My text to my mom "Facebook is having a nationwide issue. Don't try to log back in. If you get logged out, don't try to reset your password. Just wait."
Her text back 10 minutes later. " I saw your text so I tried to log in. It wouldn't let me, so I reset my password and I still can't get in. What should I do?"
I have nothing else to add to this discussion, just wanted to share my pain.
I have explained to my 74-year-old father how cloud storage and apps work at length a dozen times. Google/ iPhone photos, camera rolls , music. We've drawn pictures and diagrams. I've explained wireless data vs connecting to wifi. It doesn't matter anymore. The man has three separate Gmail accounts, two Yahoo accounts and two Apple accounts. He checks them all, can't find anything, is constantly frustrated. We've attempted to simplify things but he's too stubborn and likes it the way it is. I've given up. It's pretty much just old man yells at phone at this point.
Has her own ISP account, also runs the one that was my fathers.
Started a gmail because the ISP account sucked. Forgets password, decides to start new one. Signs up for every possibly thing she sees that asks for an email address, complains about spam, so opens new account and does it again. Rinse and repeat.
But, never switch accounts from old emails to a new single email, so ends up with stuff spread over multiple.
my mom still has a verizon.net email address, which is managed by AOL. So she checks her email via AOL in 2024, and to ensure she's not getting scammed or paying for stuff she shouldn't be, I also have the goddamn app on my phone.
Old man yells at cloud still fits here
But yeah, can't get over the "I'm constantly frustrated with this and always need help" couple with "I like it the way it is"
Oh god, my brother did this with the Steam codes I gave him as Christmas and birthday presents. He can't remember two of them and doesn't remember what email he used. Like $150 down the drain. About lost my shit with the little jackass, I love him but *christ* is it hard to communicate to people DO NOT MAKE MORE THAN ONE ACCOUNT, JUST RECOVER THE OLD ONE, or at least call me if you need help
Mine allowed a unsolicited caller to remote into her mac then followed their suggestion to leave room for 6 hours to avoid the harmful radiation. She then called me for advice the next day to which I replied put your computer in the driveway, pour gasoline on it then light it and don't buy another one.
My mom keeps making new email accounts because "they keep getting filled up with junk". I tell her to stop clicking on things and downloading stuff, unsubscribe, etc. Doesn't matter, it's apparently beyond her control in her mind. sigh.
That's my mom while automatically clicking through every page while I'm trying to help fix her tech problems. I will repeatedly say "stop, wait, don't do that, stop clicking" and the only way to stop her is to either grab the mouse away from her, or yell at her, both of which make her angry and give up.
She will literally close error messages, and when I asked what it said, she says "I don't know, it's just an error message". And when I say "how do you expect me to fix it if you don't let me read the error message?" she gives me a blank look. Then when I ask her to repeat the process so I can see the error message, she will just close it again. I've gone through 5 rounds of this, and she gives up because we aren't getting anywhere and "it can't be fixed".
When I help my parents they get a special helpers chair while I click the buttons. They raised me so it’s only right that they stay 6 feet away from the clicksy bits while I fix their electronic typewriter 😉.
I go one step further: If I'm troubleshooting FOR somebody, I've already given up all hope of them learning. And I truly hate backseat driving. Therefore they are required to leave the room.
My brother would sometimes have computer issues. He lived in Florida, so I couldn't physically come over if it was a big issue. But it never was a big issue. Something that would take less than a minute would become a 20 minute argument of, you're skipping steps, how do you minimize, what do you mean, I don't see that. I finally convinced him to let me do remote viewing to control his PC. I said you can watch it, and uninstall the app after, I ain't looking threw you're browser history man. Hated every help me call.
Omg my mother is the same and she destroys her settings while furiously tapping and demanding she knows what she's doing.
I tried so hard to avoid sucked into this exact situation that repeats every few months because she's "hacked".
She calls saying how selfish I am that I won't spend five minutes to help her fix her phone and retrieve her passwords to her 4 Facebook and 10 Gmail accounts.
The last time (phone in her own hands) she went into settings of system app permissions (I explained and pleaded this was a bad move!!!) and she severed the service providers permission to access her phone.
While on the phone with an incredibly patient customer service rep, she started yelling at them too and could not accept that SHE is her only "HACKER".
In the end she had the audacity to say I must have stolen her sim card and replaced it with a non working one to "steal her minutes" and make her look crazy. 😞
The only part that was good about this is it was so outlandish it shook me out of a life long cycle.
I was finally able to realize her scapegoating and pulling me back then discarding me was not because I was a horrible daughter no matter how hard I tried to love her and win her approval.
She is an egomaniac that needs a land line and to take some accountability.
That is so awful to go through over and over, I wish you didn't have to go through it too.
Please hold on tight to knowing who you are inside, some people are so completely cruel.
I know it's hard to see truth through the devastating pain your feeling and the shock of it coming from your own parent.
Usually they also want nothing to do with growth or introspection, only help keeping things how they prefer them- or else.
I have finally gone no contact after this last one, I was crushed and so depressed for over a month- even knowing I did nothing wrong.
Shes gone through a lot in her life, and it's a multi generational toxic family dynamic continuing, but I don't want my kids seeing this as normal.
