Many, many years ago, I officially resigned as my parents' tech support. I don't mind doing tech support per se, but I got so fed up with them ignoring my advice and then expecting me to deal with the consequences of ignoring my advice, I kind of snapped. It worked to a small extent - they now listen to me about 10% of the time and say "please" and "thank you" when the other 90% goes wrong.
Four hours this evening was spent on trying to locate my dad's lost iPhone, the day before they go overseas for a month. Two hours was travel, two hours was trying various stuff on their computer, and on mine when theirs didn't work properly. I couldn't locate the phone online, but since I hadn't set up the iPhone-finding-stuff on Dad's iPhone (which I had set up, of course, because it was my old phone), I probably only have myself to blame. I am not to blame for the fact that it took more than an hour to track down all the passwords to all their accounts and unravel the thread of accounts back to their iCloud account in order to finally log in and verify that nope, iCloud did not know anything about the whereabouts of any iPhone.
So then I said to my parents, "how about I set up a thing for you where all your passwords are saved in one place and you just need to remember one master password to unlock it, instead of your current strategy of using the same few passwords for everything and writing them down on scraps of paper that float around your house so that they are both completely insecure and completely unfindable in a crisis." And they're like, "Nooo, that sounds horrid. We don't want anything like that and will refuse to use it."
On the upside, I'm feeling incredibly motivated to have kids of my own, so that they can look after all my technology when I get old. I feel entitled.
Four hours this evening was spent on trying to locate my dad's lost iPhone, the day before they go overseas for a month. Two hours was travel, two hours was trying various stuff on their computer, and on mine when theirs didn't work properly. I couldn't locate the phone online, but since I hadn't set up the iPhone-finding-stuff on Dad's iPhone (which I had set up, of course, because it was my old phone), I probably only have myself to blame. I am not to blame for the fact that it took more than an hour to track down all the passwords to all their accounts and unravel the thread of accounts back to their iCloud account in order to finally log in and verify that nope, iCloud did not know anything about the whereabouts of any iPhone.
So then I said to my parents, "how about I set up a thing for you where all your passwords are saved in one place and you just need to remember one master password to unlock it, instead of your current strategy of using the same few passwords for everything and writing them down on scraps of paper that float around your house so that they are both completely insecure and completely unfindable in a crisis." And they're like, "Nooo, that sounds horrid. We don't want anything like that and will refuse to use it."
On the upside, I'm feeling incredibly motivated to have kids of my own, so that they can look after all my technology when I get old. I feel entitled.
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth ( comments).