CAN YOU UNDERSTAND ME WELL LIKE THIS?!
the drama called parents and technology
Parents and technology, it’s a difficult combination. And actually, we can’t really blame those poor souls either, because try to figure out how a ‘mobile phone’ or ‘cell phone’ or ‘06 number’ works when you’re 40e while we grow up with it from a young age. The result is that we often have to endure hours of explanation sessions and after purchasing ‘a device’ we get called significantly more often than normal by desperate fathers and mothers because THAT THING JUST DOESN'T WORK ANYMORE.
When I call my dad this morning to ask if he wants to give his first performance on Amayzine, I get a resounding yes. “Okay great dad, could you take a picture of yourself and your iPhone?” “But, but, how?” “Well, with your camera for example?” [silence.] “Oh right. Yeah. So I take a picture first and then the camera goes into the computer and then I can send it. Yes.” “Exactly. You have all day so no worries.” And even Jet’s mother sometimes struggles with the phenomenon of selfies because the selfies that pop up on Jet’s phone are always just her mother’s forehead. Always. It’s tricky.
If they don’t know how something works, the thing is always immediately broken. It’s never their fault, always the device’s. Or yours, because especially you break it. My dad also always gets completely flustered when I check my Facebook on his computer and then don’t log back in, “who are all these people? Why do I see all these photos of people I don’t know?!” The poor soul didn’t realize he had been scrolling through my feed for days.
Someone. It doesn’t matter who. Even if it’s the neighbor, the waiter, the cat, or for all I care the houseplant, it’s always someone else who has touched it and therefore “NOTHING WORKS ANYMORE.”
Especially when you still live at home, you often get this thrown at you.
Sometimes something is actually broken. And when you say that, you immediately get the order to fix it “because you’re young and you understand that.”
But we can’t do everything either, and that often leads to total short-circuiting in the parent brain. We were recently on vacation in Italy when it turned out that his iPod could no longer charge. Of course, I had to fix it, but hello, how the heck do you do that? The indignation was quickly followed by intense disappointment and of course, soon came “WHO BROKE IT THEN.”
Imagine you do know a solution and you try to explain it, then with every question you ask The Parent, you get the answer “I don’t know.” A capital mistake is to explain something over the phone. You then get situations like this:
“Dad, do you see this and that icon in the top right of your screen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay… And is your SIM card in properly?”
“My SIM card? Can it come out? Where is it? I don’t know.”
“Just turn it on and off and call me back.”
“On? Off? I don’t know how to do that.”
“That button at the top of your phone, do you see it?”
“I don’t know.”
When a Parent has purchased a new device, you have to be very selective about when he or she calls you. The chance is high that you are needed to fix things. By the way, I must mention that my dad is reasonably self-sufficient in that regard because as you can see in the photo above, he bought a super handy manual to tame his iPhone.
Try explaining to your dad that if you post something on Facebook from your own living room, in theory, the whole world can see it. I remember chat conversations and then he suddenly called me ‘because someone might be reading along.“
A classic, and my dad has since moved past this phase, but calling a grandma or grandpa always starts with a loud CAN YOU UNDERSTAND ME WELL LIKE THIS?!