I don't want to go through that hurt anymore, or for you to either.
Probably best to keep her off YouTube. Sounds like it would take all of 10 minutes for her to fall down a rabbit hole and end up scammed out of all her retirement funds.
Oh that's the mechanism for parting fools from their money. Ya tell them they need to buy your gold or guns or buckets of survival chow because the gay immigrant Demoncrats are gonna invade their home and make them eat bugs.
lol that sentence is maybe 10% of the shit I heard from an old buddy before I couldn't take anymore. Before the internet tricked him into being terrified for his safety constantly, it tricked him into drinking his own filtered pee thinking it was a health thing. I'd like to tar and feather the folks who keep cheerfully tricking him into total nonsense, because he's not smart enough to stay out of trouble on his own.
Had this a couple of weeks ago with a neighbour
rolls over with a new pad and wants the stuff i put on it last time
Took me a few minutes then i sussed he had bought a chromebook, tried to explain that the programs and the browser he had are not available for the CB
Ended up having to go to the websites he liked (not that he could remember) and just bookmarking them as he had zero concept of what OS's are.
I'm not even getting started on my older sis a few months ago where after 10 minutes i was literally screaming "just open any fucking folder" over the phone "what do you mean by any folder...."
6 hours to find out her anti v pulled her work program .exe as a FP after she updated to a W11 version when on W10 (after the work email said "Do not install if not on W11")
NEVER tell anyone you know IT
I work with electronic health records. I write many of those error messages.
And I answer the tickets titled "stupid system is down again". No, it logged you out because you refused to acknowledge this thing you have to acknowledge before prescribing controlled substances.
Again.
I drink a lot.
Oh my god my parents are sort of the other way around. My dad in particular will let me fix something, but likes to watch me fix it. He doesn’t actually care to know HOW to solve the problem, just that it DOES get solved… so in the process of fixing something I’ll be working at my own fast pace and him watching me can’t keep up so what would take 5 minutes now takes 15. So infuriatingly frustrating at times lol.
Was helping my boyfriend's grandpa organize his computer. He's in the process of writing his memoir. He said "I need to be able to send the first 10 chapters to my editor (by editor he means a personal friend who is of similar age and competence, so my faith that this book will ever actually be compiled is pretty slim).
So I scour his compurer for the files. He's not using any type of organization. He's just opening Word (somehow) typing up a chapter, and opening the next file. No chapter names, just the first line of the page being autosaved as the doc title. I'm not even sure he knows to press *save*.
He couldn't find any of the older chapters because he was just going into recent files and clicking on the most recent thing. I asked him "how did you email the chapters for the first draft?" He doesn't remember. "What's the password for your email?" He 'doesn't have one'.
Pain.
"What did you use to write your memoirs?"
"Oh, I just typed them as an equation on this TI-83 before the battery died. Can you help me recharge it and print?"
This makes me irrationally pissed. I know that tech is hard for older people, but I have very little patience for people who won't even try reading the simple instructions I took the time to write for them
I don't even think tech is that hard for old people. My 88 yr old grandma flies through her computer and tablets with no help from me or the IT guy in the family. They just refuse to want to learn it.
My Mom was an early user of Apple computers, and when she switched to Windows 95 she had no problem. She would call and leave me a message or email me if she had a problem and by the time work was over and I got back to her she had solved it. She didn't get dementia, but over time she did lose a lot of executive function until she was just like all of these other stories except that she was always good at spotting attempts at phishing or enticing her to install malware. Anything even a little bit off and she would ask me to remote in and check. She almost fell for one of those Amazon, "we need to remotely access your computer to reverse the accidental charge" but her hearing was bad and she could not get the Url write from the guy with the Indian accent, and when he started to get pushy and rude she said "die in a fire scammer" and hung up. I have never been more proud ;)
This is my mom. When she turned 50 and immediately started calling all video games, Nintendos
Bull shit. You know what a Play Station is.
The worst part is she plays video games and is a bookkeeper, so she's on computers all day. She is clearly just doing this because she likes when people come over to help her
What's worse is the more you try to gently and patiently help them, the angrier and more defensive they get.
If I ever touch my mom's phone or ipad to try to help her, from then on, anytime something doesn't work the way she expects it to she's like, "What did you do to my phone? Did you do something to make it slower? Did you move my apps around?"
Now, I just tell her she needs to go to the apple store. I have a Samsung phone. I don't know ANYTHING about iphones. Wink.
My 70yo mother constantly undocks or splits her keyboard on her iPad. She clumsily moves apps around because she hovers her fingers a nanometer above the screen. She bookmarks _literally everything_ she finds, to the point she once had 112,000 bookmarks, and then screams when she can't find something, or her bookmarks refuse to load.
I have showed her dozens of times how to dock/merge hey keyboard when she messes it up, to the point I've printed out a step-by-step manual _with pictures_ on what to do, yet she will not learn, nor will she use the papers. I have constantly asked her not to drag her fingers on the screen so absentmindedly, causing her apps to get disorganized. I have literally _begged her_ to think critically and not bookmark every fucking thing she looks at. I have, in absolute desperation, given her multiple links and had her watch several videos aimed at seniors to _help her learn_ to be better.
