To think I might actually die trying to sort out DM's iPhone?

[TreacherousPissFlap]

DM has a new phone, she's very pleased with it.
The very nice man in the shop told her all her settings would "follow her over" to her new phone. Her settings have not followed her over
It now appears that DM has no less than three different FB accounts. I assumed she was changing profile pictures, turns out she was just logged into different accounts of the same name. This also explains her indignation that people have not replied to her messages.
She does not know her AppleID and appears to have locked it to DSDads fingerprint- sadly he died two years ago so is not really being much help.
Any requests for passwords are met with blank looks, as if it's an utterly outlandish thing to request.

I'm not going topless in public either! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

And DM set screen time limits to 1 minute per app per day. Set a passcode she didn’t know (I’m certain she sat on it to set it in the first place) and couldn’t use anything for about 6 weeks.

I don’t know how she did it and couldn’t fix it didn’t stop her calling every day to ask me to

God knows who fixed it in the end, but she hasn’t managed to repeat that!

Love this

My mum got an Apple Watch and the first few weeks involved many, many texts with random letters or emojis sent by accident. Even now she won’t actually use it to answer, she’ll hang up on me when it rings then call on the phone

My friend who is a little older but terrible with tech still uses bloody txt spk. It takes forever to get thru her msgs - I’m sure she’d have to actively battle autocorrect to do this?!

My father only turns his mobile on when he's home. Sigh.

I used to volunteer as a computer buddy in a library, supporting older people to access basic computer training. We had a lovely time, I met some truly wonderful, interesting, kind people.They would work through the online training and I would sit there and answer questions, maximising windows that had been accidentally minimised etc. Sometime they would bring in a phone, tablet or laptop and ask me to explain it to them.

With hindsight, I doubt very much if any of them went on to be effective tech users. With quite a few of them, we just agreed to settle for "doesn't look completely blank when the latest Facebook scandal is being discussed on the news" in the hope it would stop their DCs nagging them.

I'm loving this & have many stories to add 😂

When I went travelling over 20 years ago, dm got a mobile so she could text me. My poor db was demented showing her over & over again how to text - he says lab rats learned quicker 😂

For years she could only reply to a text, couldn't start a new one so she had to keep one from everyone

My df has an ancient iPad & FaceTimes me. A few months ago he FaceTimed & there was no sound. Spent about 2 minutes trying to wave at him & make him understand there was no sound. Then he thought shouting would help & then speaking really slowly so I could lip read 🙄

It took a week before a friend of a friends young son (in his thirties lol) sorted it by switching it off & on again.

The parents also used to turn the internet off at night !

My dm's daily routine is to check Facebook & RIP.ie to see who's died 😂

My aunt gave us all a heart attach phoning from my granny's phone several months after she'd passed away. Apparently she didn't want the credit being wasted

My Nana had a dreadful phone so my mum replaced her iPhone with a new one and gave her the old one. Somehow she managed to link both her old phone and her phone so when my Aunt went through the phone and saw people in the contacts she didn't recognise she deleted them
All.. my mum is a vicar and lost all her contacts 😂 no idea how it happened!

Then after that my mum went on holiday and my Nana went out and bought the same phone she had previously and still has no idea how to use it!

@Leah2005 Why do you need a password to uninstall Facebook? I'm presuming you mean the app? Just long press then delete?

In my family, all technical issues relating to my Mum’s phone/iPad etc get directed to my younger sister who we pretend is the technically competent and who has the most patience of all of us!

Hello friends. What a lovely support group for relatives this is!

MIL has now been banned by Facebook for continually opening new accounts for herself in lieu of bothering to remember her password.

She has now moved on to Alexa, after Margaret in Sainsbury’s told her it would change her life. An Echo duly arrived and she asked muggins me to set Alexa up for her.

Turned out she doesn’t have an Amazon account and had asked SIL to order the Echo for her. (Thanks SIL).

After having eventually created her an account and finally getting Alexa online, she began:

‘Hello Alexa, could you make my living room glow pink and play the BeeGees please?’

I then explained that she needed special lightbulbs and a music subscription service for these features.

‘Oh. Well that’s not much use then is it?’

Fortunately, she discovered she can insult Alexa for free. So now she does that. Which gives the rest of us a break.

Just thought of another one and to this day I don't know how the hell she did it as she can only just about manage a txt.........
When I set up mums phone I put photos of people in the contacts, she has only a few contacts so it wasn't difficult.
Ooh that's nice she said, if your brother phones his face comes up on the screen etc. All good!
Except one day she said "when you rang me, auntie Ethels photo came up"
Somehow she had changed the contact photos for every one so they wernt connected to the right people!!
I had Aunt Ethel, Dbro had me, My DD had Burt.
How the hell???? to this day I can't fathom how she did it
Apparently the phone did it to test her🙈

This thread is wonderful!
I live in a different city from my mother, she visits every three or four months and then will come the inevitable question about the phone. Usually about losing photos or something. She also asks me questions about the technology for a task she has to do at church.
I wouldn't mind but I have several siblings in the same city as her and who she sees frequently including one who's whole job is to mend computers and fix issues for clients and she sees that one several times a week. She also has computer guys at church who actually know the software she is asking me about. I've have never seen it!

