Mothers Interact Weirdly With Technology

Trying to teach my mother to use gadgets in a meaningful and productive way is seriously frustrating.  For comparison, imagine struggling to instruct a puppy in the use of a piano.   They can push buttons and cause a ruckus, but neither has any idea what is happening or how to control the horrible noises that are happening to them.

Part of this is down to the secret hope I’m sure she always harbored that electronics stuff would eventually die a sociable and timely death at the hands of good sense and economics sometime around 1992, and that kids everywhere would realize that video games are actually tremendously boring and doing stuff like climbing trees and throwing rocks is way more fun.   The same TV from 1986 would suffice forever because the technology would never move forward.  She would keep it going by forever buying new parts to fix broken ones and hovering anxiously while Dad fixed it.  (Just for the record, I also wish this were the case, but I’m willing to face reality.)  And the concept of mobile phones would stop at the level where no one would ever carry such ridiculous devices around or use them for anything but an emergency, when you still had to plug a Nokia the size of a book into your car cigarette lighter, and when car cigarette lighters were still used to facilitate smoking. 

Anything new that comes out, she looks on with suspicion and disbelief that it will last longer than a couple of months.   On the plus side, this means we didn’t fall into the pointless laser disc craze in the mid-90’s.  On the minus side, it also means that by the time she gets around to learning how to use a new gadget because it’s demonstrated some degree of longevity, it’s already obsolete and no one uses it anymore.

When she really needs to, my mum will knuckle down and learn to use what she thinks is required.  She can use a desktop computer well enough to search the web, order Netflix, send me emails longer than one line, and look up obscure medical conditions to ask if I’ve made sure I don’t have them.  She also has better karma with printers than I do, but that’s not saying much.   

So this Christmas, when she complained about being bored while jogging, I bought her a used iPod nano to keep her going.   I thought this was something basic and simple that she would be able to handle reasonably well.   Since then, we have had the following exchange:

Also, she’s never actually learned to switch off her new Nano.  Instead she just plugs it in and wait till I come visit and switch it off for her.

But it’s with laptops where she struggles the most.  At first I thought she was stymied by the concept of lids.  One interaction with a closed laptop led to a series of unfortunate struggling including but not limited to turning it off, restarting it, formatting everything on it and somehow booting it into DOS, shutting down the wireless router, and somehow downloading more porn than Hugh Hefner has ever seen, all without ever figuring out how to actually open the lid.  So one time when we used my laptop to follow a cake recipe on the internet, I was careful to make sure I never closed the lid near her. 

That’s when I realized it wasn’t the lid concept so much as the sleep concept that was bothering her.  At one point, my laptop went to sleep when I paused to take a phone call and left the room for awhile.  When I came back, Mum was trying every possible key combination to reawaken it, including pressing the Dell logo.  She forgot about the mousepad.

At this point she reached critical mass and short-circuited.  Just as I walked through the door, she started jumping up and down, flashing her belly button at it, and blowing raspberries, as if a striptease and a bit of sprayed saliva were obviously what all computers are just waiting for.