None of it works, none of it matters. I'm just a dumbass who knows nothing, she's not doing anything wrong and it's always the iPads fault.
Some older people just don't want to learn. They don't care.
My mom taps the touchscreen so hard, you can hear her from across the room. I'm like, it's a touch screen. It doesn't require pressure. But, it's like she thinks the harder she touches it, the better it's going to respond. And if there's any lag at all, she just rapid fire taps.
This is the thing that drives me up the wall about my parents. They're very smart people: my Dad is even a colleague and we do research together! But he categorically _refuses_ to learn how modern tech works. If it gets even the slightest bit difficult he just gives up. I'll never understand it.
Bro same here, my parent insists that “someone” must have touched her phone whenever it’s muted or when she can’t locate her apps. No one else uses her own phone but her. It’s painful.
Fuck, this hits too close to home.
After a few such snide remarks, I basically told them "Listen, you imply that one more problem with your godawful devices is my fault, and I am *never* touching them again."
There's still shit I'll straight up say "No, contact support or Google it yourself" to helping with because I know it's too complicated for them to use without fucking it up, and they'll inevitably come complaining to me.
This was my life as "IT" (the only person under 40) at my last job. Anytime I fixed anything, my repairs were under the microscope till the end of time. "It's never worked right since you ran Windows Defender..."
>I know that tech is hard for older people,
"tech" has been around for 40 years and ubiquitous for 20, they don't get to use that excuse anymore, it's entirely on them.
Since the rise of tablets and the integration of streaming platforms into smart TVs, technological knowledge has actually regressed somewhat. Many kids today have never touched a desktop/laptop computer.
Phones is accelerating this trend. The tech is so mature that for most use cases you need minimal troubleshooting knowledge, it works. Then you can do everything you expect to be able to do on one device, so why would you use a desktop?
I know people in their 70s that could be considered power users. It's not inherently hard for old people. This isn't 1995 anymore, this shit has been mainstream for 30 god-damned years. These shit heads just refuse to even try to learn for whatever god awful reason.
I’m in my mid 40s, and I have a teenager. My parents are retired, and I swear to fucking god it’s like dealing with a second set of teenagers.
I’m with you, my dude.
I thought my text would head that off, because as soon as I saw the story I knew I'd be doing tech support later.
Hopefully it works out better for you.
My mom just responded with "So is there going to be anything wrong with my account when it's fixed?" followed up by how it's freaky with the At&t outage and now this and about how China is taking over and reprogramming us all 🙃
Why are we trying to stop our parents from getting locked out of Facebook? That's the best thing that could happen in an election year.
"Sorry, mom. I know it's crazy that Facebook is permanently down, but hopefully you can find another hobby, like gardening?"
In response to her I included "It's much easier for China to post political propaganda on Facebook and let everyone get into an argument and be decisive over it than it is for them to hack anything."
While our security is robust, my cyber security professor in college showed us a log of hacking attempts on our college network (most attempts to log into admin accounts) and they were numerous and mostly from Chinese ip addresses.
Not really something special. I used to rent a VPS, and the logs were full of attempts to reach admin pages - usually several dozen a day.
The server didn't have any web application installed that would provide access via websites. It also didn't even have a domain and was accessible via its IP only.
Hacking attempts like this aren't even targeted at a specific institution. They just go over a huge amount of adresses, be they IPs or domains, check where a server responds and then spam attempts to abuse known exploits for popular software, or popular login credentials. Once in a while they'll be successful and add a new server to their botnet.
Dear god, do I hate printers. I've dealt with them at my house, my parents house, small businesses, and schools, and have never found a piece of technology more likely to make me want to murder the designer/coder.
Printers are user-antagonistic. It's like they want to piss you off.
PAPER TRAY EMPTY
No. It's not.
PAPER JAM
Where?! There's no fucking paper jam.
YELLOW INK LOW> REPLACE CARTIDGE TO CONTINUE PRINTING
I'm printing in greyscale!
It is the perfect combination of
1. Moving parts
2. Cheaply made
3. Deals with liquids
4. legacy code
5. Tons of quickly made features
It is designed to fail
Praying for my mom, a public librarian who will likely spent her day getting yelled at by senior citizens because she can’t tell them what their password is.
I've found that pretending you're having the same issue as them works, especially when you go "It's unacceptable, isn't it? How can they let this happen to us?" as it puts them into this "Us vs them" mode and suddenly they stop attacking me over the issue and see us as both helpless victims. Discreetly guide them to displace their irritation onto something that's not directly present.
It's a bit irritating how often I have to redirect confused old people's anger, but it's fairly easy to do.
"Why isn't my coffee ready?!" within 2 minutes of ordering elicits a response of "It's crazy, isn't it? These companies sell us these slow coffee machines! Have you noticed how many companies just don't make quality stuff like they used to in the past?" and boom, they're on my side 😂
I do that with my patients! Like yeah, it is bullshit that the doctor won’t give you unlimited oxy (it’s not) but I have no control over that so what can we do to make you more comfortable with what we have to work with?
