So, my Mom doesn't really understand email...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I gave my parents their first computer over 10 years ago. They have used email and IM all that time.

But I didn’t know until just now that Mom really doesn’t understand it.

I develop software and so I have had the pleasure often of being able to travel with my job. I’ve been a variety of different places, Japan, England, France, various parts of Canada and all over the US.

I send Mom an email usually to let her know I arrived safely and just to shout out. She never responds.

Today I found out why. She thought that the email goes to my house. I sent her email from England last Sunday and got no response. Today I asked her if she were away for Labor day, since I didn’t hear back. No, she said, she just wasn’t sure where to send it. She was afraid that if she sent it to my email at home I wouldn’t read it until I returned home.

She’s 70, BTW, I guess we can cut her some slack - but I was mildly surprised she didn’t understand.

2

Tell her it goes to an internet telegraph station, and you can retrieve it from the internet telegraph station using the magic of the web :wink:

3

Her age has nothing to do with it. She just never got a good explanation of how it works.

4

Hmmmm. I suppose I will have to bow to your superior knowledge of my mother’s inner workings. Can you tell me what she wants for Christmas? And BTW, how *do *you know my Mom?

5

Man, you’re asking for it…:slight_smile:

IDNKYMB (1)
I’d tend to agree with him. Perhaps she thinks it “goes to” a particular computer.

(1) I Do Not Know Your Mother, But

6

There are plenty of people who understand you can retrieve e-mail from anywhere. And that includes people in their 80s.

Did you ever explain to her that it could be received anywhere? I’ll bet you just were so used to the concept that you assumed she knew it, too.

7

Heheh I had this exact same thing with my mum. What worked was explaining that email is like a mobile phone, in that it’s with you wherever you are, rather than being a landline which is only in one place.

8

:slight_smile:

That’s cute. I know just what you mean.

My Mom, age 66, loves to play online euchre. But sometimes she’ll get on a losing streak and then can’t find table partners b/c her accumulated score is poor. So she wanted to sign on again, under a new alias.

Well, of course it wouldn’t let her set up a second account with the same email address.

So she put in my sister’s email address instead. Was a little baffled that it didn’t work.

(not sure what Sis did w/those confirmations)

So I explained that she needed to create a second Yahoo email account and activate it when the confirmation was sent.

And she did, she made one with the alias “Mary” and all was well in euchreland. But now she couldn’t get to her original email account.

She called me in an absolute panic “It’s gone. I’m all gone. I log in and it says ‘Hi Mary’ and I can’t get back to myself. I need my restore discs. I need to restore my computer”.

I did manage to talk her out of that. It helped that I was able to login to her original account on my cell phone (I have learned that it pays to save her passwords).

Last month she wanted to send me a spreadsheet we were working on on her laptop, but didn’t think she could do so because she couldn’t find “that little orange Earth” on the top of the page in Excel.

What’s really frightening and baffling about this is, she and my dad were on the cutting edge of computers in the early '80s. They ran a business in our basement that did billing and insurance filing and financial reports for physicians. This was before it occurred to lots of other people to automate billing. The software was based on prompts (their computers were Osbornes) - long before Windows, before Lotus 123, too (never mind Excel). I don’t know if she never understood how they worked, or if she’s just forgotten.

Makes aging a really unappealing prospect.

9

For some technologically-challenged people, even the simpliest things others take for granted are a mystery. The other day I had a panic call from a neighbor who was trying to send an email and couldn’t. Turns out she accidentally clicked on the “full screen” middle button, which enlarged the window she was working in, covering up everything else. At that point, she was lost. Even after working with a Windows computer for 10 years, the concept of a window was totally foreign to her.

I explained it to her, but I’ll bet she’ll call again when it happens again. And we’re not talking about someone senile.

10

Some people just don’t have The Basics. I write sequential programs in my job, so I’m always pulling files from here and there and writing files to there and here and there. I’ve been doing it for a long time. My coworker manipulates files in Excel, and she manually types data into a mainframe program, which creates the files that she sends. I tried to show her how to run (not write) the programs I’ve written. It’s a little more complicated than it needs to be, because the data must be in ASCII text in fixed positions (and fixed-block) and our version of Excel has limits on record length. So the drill is to convert the .xls file to a .csv file in Excel, import the .csv file into Access, and write it out as .txt before running Easytrieve. Still, it’s a simple step-by-step process. Except…

Except my coworker doesn’t really understand file-handling. Even though I wrote step-by-step procedures, they weren’t clear enough. I just assumed that if I say to open the file and save it to the H: drive, then run it through Access and save it to a folder on the H: drive, then that’s clear enough. But she just didn’t get it. She’d never really noticed the ‘Save to:’ box. Every single thing, every step and every exception, must be written down.

