helplessness. I dreaded leaving him on a computer by himself. Seemingly every time he came in something would get screwed up on the computer, and often I had no clue how he did it. Luckily he was a nice person otherwise I would have dreaded seeing him.
By the way I think the key for training people is to make them do the operations themselves.
Nooooo!!!
Well, actually, the Radio Shacks in Canada are now The Source, because the distributor lost the license to use the RS name (i’m not sure of the details), but still… every electronics student has gone there in a desperate hurry to get that forgotten resistor or fuse on the night before a project is due.
And as Napier said, in many centres RS/The Source are the only places to get things like slightly-obscure batteries, adaptors, cables, etc. In Toronto you can go to dedicated electronics parts retailers like Active Components, but you can’t do that in Bancroft, or even Kingston.
No, it’s not. I’ve never been fat, but if I were (and especially if I were an adolescent), I’d certainly never go onto an Internet site that would ridicule me because of my weight. Would you?
The segment was funny, but its whole point was to belittle this "kid.’ Maybe in reality he likes being fat. I don’t know.