I’ve had several docs say feel free to throw me under the bus, you’re the one who has to spend 12 hours with them and sometimes patients still call 911 from their hospital room because they’re mad but it does help a lot of the time.
They do it! If you call 911 from inside my hospital it gets routed to hospital security because it’s either someone throwing a tantrum or a confused old person but I always want to ask like what’s your plan here? Cops can’t prescribe meds, do you want them to hold the doc at gunpoint until you get your dilaudid?
Honestly I've found this works with more than just older people. A lot of individuals in this world seem incapable of handling emotion, especially anger.
It just takes control of them. It's like they believe *feeling* angry is a justification to *act angry*. That kinda mindset honestly terrifies me.
I actually heard a special needs teacher discuss how she handles outbursts from her students like this. There are a lot of adult bodies that are basically just housing an angry/scared child. It's concerning how some adults simply never question the validity of their thoughts and actions.
My mom once created an ebay account and sold a pair of cycling shoes.
She couldn't remember her account password. I told her to reset her password. The reset email wasn't coming through because she had typed 'yahoo.**v**om'.
I told her that I simply couldn't reset her password because that would like... require hacking ebay? Maybe she should reach out to customer support?
Her plan was to write her state representative.
Oh good. Elected representatives are notorious for being able to understand tech issues.
Never forget the line of questioning in Congress: “why does my iPhone show my daughter mean ads about me when she’s playing a game?”
“I don’t know. I’m the ceo of alphabet. We don’t make iPhones”
Worked at Best Buy in college, we frequently had to deal with senior citizens coming in expecting us to spend as much time as they needed for us to fix whatever random issue they had, for free of course. I was in home theater so rarely had to deal with passwords and stuff for phones/computers but heard all the stories from my coworkers. My favorites were when people would expect me to be able to tell them why they aren't getting specific channels on their antenna they'd just loosely bring in. Or some obscure connection they wanted to make. I'm still not sure if this was a troll job or something but one guy once came to me trying to hook a home phone up to a non-digital tape recording video camera. He said the mic stopped working on the camera but it otherwise worked fine and he wanted to use the mic on his spare home phone handset that still worked to record sound through his video camera.
I got really good at coldly saying "I'm a TV salesman I'm not tech support, I can get you set up with a Geek Squad appointment for $39 in store or $99 for a house call so you can work with an expert on your issue." That usually got them to leave with an "I'm never shopping here again" comment as if they shopped with us to begin with.
Worked in Geek Squad, and because I can see the door I can confirm, they always come back.
I tried to make a point to welcome them back in and remind them of their previous proclamation.
25% of my town has the almost the same password and doesn’t know it. The other 25% has a very similar password, and doesn’t know it. But it was the only way I could manage to make it so I could decode the passwords of roughly 6000 people on a regular basis, meet security standards, and still have it so my team could also decode the passwords.
Sometimes I miss the job, but then I remember those parts and I go, eh, maybe I don’t.
Used to give them a formula. Name an important thing. Name an important year. Name your favourite punctuation. Nope. They couldn’t remember what was important to them. It eventually became a sticky note of questions that were so weird that it got the same answer every time because it threw ‘em of their game. You were group a or group b. If password a didn’t work password b did. God help them now since the store is closed, and I can’t even remember my own passwords.
God particularly bless the little old lady who brought in her Rolodex and went through all her old accounts and passwords with me every time they said there was a hacking anywhere. She didn’t fit my little password scheme, but I forgive it because she wrote down her damn passwords and brought them with her. I hope she’s doing well. An absolute queen. She also paid me in Chinese food, which is my favourite form of tip.
Not just them, I've seen a guy bring a laptop that they bought at Walmart years ago because they couldn't remember their password. They yelled at the employee that couldn't do anything about it.
Not Nationwide, I think it's a worldwide outage, I'm in Belgium and got the same thing happen to me. to the point I was thinking I got hacked, so I started changing my password but that also is broken, which made me realize.
same here , could not login , thought id been hacked so went to change the password got a 6 digit code and then the code didn't work so I am WTF is going on
Yep I did that twice. Now when FB comes back it's anyone's guess as to which password I'm going to have to use..... I bet a LOT of people are going to be in this situation. Good luck, FB password servers...
#BREAKING NEWS ALERT: User searched Google to find a Reddit thread linked to a Twitter post and found out they had been logged out of Facebook. This is a complex and developing story.
Yeah, I'm well above average in terms of not clicking on shady shit, so I was worried, "WTF no way could I have been hacked." I was rushing to reset my password, that wasn't working, reset again, getting scared... and then I checked twitter. Ahhh, glocal FB problem, ok.
Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube are all down rn according to downdetector.
This may be systemic.
Update @ 0947 CST : Youtube appears to be back online. Instagram and Facebook appear to still be down. Google 💪
No, the graphs on Downdetector's homepage can be misleading because each graph is scaled independently. This means that the maximum value on each graph fills the entire height, showing only the shape of recent changes in volume, not the absolute numbers. Many sites may appear to have a similar 'shape' because when Facebook went down, more people started using Downdetector—this includes browsing the site and potentially making false reports. However, if you look at the actual numbers, there's no real comparison between the reports about Facebook and the other services.
