Thread: Parents and computers.

Went for a nice drive down to Sydney today, show off the new baby have a bit of lunch with one lot and dinner with the other. At my Dad's the online backup wouldn't work because someone had forgotten to open up some ports.

And a corrupted print file that wouldn't stop spewing pages out of the printer.

So that was lunch.

And at my Mum's, printer was unplugged.

And the modem was toast. Netcomm NB1300+4, six years old, must be the oldest still running. My Mum said, 'It won't connect to the internet.' I didn't even bother fiddling, up the street Netgear DG834v from the cheapest place in town.

So that was dinner.

And in between, a tank of diesel, two 9Kg gas bottles filled, because it costs half as much in Leichhardt as it does in the mountains, and the final bits of the network wiring for the house.

Tuesday is a day of rest.

This time was pretty good, at least the problems were odd enough to be pretty much impossible for them to solve without assistance.

What is maddening is the sudden idiocy that strikes them the moment I try to solve a problem over the phone.

'Now press the Start button and go into the Control Panel.'

'Where's the Start button?'

Or my mother in law, who flies into fits of keyboard-mashing rage at a keyboard that works for everyone except her, and somehow can't plug in the replacement. Only days later she is conveniently expert at instructing a less computer literate friend over the phone on how to install a usb scanner and scan documents for her.