Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
If you were adapt at cars and someone else wasn't and needed help, would you get annoyed as well? Well you're 35yrs old, you should have known it was the alternator, not the battery.
Yep, can't help but wonder to whom the OP turns when he has a car or plumbing problem.
That said, I'm a 66 yo female who is the go-to person when my spouse or sons have problems with their cellphones, tablets, streaming devices, etc. It gets a little old (Android is a Moderator cut: edit pain) but it's nice to be needed. DH doesn't complain about checking the air-pressure in my tires or tightening the seal around the toilet so why should I gripe when he can't figure out why his iPhone doesn't ring or his audiobook doesn't download?
Last edited by Miss Blue; 12-30-2014 at 09:51 AM..
Reason: changed the filtered word
That is what bugs me. They are smarter than I am. Doctors, PhDs, etc. I'm no genius, but I don't having any problem fiddling with buttons until it works, or reading the manual.
uh-huh. Next time you have a faucet blow-out or hot water tank leak or a flat tire on an interstate, tell me how that works for you.
Me, too. Just returned my first Smart phone because it was literally neurologically impossible to use. Not all of us can perceive info the same way. Just not a tech-savvy person. but my friends and family certainly don't beat me up over it.
This is more disturbing, and 23 year olds who have to print because they can't write in cursive or think WW2 took place in 1967 when the US attacked Hawaii.
FABULOUS POST!!!!!!! I am a 57-yr-old semi-retired English teacher who is the least tech-savvy person in the world. My students can do anything on a computer or smart phone. They also have NO clue as to current events or world history and can barely read two pages of Dickens, Fitzgerald or Wordsworth without screaming about how "hard" it is to understand.
Location: Huntersville/Charlotte, NC and Washington, DC
26,700 posts, read 41,794,567 times
Reputation: 41397
The best part of living 700 miles away from my mother, I no longer have to be her unpaid help desk associate. I help functionally illiterates for a living. Think I'm gonna do that off the clock for free you are crazy.
My mother is 81 and is still mystified by the PowerBook I bought her. So I get a call from her once a week asking how to do something that, to most people, is second nature. No problem.
Meanwhile, I have a colleague who is my age who is a complete ditz. She never backs up, loses e-mails, loses files, you name it. I mean, just last week, she e-mailed me looking for a file that I had sent her five different times in the past year. So for a long time, she was calling me to be her phone support. I finally stopped answering her calls for help.
DH and I are both IT professionals in our 40s, what surprises me is not that old people are technically illiterate, it is the young people. I am daily confronted with 20yo who cannot manage their devices. I thought that everyone after the IT boom generation would be technically savvy because tech is so pervasive. I was wrong. I think that as objects became more monolithic and "smart" (android aside) people just stopped bothering to learn since it works 90% of the time. Auto-switching TV inputs, auto app updates, windows updates, heck even fridges that ping servers to update firmware. Since we often choose to have so little input in the nitty gritty of an object's set up it is an inscrutable morass when things go wrong.
OTOH I have an older relation that is so computer-impaired that it has become obvious to me that he suffers from a disability that he has been able to mask his entire adult life. It explains so much about his educational and vocational history.
uh-huh. Next time you have a faucet blow-out or hot water tank leak or a flat tire on an interstate, tell me how that works for you.
Er, I do that stuff all the time. How hard is it to change a tire? I was on the shop / engineering track in high school. I rebuilt a motorcycle this past summer and remodeled my parents kitchen. I redid the kitchen in a condo in AZ the winter before that. The weird thing is my dad can do all that stuff too (and perform surgery) but he can't figure out how to change the input on his TV, even after I've shown him how to do it eleven times.
Er, I do that stuff all the time. How hard is it to change a tire? I was on the shop / engineering track in high school. I rebuilt a motorcycle this past summer and remodeled my parents kitchen. I redid the kitchen in a condo in AZ the winter before that. The weird thing is my dad can do all that stuff too (and perform surgery) but he can't figure out how to change the input on his TV, even after I've shown him how to do it eleven times.
LOL, you just described my parents. My dad can fix a car, rewire a house, build furniture, etc., but ask him to set up a Roku and you can just forget it.
My poor husband is everyone's tech support. I can do most of it, but people tend to ask him because he is a software engineer, I guess. I don't know if it bothers him but it has to get a little old. In the 8 years I've gone to visit his parents with him he has never spent less than 2 hours working on their computer problems. It really takes away a huge time from any actual visiting and I hate that I get left alone with his mother for that long every time. But, I guess that's just how it goes.
Quote:
My daughter, at 13, had a classmate who did not know how to tell time by an analog clock. No one had ever taught her.
I have a 32 year old co-worker who couldn't read her own analog watch. Seriously. I asked her what time it was at a party last week and she said, "oh, I can't read this thing, I only wear it because it looks nice." I was shocked.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I am a 57-yr-old semi-retired English teacher who is the least tech-savvy person in the world. My students can do anything on a computer or smart phone. They also have NO clue as to current events or world history and can barely read two pages of Dickens, Fitzgerald or Wordsworth without screaming about how "hard" it is to understand. 
crazy.