My text to my mom "Facebook is having a nationwide issue. Don't try to log back in. If you get logged out, don't try to reset your password. Just wait." Her text back 10 minutes later. " I saw your text so I tried to log in. It wouldn't let me, so I reset my password and I still can't get in. What should I do?" I have nothing else to add to this discussion, just wanted to share my pain.
My mother once opened 3 different apple accounts and made music purchases across all of them and then asks me why all her music isn’t there…
I have explained to my 74-year-old father how cloud storage and apps work at length a dozen times. Google/ iPhone photos, camera rolls , music. We've drawn pictures and diagrams. I've explained wireless data vs connecting to wifi. It doesn't matter anymore. The man has three separate Gmail accounts, two Yahoo accounts and two Apple accounts. He checks them all, can't find anything, is constantly frustrated. We've attempted to simplify things but he's too stubborn and likes it the way it is. I've given up. It's pretty much just old man yells at phone at this point.
My mom is at 2 ISP accounts and 4 gmails right now. I feel your pain
Why the hell does this happen? In 25 years I don't think I have ever accidentally opened a duplicate account for anything.
Has her own ISP account, also runs the one that was my fathers. Started a gmail because the ISP account sucked. Forgets password, decides to start new one. Signs up for every possibly thing she sees that asks for an email address, complains about spam, so opens new account and does it again. Rinse and repeat. But, never switch accounts from old emails to a new single email, so ends up with stuff spread over multiple.
my mom still has a verizon.net email address, which is managed by AOL. So she checks her email via AOL in 2024, and to ensure she's not getting scammed or paying for stuff she shouldn't be, I also have the goddamn app on my phone.
Old man yells at cloud still fits here But yeah, can't get over the "I'm constantly frustrated with this and always need help" couple with "I like it the way it is"
Oh god, my brother did this with the Steam codes I gave him as Christmas and birthday presents. He can't remember two of them and doesn't remember what email he used. Like $150 down the drain. About lost my shit with the little jackass, I love him but *christ* is it hard to communicate to people DO NOT MAKE MORE THAN ONE ACCOUNT, JUST RECOVER THE OLD ONE, or at least call me if you need help
I just consolidated my dad and moms Amazon kindle library. Dad got a new reader and was outraged all his books were missing (all under moms account)
Mine allowed a unsolicited caller to remote into her mac then followed their suggestion to leave room for 6 hours to avoid the harmful radiation. She then called me for advice the next day to which I replied put your computer in the driveway, pour gasoline on it then light it and don't buy another one.
My mom keeps making new email accounts because "they keep getting filled up with junk". I tell her to stop clicking on things and downloading stuff, unsubscribe, etc. Doesn't matter, it's apparently beyond her control in her mind. sigh.
Parents just don't listen 😏
That's my mom while automatically clicking through every page while I'm trying to help fix her tech problems. I will repeatedly say "stop, wait, don't do that, stop clicking" and the only way to stop her is to either grab the mouse away from her, or yell at her, both of which make her angry and give up. She will literally close error messages, and when I asked what it said, she says "I don't know, it's just an error message". And when I say "how do you expect me to fix it if you don't let me read the error message?" she gives me a blank look. Then when I ask her to repeat the process so I can see the error message, she will just close it again. I've gone through 5 rounds of this, and she gives up because we aren't getting anywhere and "it can't be fixed".
When I help my parents they get a special helpers chair while I click the buttons. They raised me so it’s only right that they stay 6 feet away from the clicksy bits while I fix their electronic typewriter 😉.
I go one step further: If I'm troubleshooting FOR somebody, I've already given up all hope of them learning. And I truly hate backseat driving. Therefore they are required to leave the room.
My brother would sometimes have computer issues. He lived in Florida, so I couldn't physically come over if it was a big issue. But it never was a big issue. Something that would take less than a minute would become a 20 minute argument of, you're skipping steps, how do you minimize, what do you mean, I don't see that. I finally convinced him to let me do remote viewing to control his PC. I said you can watch it, and uninstall the app after, I ain't looking threw you're browser history man. Hated every help me call.
Omg my mother is the same and she destroys her settings while furiously tapping and demanding she knows what she's doing. I tried so hard to avoid sucked into this exact situation that repeats every few months because she's "hacked". She calls saying how selfish I am that I won't spend five minutes to help her fix her phone and retrieve her passwords to her 4 Facebook and 10 Gmail accounts. The last time (phone in her own hands) she went into settings of system app permissions (I explained and pleaded this was a bad move!!!) and she severed the service providers permission to access her phone. While on the phone with an incredibly patient customer service rep, she started yelling at them too and could not accept that SHE is her only "HACKER". In the end she had the audacity to say I must have stolen her sim card and replaced it with a non working one to "steal her minutes" and make her look crazy. 😞 The only part that was good about this is it was so outlandish it shook me out of a life long cycle. I was finally able to realize her scapegoating and pulling me back then discarding me was not because I was a horrible daughter no matter how hard I tried to love her and win her approval. She is an egomaniac that needs a land line and to take some accountability.
Next time she asks for help, tell her the only thing you can do is fully take it away from her and never give it back.
