I had to go to my mother’s house to help her because her phone was loud and she couldn’t figure out how to make it stop. She’d pushed the speakerphone button.
But even after her stroke (when she was 72) she was able to send and receive e-mail, play games on Pogo and buy on e-bay.
StG
My boss called me for the payroll spreadsheet. I was off work that day. I told him it was on the desktop I put it there so it would be easy to find. He called me back furious that I was mucking around with him - giving me a list of all the things that were on the desktop, you know, pens, paperclips, coffe mug - but no goddam spreadsheet. :smack: He’s in his thirties. 
For a minute I was thinking - what would a coffee cup icon be for. I think he thought I’d made up some alternative term for a computer screen … desktop.
My mom didn’t quite get the concept of how cellphones worked at first. She kind of thought they were something more like regular cordless phones and/or walkie-talkies. She was amazed when my uncle’s phone still worked, several hundred miles form home.
But once my sister explained how it worked, she got it right away. And my sister didn’t need to go into detail either, she just said something like “the phone signals go through satellites”.
She does occasionally ask me if her email is only on her computer or if it’s on the internet, but that’s because she tends to forget which applications store things on the hard drive, and which are virtual.
Technically, this isn’t a case of failure to understand, but it’s a funny mistake almost in keeping with the thread.
Mom made a call recently, then hopped in her car and drove off. That’s funny, she said, why did I get cut off so abruptly?
Then she looked at the phone–she’d taken her house phone with her, rather than the cell phone.
We tease her about that quite a bit–though like I say, it was a brain fart or a senior moment, not a failure to think things through.
My crazy MIL once yelled at me for sending an email to the UK because I should have known it was the middle of the night there. She worked out the time difference and wanted me to resend the email when there would be some-one there to get it…
To continue with cell phones. My mom has one and has no problems with it. A few years ago we moved our land line to a cell and she knew all about it… we kept the same number and refer to it as the “home phone” since it is for general calls to the house. We were going on vacation and she was concerned to get our contact number. I told her to just call the home phone and we would get it. Our youngest didn’t have his own phone at the time so we thought he would keep it so we could get hold of him on our trip if we got seperated. I told my mom that the youngest would probably answer though but they could still call that. She paused and asked “isn’t he too young to stay alone?”… we said he won’t be alone, he’ll be with us… “then how can he answer at home?”… he won’t be at home, he’ll be with us… “then how can he answer the home phone?” This went on for a while and even telling her again that the home phone is a cell she didn’t get it. We called her from it mid week and the first thing she asked is “why did you cut your trip short?”
I live across the street from a Senior Center where I participate in activities.
I know several Seniors who ‘do not understand’ as an excuse not to be bothered.
Back when my folks first got on the internet and set up an e-mail account, I asked my dad if he wanted to check his e-mail.
He said he couldn’t, because the computer he’d set it up on wasn’t working.
Now, of course, he sends out e-mails WITH PHOTOS ATTACHED nearly twice a week of their adventures.
The man’s still on dial-up though.
Fair enough. Think if all she wanted to do was write a letter:
Turn on computer, log in, open Word, type, cut/paste as required, insert image, browse to find image file, save, print set-up to choose print options, print.
Or… grab a pen and a piece of paper. Ta-dah! Done!
True, sometimes the stubby pencil method is really the most efficient.
My mom was in her 70’s when she got her first computer in the early 90’s. She was the family geneologist and the computer software was a trip for her. I was soooo proud of her!
The people in your office are precisely what keeps me employed doing tech support.
THEM: So I don’t know how to get the money back I should have charged
ME: What happened when you posted the bill to debit their account
THEM: Oh. I didn’t want to mess anything up.
ME: OK.
Even better are the “I’ve designed and implemented all kinds of software” folks. Oh really. Well then I would expect you would know that the reason you can’t open pdf files is because you don’t have a pdf reader and that you’d be able to give me the version of Windows/IE you are running without step by step instructions.
Back to the OP. My mom is in her mid 60’s and she was a little afraid of being online and had the same worries about email, namely she’d have to be home to get her email. When I explained that her email probably lives on a server in Palo Alto somewhere and her computer was just a “tube” to get access to it she seemed to get it.
That is sweet. We have that posted on our wall at work.
After all the email training, I still get notes stuck to my door.
I wonder if we will have performed a giant social/psych experiment in the next 40 years. Do older people just have trouble with new things in general the way it seems, or is it more rather the case that even my MIT-grad father has trouble with his computer that I’ve never heard of before. Just a couple of years ago, after having a computer and email for about 6 years, he couldn’t log into my email because he kept putting spaces in my name while logging in.
Even his generation mostly dealt with things that could be controlled through kind of just staring at it. The knob turned the pointer, and you got a different radio station. You pushed one pedal, and the car moved. Now we expect people to use machines much more complicated, with invisible parts and commands. So is it an aging brain thing, or is it a true generation/brain-training gap?
I think it’s a “how the Hell does this thing work” thing, but I’m surprised an MIT graduate can’t figure it out.
I used to think it was because I used to dream in 5206 machine language, but younger folks who only know Windows haven’t done that. 
Okay, here’s my favorite story. A year after a neighbor got a computer, I was called to assist when her printer had a problem. She frequently wrote poems for the local paper, so I asked her to open one of her files and print it out.
“File?” She starts typing a poem from a printout.
“No, just open one of your old files.”
“Do what?”
Turns out she printed out each poem, then when she exited the program, it said “Save…” and she didn’t know what that meant, so she turned off the computer. In a year she hadn’t saved any files. She faxed the printed poem to the newspaper, who re-typed it for publication.
:smack:
Not once did it occur to her that her poem could be emailed, stored, and retrieved, nor did she ask for help about the incomprehensible file save dialog, which she thought was some kind of error message.
But she wrote good poems.