5 Things old people do that you don’t understand

1- My Grandfather could not figure out how to get into his email. Finally he asks my father to help him and when they got to the password screen, my father asked for the password.

“it’s just a series of dots but it never works”

as cute as it was, Geek Squad had been there 3 times and instead of just telling him that his password isn’t a series of dots, they let him rack up a bunch of decent sized bills for their “work”.

2- My grandma was an author and was never able to grasp that just because she can’t see her novel on the computer screen, doesn’t mean it’s gone. She’d call me to come downstairs, looking like she was about to cry because she’d accidentally minimized Word and thought her entire novel was gone, even if she’d only written one page that day and the other 200 pages had been saved and backed up in multiple places. Every single time we saved her work and closed Word, we had to reopen it to prove it would still be there when she came back for it. And she still seemed skeptical. Every. Time.

3- Those words are written in small print. Older folks need reading glasses to read even regular size print.

In addition older generations were used to mechanical devices that followed a standard layout. If you can use one can opener then you can use all of them. “A spade is a spade” as the saying goes. Remotes change which side is volume and which is channel up/down. They put the buttons that do the few functions older folks need in different places. If you press the wrong button then even the buttons you know do different stuff i.e. change source/input makes a mess of everything if you don’t know how to choose the correct source again.

If there was a gold standard for remotes that followed a fixed configuration then your Grandma would learn and remember the basics, I suspect.

If you teach her overarching concepts like how the TV can take in different inputs from different sources and that these sources roughly correspond with the places you can stick cables into the back of the TV and that she needs to be sure the TV is “talking” or “listening” to the Cable Box or the DVD player or the rooftop Ariel THEN she might start to understand how to figure out a new and unexpected configuration of buttons or unexpected loss of picture.

4- My grandpa, the only one of six grandparents that I actually liked, sent my family a tin of homemade fudge every year for Christmas. When I moved out, he always made sure I got my fudge too. He died on New Year’s Eve 2017, of heart failure. This Christmas the lack of fudge didnt even register until I ragequit my family’s Christmas and went to my best friend’s house. Her mom offered me a piece of fudge from a metal tin just like the one’s my grandpa used, and I just about came apart at the seams. Had to excuse myself and go smoke an emergency cigarette. Probably the first time in over a year that I’d felt a serious urge to drink. I miss the shot out of my Boppi, and I doubt I’ll consume another piece of fudge for the rest of my life.

5- I no longer have any grandparents and realized I miss my grandmas bananabread… Remembering how perfect she made over-hard eggs. Perfectly tan, fluffy pancakes that don’t absorb syrup like a sponge in spite of this. Only person in the world who made Biscuits and Gravy I liked.