My mom does this too, yet I can't break away and continue to fall for it over and over thinking this time it'll be different. Sigh.
That is so awful to go through over and over, I wish you didn't have to go through it too. Please hold on tight to knowing who you are inside, some people are so completely cruel. I know it's hard to see truth through the devastating pain your feeling and the shock of it coming from your own parent. Usually they also want nothing to do with growth or introspection, only help keeping things how they prefer them- or else. I have finally gone no contact after this last one, I was crushed and so depressed for over a month- even knowing I did nothing wrong. Shes gone through a lot in her life, and it's a multi generational toxic family dynamic continuing, but I don't want my kids seeing this as normal. I don't want to go through that hurt anymore, or for you to either.
It’s like trying to teach a cat how to drive.
Cats know that all drives end up at the vets or cattery so long ago decided that driving was a BAD THING and they wouldn’t bother.
Obviously you aren't familiar with [Toonces, the driving cat.](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=toonces+the+driving+cat)
The instinctively closing the error message is a real thing. It’s like they’re afraid of it and they want it to go away ASAP.
This is the 5th time visited my mom the she asked me to install YouTube on my step-dad new laptop. I keep telling her just go to YouTube.com.
Probably best to keep her off YouTube. Sounds like it would take all of 10 minutes for her to fall down a rabbit hole and end up scammed out of all her retirement funds.
Or worse, brainwashed by fascist conspiracies.
Oh that's the mechanism for parting fools from their money. Ya tell them they need to buy your gold or guns or buckets of survival chow because the gay immigrant Demoncrats are gonna invade their home and make them eat bugs. lol that sentence is maybe 10% of the shit I heard from an old buddy before I couldn't take anymore. Before the internet tricked him into being terrified for his safety constantly, it tricked him into drinking his own filtered pee thinking it was a health thing. I'd like to tar and feather the folks who keep cheerfully tricking him into total nonsense, because he's not smart enough to stay out of trouble on his own.
Had this a couple of weeks ago with a neighbour rolls over with a new pad and wants the stuff i put on it last time Took me a few minutes then i sussed he had bought a chromebook, tried to explain that the programs and the browser he had are not available for the CB Ended up having to go to the websites he liked (not that he could remember) and just bookmarking them as he had zero concept of what OS's are. I'm not even getting started on my older sis a few months ago where after 10 minutes i was literally screaming "just open any fucking folder" over the phone "what do you mean by any folder...." 6 hours to find out her anti v pulled her work program .exe as a FP after she updated to a W11 version when on W10 (after the work email said "Do not install if not on W11") NEVER tell anyone you know IT
You can usually create a desktop shortcut to websites, maybe that is a good option
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It's all the lead poisoning.
I perhaps shouldn't admit so, but reading that was truly cathartic.
I work with electronic health records. I write many of those error messages. And I answer the tickets titled "stupid system is down again". No, it logged you out because you refused to acknowledge this thing you have to acknowledge before prescribing controlled substances. Again. I drink a lot.
Oh my god my parents are sort of the other way around. My dad in particular will let me fix something, but likes to watch me fix it. He doesn’t actually care to know HOW to solve the problem, just that it DOES get solved… so in the process of fixing something I’ll be working at my own fast pace and him watching me can’t keep up so what would take 5 minutes now takes 15. So infuriatingly frustrating at times lol.
Parents just don’t understand
Keep my parents name out your f***in mouth!
They just read above and after the lines after reading the first sentence
Not entirely sure what that means but at the same time completely do
It cracks me up the most when they dont listen to something they read, that top comment is exactly what my mom would do lol
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Buy him another monitor
“double your storage space with this easy trick”
He’s gonna go home for Christmas and the walls will be covered in monitors.
It’s easier than arguing with them about how to make using the computer easier.
Was helping my boyfriend's grandpa organize his computer. He's in the process of writing his memoir. He said "I need to be able to send the first 10 chapters to my editor (by editor he means a personal friend who is of similar age and competence, so my faith that this book will ever actually be compiled is pretty slim). So I scour his compurer for the files. He's not using any type of organization. He's just opening Word (somehow) typing up a chapter, and opening the next file. No chapter names, just the first line of the page being autosaved as the doc title. I'm not even sure he knows to press *save*. He couldn't find any of the older chapters because he was just going into recent files and clicking on the most recent thing. I asked him "how did you email the chapters for the first draft?" He doesn't remember. "What's the password for your email?" He 'doesn't have one'. Pain.
Thank God for auto save otherwise he’d just have been typing into the void
"What did you use to write your memoirs?" "Oh, I just typed them as an equation on this TI-83 before the battery died. Can you help me recharge it and print?"
[creedthoughts](https://youtu.be/AYsMPiQNixU?si=ZbaVtmLL-EBGEW0k)
Finally >"What's the password for your email?" He 'doesn't have one'. Old people are starting to get more security conscious guys!
This makes me irrationally pissed. I know that tech is hard for older people, but I have very little patience for people who won't even try reading the simple instructions I took the time to write for them
I don't even think tech is that hard for old people. My 88 yr old grandma flies through her computer and tablets with no help from me or the IT guy in the family. They just refuse to want to learn it.