We zip and encrypt our files and email them. Now there’s a new Secure Transfer System we need to use (since last week). Instead of saving them to one folder, we save them to a different folder and with another naming convention before using STS. Simple enough. She was very confused, and I could not understand (no, really; I couldn’t) what the problem was. I was becoming exasperated (I’m a crumby teacher) and she was getting pissed off, and wanted to clarify things with the boss. She eventually figured it out and didn’t need ‘clarification’, but it baffled me that it took so long for her to grasp ‘Save it here using this naming convention, instead of here with this naming convention.’

There are people who learn how to do things one way, often taking notes and following them religiously, and they don’t know the basic stuff that everyone else just assumes everyone knows.

11

There is a different mindset for some people. Me, if I see something on a menu, I’m curious enough to (1) try it out and see what it does and (2) notice how it works compared to other things. Others never will try or observe either.

Some people notice the similarity between things and make a connection or a logical extrapolation. Others are oblivious and treat every computer program as a new task, not noticing that 90% of them use the same file open, file save, edit, preferences, etc. tasks. For those people, we need to write down an exact list of steps, even if the steps are similar to the ones they used last week and the week before that.

I hesitate to call it a lack of intelligence, but it certainly is a mental attitude.

12

My mom won’t use the internet at all. I have a goal to get her online in the next ten years.
NCIS has convinced her that anybody who wants to can take over her finances, identity, and life if she ever touches a computer hooked up to the internet.
And she’s furious to know that there’s an unflattering picture of her on the internet. Her name is not attached to it in anyway, it’s just a photo of group of people, but she’s outraged.

13

Manny peoples don’t understand that puters do what you tell them, not what you want…

Be very careful what you tell them…

14

I just went through this sort of thing with my 71 year old mother last weekend. No matter how I tried to explain it, she just could not wrap her mind around bank card usage. That it can be used both as a debit (PIN) card OR run as a credit card (NON-PIN).

Just when I thought I’d gotten through, she’d say something like “Oh! So instead of coming out of my account, it goes to VISA? But no one can charge on my card because they need my PIN, right?” :smack:

I finally apologized for not being able to explain myself, and agreed that she should just keep paying for gas on her credit card like she has been… :slight_smile:

15

I do know some people who have kept up with technology as they age, but I know many more who haven’t. Perhaps my experiences are uncommon.

But what confuses me is, she knows I have been able to *send *email from my account anywhere in the world (for those who haven’t spotted it - she knows this because, well, you know, I *did *it) but she hasn’t be able to figure out that I can *receive *it…

I’ve moved several times since I gave them their first computer, I’ve sent her email from all around the world and sent responses to her emails from work (“Hey Mom, got your email, but am at work. When I get home I’ll look up that information”) but it hasn’t occurred to her that my emails came from the same address, no matter where I go.

Gala Matrix Fire when Dad was alive he had similar fears, but his love for all things gadget-y made him try it anyway. I used to smile because he was so fascinated with the ability to IM people in Australia - even though he had used a telephone all is life.

sandra_nz if Mom had a mobile that would be a great comparison.

Dusty Rose, that’s a great comparison. She used to work in a bank and has used an ATM card all over. Maybe that will help her see how things aren’t tied to one place.

16

I put it down to lack of curiosty.

More than once have I written some code and then asked the program why it did what I told it to do instead of what I wanted it to do! :stuck_out_tongue:

17

This is because she thinks you’re doing something that she doesn’t know how to do, or that you’re on a special computer that does things her computer can’t. I remember being amazed that I could access my e-mail from any computer.

It takes an old, technologically-challenged person to understand another one. :slight_smile:

18

That is probably true. She knows I write software for a living, but doesn’t really understand what that means (nor did Dad when he was alive.) I have tried to explain the concept, but it doesn’t make sense to her. So she probably thinks I am doing something only an “expert” can do.

19

Exactly. In every office I’ve ever worked in I become the go-to guy for computer software problems. Not because I know any more than anyone else, but because I presume it’s possible to figure out the answer, so I make an actual attempt to figure it out. 90% of computer users, if they don’t already know how it’s done, they throw up there hands and give up.

When in doubt, right-click on something.
–lissener

20

I disagree. I think people are simply afraid of breaking something.

Many people only know enough to get done what they need to get done. They’ve been taught that computers are finicky and cantankerous things. Hell, Mac’s whole advertising campaign is built around the belief that PCs crash regularly and are difficult to use. If you believe that your computer can be so easily broken, you are afraid to try anything new, because what if it breaks it? Someone showed them how to turn on the computer, open program A, and work on and save file D. Obviously, that is the only safe thing to do, everything else is a risky proposition.