Oh God this is my MIL. The phrase "Do you want to come over for dinner?" is now actual code for "you are going to spend Sunday afternoon fixing my laptop yet again and guessing my latest password". I feel irrationally annoyed at the way she violently jabs at her phone when texting too. I use the same technique trying to stop dh from snoring.

Oh yes, the tv! Dm has two, each different. She can never get the one she's watching to do what she wants. She can get different channels on each, catch up tv is different on each, they need her BBCiplayer ID, or her BT password or, or, or...

Argh. She's had the neighbour out to look at it, the neighbour's wife, the BT internet man (at least twice), DH, DS1&2, DN.....

Yes, it seems Guess my Password is a favourite family entertainment.

This is probably me and definitely DH. DD has pointed out that she and her siblings are getting to an age where even they are losing track of current technology. We're pinning our hopes on DS2 giving us grandchildren.

Well at least this is natural! My elderly mother is a complete tech whizz. I discovered recently that she has multiple different email addresses with different aliases for various chat forums. Some in different languages. Her printer, desktop and mobile are synced. It's really not natural... I suspect she may be a spy. And may be spying on me right now with her techno tactics.
Mind you, when she lost her phone she couldn't remember the account password to lock it so she made me phone up and pretend she was a doddery old lady so they would sort it out for her :)

Remembered one.

Dad was in the end a whizz and loved his computer mainly for sharing terrible jokes

But he had the IT guy at work practically sitting with him all week at times.

A conversation went like this

Ddad (very frustrated) "but what IS the internet? Why would you want to use it?"

Me: well, you can email or look stuff up

Ddad (even more frustrated) "but who OWNS it?"

Me: "ummmm"

Ddad "IT doesn't matter... I don't want to know anyway!!!"

My dad takes his phone into the nearest phone shop when he gets stuck. Not the place he bought it from, just whichever one he's passing. And he hasn't got a particularly new phone, so they're all googling how to do whatever hes asking about.

Last time I went round he wanted me to download iTunes onto his Samsung phone because his mate has it. Apparently I just need to go to the Apple website. I was stuck in a terminal loop of 'well you cant' and 'but Dave said you just go on the website'.

He's recently asked me to go round and show him how to email photos to Facebook (yep, no idea).

Sounds just like my MIL.

I keep messaging my SIL to tell her I think her mum's FB has been hacked as I keep getting new friend requests from new accounts for her. SIL just sighs and says she's forgotten all her log in details so has set up another new account!

My mum asks me to do stuff. Then sends me her password to us
It’s either 4 or1. You know

Umm. No.

My dm and her sisters and SiL’s all decided to join Facebook. Great. Not through the app because they think that’s ridiculous and need to save the memory. All right.
So now all of us need to be on a constant state of alert to raise the alarm when the like a Britain first post. I started off really gently explaining that while they’re intentions were good and yes pensioners should be paid like footballers you have to look at who’s posting. After a couple of years there are younger less tactful cousins who just messed the family what’s app saying “aunty Brenda your being racist again”. Then aunty Brenda phones her contacts to apologise. Which is fine cause it’s only the original sisters and their offspring.

I always have to help my DM with her iPad and iPhone. She can’t text, we’ve all been trying to show her for years, but it just doesn’t work.

She has a friend, who ‘helpfully’ sets up or changes passwords for her. She writes these passwords down on a scrap of paper, puts it in her bag, with all the other scraps of paper, and loses it. She then gets very cross with me, because I don’t know the password, and can’t log her in.

Oh god.
My DF can’t press a button on his iPhone. Incapable. Presses then kind of smears it sideways so it does about six things at once. He then doesn’t know what those six things are. Cue hysterical phone calls from DM because she thinks he’s somehow sold their souls to the devil by accidentally agreeing something.

‘Something’ on the Galaxy tab was beeping intermittently for weeks. DM believed alternatively that ‘some kind of alarm in the house was running out of battery’ ‘that the whole thing was a conspiracy to drive her mad’ that my DF had ‘pressed something’ and so on. I think it was a calendar alert in the end, but who knows.

She sa very clever woman who downright refuses to ‘understand’ how targeted adverts work and thinks it’s some kind of devils work that Facebook shows her an ad for slippers that she just searched for on google.

My DB suggested we buy her an Amazon Alexa device - I think that would finish her off.

The absolute worst was the digital watch/ medication reminder alarm my DF bought instead of a proper smart watch (on the basis that he was pretty scared of a smart watch) it took me (a sometime web coder) an hour of pressing tiny tiny buttons on a tiny tiny screen to set up the required four alarms. The next week he lost the phone (inside his dressing gown) for two months

I get the following regularly from DM:

'I've lost gmail again'. She hasnt, she's just clicked on the settings tab instead of the inbox and can't work out why the screen looks different every time she goes in.

'I'm not getting any emails through'. She is, she's just got herself stuck in the sent items box.

'Jean in Basingstoke hasn't got my text it's not working.'
It is working, it's just you didn't press send....it's sat there waiting.

And the best one, 'Your father can't phone me it's broken.'
She'd blocked him!