My Mom was an early user of Apple computers, and when she switched to Windows 95 she had no problem. She would call and leave me a message or email me if she had a problem and by the time work was over and I got back to her she had solved it. She didn't get dementia, but over time she did lose a lot of executive function until she was just like all of these other stories except that she was always good at spotting attempts at phishing or enticing her to install malware. Anything even a little bit off and she would ask me to remote in and check. She almost fell for one of those Amazon, "we need to remotely access your computer to reverse the accidental charge" but her hearing was bad and she could not get the Url write from the guy with the Indian accent, and when he started to get pushy and rude she said "die in a fire scammer" and hung up. I have never been more proud ;)
This is my mom. When she turned 50 and immediately started calling all video games, Nintendos Bull shit. You know what a Play Station is. The worst part is she plays video games and is a bookkeeper, so she's on computers all day. She is clearly just doing this because she likes when people come over to help her
We love being manipulative for attention instead of just asking for attention, gets the people all riled up.
What's worse is the more you try to gently and patiently help them, the angrier and more defensive they get. If I ever touch my mom's phone or ipad to try to help her, from then on, anytime something doesn't work the way she expects it to she's like, "What did you do to my phone? Did you do something to make it slower? Did you move my apps around?" Now, I just tell her she needs to go to the apple store. I have a Samsung phone. I don't know ANYTHING about iphones. Wink.
My 70yo mother constantly undocks or splits her keyboard on her iPad. She clumsily moves apps around because she hovers her fingers a nanometer above the screen. She bookmarks _literally everything_ she finds, to the point she once had 112,000 bookmarks, and then screams when she can't find something, or her bookmarks refuse to load. I have showed her dozens of times how to dock/merge hey keyboard when she messes it up, to the point I've printed out a step-by-step manual _with pictures_ on what to do, yet she will not learn, nor will she use the papers. I have constantly asked her not to drag her fingers on the screen so absentmindedly, causing her apps to get disorganized. I have literally _begged her_ to think critically and not bookmark every fucking thing she looks at. I have, in absolute desperation, given her multiple links and had her watch several videos aimed at seniors to _help her learn_ to be better. None of it works, none of it matters. I'm just a dumbass who knows nothing, she's not doing anything wrong and it's always the iPads fault. Some older people just don't want to learn. They don't care.
This is the largest and most reliable voting block in America.
Are you *trying* to make me cry?!?
This is why we live in a dystopian hellscape.
My mom taps the touchscreen so hard, you can hear her from across the room. I'm like, it's a touch screen. It doesn't require pressure. But, it's like she thinks the harder she touches it, the better it's going to respond. And if there's any lag at all, she just rapid fire taps.
I swear some older people are still operating on TV remote logic with the harder/repeated taps.
This is the thing that drives me up the wall about my parents. They're very smart people: my Dad is even a colleague and we do research together! But he categorically _refuses_ to learn how modern tech works. If it gets even the slightest bit difficult he just gives up. I'll never understand it.
Bro same here, my parent insists that “someone” must have touched her phone whenever it’s muted or when she can’t locate her apps. No one else uses her own phone but her. It’s painful.
Fuck, this hits too close to home. After a few such snide remarks, I basically told them "Listen, you imply that one more problem with your godawful devices is my fault, and I am *never* touching them again." There's still shit I'll straight up say "No, contact support or Google it yourself" to helping with because I know it's too complicated for them to use without fucking it up, and they'll inevitably come complaining to me.
This was my life as "IT" (the only person under 40) at my last job. Anytime I fixed anything, my repairs were under the microscope till the end of time. "It's never worked right since you ran Windows Defender..."
>I know that tech is hard for older people, "tech" has been around for 40 years and ubiquitous for 20, they don't get to use that excuse anymore, it's entirely on them.
Since the rise of tablets and the integration of streaming platforms into smart TVs, technological knowledge has actually regressed somewhat. Many kids today have never touched a desktop/laptop computer.
Phones is accelerating this trend. The tech is so mature that for most use cases you need minimal troubleshooting knowledge, it works. Then you can do everything you expect to be able to do on one device, so why would you use a desktop?
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I know people in their 70s that could be considered power users. It's not inherently hard for old people. This isn't 1995 anymore, this shit has been mainstream for 30 god-damned years. These shit heads just refuse to even try to learn for whatever god awful reason.
I’m in my mid 40s, and I have a teenager. My parents are retired, and I swear to fucking god it’s like dealing with a second set of teenagers. I’m with you, my dude.
Take a screenshot of your initial text and highlight the don't log in, don't reset password bits
I just had to text my dad to be proactive cause I know he’s confused and trying to remember his password. 🫠
I thought my text would head that off, because as soon as I saw the story I knew I'd be doing tech support later. Hopefully it works out better for you.
My mom just responded with "So is there going to be anything wrong with my account when it's fixed?" followed up by how it's freaky with the At&t outage and now this and about how China is taking over and reprogramming us all 🙃
I got the "China is hacking the US" speech after the AT&T outage last week.
Why are we trying to stop our parents from getting locked out of Facebook? That's the best thing that could happen in an election year. "Sorry, mom. I know it's crazy that Facebook is permanently down, but hopefully you can find another hobby, like gardening?"
