21 Times Seniors Took on Tech, Only to Fail Adorably

Our grandparents, parents, and assorted aunts and uncles have a lot to teach us, and immense patience to go with it. But what happens when they become the students, and it is up to us to teach them the trials and travails of technology? Absolute hilarity. Here are some anecdotes to prove that technology and the older generation have a lot to learn about each other.

“My dad doesn’t know how to turn off the front camera heart feature on his phone, and he tried to send me a pic of his new stove.”

• When my grandma got Facebook, she would look up my name and check other people’s profile with the same name as m,e then ask me who all these people were in my pictures. © Unknown author / Reddit

• My uncle has a laptop, iPhone, and tablet. Each device has a different Facebook account saved on it because he had to make new ones since he could never remember his password.
  © hippokuda / Reddit

• I worked in IT. I had an older woman who called me up, saying her monitor was broken. I spent 20 mins trying to troubleshoot what was wrong with it, only to find out she never tried turning it on. I guess it was just as much my fault for not checking that also...
  Another call, same woman... she “couldn’t type into her spreadsheets” I go up to her desk and knowing the level of care I need to show at this point I check to make sure her keyboard didn’t get unplugged, open up Excel type gibberish into a few cells and all is well. She insists it wasn’t working, I ask her what she was typing, she says numbers. She had turned NumLock off, and that is why she “couldn’t type into her spreadsheet.” © RestlessBeef / Reddit

“Today, my Nana showed me some of her favorite websites!”

• We have touchscreen monitors at work for ordering food. I had a woman get in line, and she stood there for maybe 5 minutes before I had time to help her. She was trying to get the screen to activate, because it was on the home screen, but she was pressing one of the Velcro pieces on the side, thinking it was a button. © Pm_Me_Gifs_For_Sauce / Reddit

• My grandma called me anytime something was slightly different about her PC. Antivirus shows a message about upgrading? I get a call. Her favorite news website changed its layout? Call. Desktop symbols are slightly differently arranged? Call. She also believed that strong winds cause bad connections because it “blows the internet away.” © prenobertis / Reddit

• Back in the 80s, I was rolling out the first computers the company had seen. One woman who was older and used to using a Dictaphone that had a pedal on the floor to slow down or speed up the audio during transcription. Well, I set up the PC and got a call later on saying she was having trouble. get there, and she has the mouse on the floor and is trying to move it back and forth.
  Old habits die hard, but we had a good laugh when I showed her how to use it properly.
  © Unknown author / Reddit

“My Nana asked me to fix her phone because the outside clock is always showing the wrong time.”

• My mom said she deleted the internet and was worried she would be in trouble. She deleted the browser icon from her dock. © PersephoneIsNotHome / Reddit

• My grandma has a folder of family photos on her computer. She asked me to change all the photos to small thumbnails because she thought she could fit more photos in the folder that way.
  © donkeypunchfractal / Reddit

• I got an email from my Grandpa: Hello Jerry! I wanted to tell you that I’m looking forward to Christmas and seeing you and your parents. I hope you’re eager to see your grandpa, too? I’ve found this new email called read it. I think you youngsters would call it “awesome” nowadays. As always, I’ll give you 10 dollars for Christmas. I want to make sure you’re spending this kind of money wisely. Don’t buy a motorcycle or something! © Unknown author / Reddit

“Custom grandma TV remote.”

• My brother had to call an engineer out to take a look at our mother’s boiler because she couldn’t get the heating to come on. For the price of £65 the engineer kindly showed my mother how to use the remote for it, which has been sitting in a drawer since the boiler got installed several months back. © Unknown author / Reddit

• My dad spent hours yelling at the keyboard before he finally learned how to type, and he still does it in all caps. It was kind of hilarious, though. “Dang it, where’s the M key?! I swear I just saw it, but now it’s turned around and disappeared on me!!!!”
  Every so often, he’d call me into the room to find the letter he was looking for, and then he’d get mad at me for finding it so easily. “What?! I swear it wasn’t there a minute ago! I just looked!! Have you been moving the keys around when I’m not looking??” © NeedsMoreTuba / Reddit

• I worked at a call center doing tech support and customer assistance for a cell phone service provider that caters to the elderly. So many calls with simple things like people saying that their phone was broken. I had them hold the “End” or power button, depending on the model, and it would turn on; they thought I was a miracle worker.
  My favorite call was a woman that had recently gotten her first smartphone and had been using it for a few days. She said that the time never changed on her screen, and it was always displayed... she had left the plastic on the screen. Took about 10 minutes, but I figured it out and had her remove it. © traumaqueen1128 / Reddit

My 90-year-old grandma from Japan, showing us how she zooms in with an iPhone.

• The grandsons got my mother-in-law a new computer and set her up with some simple programs, including internet. She got very angry because she said it was used and the previous owner’s name kept popping up. My daughter and I stopped by to see what she was talking about, and she triumphantly showed us the name of the previous user.
  “There he is! Logan!”
  What had popped up was “Login.” We told her we’d get the boys right on it. © theoriginalalexa / Reddit

• In the early 2000s, I worked at a library. One of our regulars was an elderly woman whose kids lived abroad. When I told her she could email them, and they’d get it instantly, her face lit up. The next morning, she returned, completely serious, and asked me, “Where do I get the stamps for the email?” I was hard-pressed not to laugh, as I explained what email was, and then helped her send an email to her son and daughter.
  When their reply came, she looked at me with stars in her eyes, like I had performed a magic trick.

• After weeks of gentle nudging, I finally talked my elderly uncle into getting a computer. We picked
  one out together, and I set it up. He was very excited. The next morning, he called. “The keyboard’s broken,” he snapped. So I headed over to check, speechless when I saw all the keys on the keyboard arranged in alphabetic order.
  My uncle took thought the QWERTY keyboard was incorrect and “fixed it,” and then was surprised that a still typed q, b still typed w, and so on and so forth. We had to get a new keyboard and this time, I took care to explain everything that I could think of. I still kept getting called over to fix this and that for the next few months, not that I minded.

“My dad said, Look, those TV models are pirates.”

Clearly, sometimes technology and the elderly mix just as well, as does oil and water. For more such hilarious anecdotes, here is an article about nannies whose days went from normal to haywire in the split of a second.