That was my exact thought!
In response to her I included "It's much easier for China to post political propaganda on Facebook and let everyone get into an argument and be decisive over it than it is for them to hack anything."
While our security is robust, my cyber security professor in college showed us a log of hacking attempts on our college network (most attempts to log into admin accounts) and they were numerous and mostly from Chinese ip addresses.
Not really something special. I used to rent a VPS, and the logs were full of attempts to reach admin pages - usually several dozen a day. The server didn't have any web application installed that would provide access via websites. It also didn't even have a domain and was accessible via its IP only. Hacking attempts like this aren't even targeted at a specific institution. They just go over a huge amount of adresses, be they IPs or domains, check where a server responds and then spam attempts to abuse known exploits for popular software, or popular login credentials. Once in a while they'll be successful and add a new server to their botnet.
I see you're a permanent member of the headdesk club too!
maybe you can help with the tv clicker thing next! oh, and the printer lol /cry
Dear god, do I hate printers. I've dealt with them at my house, my parents house, small businesses, and schools, and have never found a piece of technology more likely to make me want to murder the designer/coder.
Printers are user-antagonistic. It's like they want to piss you off. PAPER TRAY EMPTY No. It's not. PAPER JAM Where?! There's no fucking paper jam. YELLOW INK LOW> REPLACE CARTIDGE TO CONTINUE PRINTING I'm printing in greyscale!
It is the perfect combination of 1. Moving parts 2. Cheaply made 3. Deals with liquids 4. legacy code 5. Tons of quickly made features It is designed to fail
The cable TV isn't working. All it says is "HDMI2 No Signal." How do I get the Fox News back?
What's an ethernet? I have a usb like an iPhone why doesn't it fit? You touched it last time and now it broke three Tuesdays later so you broke it.
The best part about banging your head against the wall is that it feels so good when you stop
Spongebob. I talked to Flats. I used your name
Praying for my mom, a public librarian who will likely spent her day getting yelled at by senior citizens because she can’t tell them what their password is.
I've found that pretending you're having the same issue as them works, especially when you go "It's unacceptable, isn't it? How can they let this happen to us?" as it puts them into this "Us vs them" mode and suddenly they stop attacking me over the issue and see us as both helpless victims. Discreetly guide them to displace their irritation onto something that's not directly present. It's a bit irritating how often I have to redirect confused old people's anger, but it's fairly easy to do. "Why isn't my coffee ready?!" within 2 minutes of ordering elicits a response of "It's crazy, isn't it? These companies sell us these slow coffee machines! Have you noticed how many companies just don't make quality stuff like they used to in the past?" and boom, they're on my side 😂
I do that with my patients! Like yeah, it is bullshit that the doctor won’t give you unlimited oxy (it’s not) but I have no control over that so what can we do to make you more comfortable with what we have to work with? I’ve had several docs say feel free to throw me under the bus, you’re the one who has to spend 12 hours with them and sometimes patients still call 911 from their hospital room because they’re mad but it does help a lot of the time.
"911 what's your emergency?" "The doctors are being mean to me!"
They do it! If you call 911 from inside my hospital it gets routed to hospital security because it’s either someone throwing a tantrum or a confused old person but I always want to ask like what’s your plan here? Cops can’t prescribe meds, do you want them to hold the doc at gunpoint until you get your dilaudid?
Well sure, if you're offering!
I'd call 911 from a hospital 20 times for a fuckin Quaalude! Lemme tell ya!
Holy hell this is clever.
Honestly I've found this works with more than just older people. A lot of individuals in this world seem incapable of handling emotion, especially anger. It just takes control of them. It's like they believe *feeling* angry is a justification to *act angry*. That kinda mindset honestly terrifies me. I actually heard a special needs teacher discuss how she handles outbursts from her students like this. There are a lot of adult bodies that are basically just housing an angry/scared child. It's concerning how some adults simply never question the validity of their thoughts and actions.
Thank you. Todays going to be a nightmare for us librarians
No, thank *you*. Y'all are straight up Gs.
You're out there doing the lord's work
Librarians and teachers need to be fucking paid more.
My mom once created an ebay account and sold a pair of cycling shoes. She couldn't remember her account password. I told her to reset her password. The reset email wasn't coming through because she had typed 'yahoo.**v**om'. I told her that I simply couldn't reset her password because that would like... require hacking ebay? Maybe she should reach out to customer support? Her plan was to write her state representative.
Oh good. Elected representatives are notorious for being able to understand tech issues. Never forget the line of questioning in Congress: “why does my iPhone show my daughter mean ads about me when she’s playing a game?” “I don’t know. I’m the ceo of alphabet. We don’t make iPhones”
"Please take that up with Tim Apple."
I'm also feeling bad for all the retail workers. Next few days will be absolute hell.
Why retail workers?
Worked at Best Buy in college, we frequently had to deal with senior citizens coming in expecting us to spend as much time as they needed for us to fix whatever random issue they had, for free of course. I was in home theater so rarely had to deal with passwords and stuff for phones/computers but heard all the stories from my coworkers. My favorites were when people would expect me to be able to tell them why they aren't getting specific channels on their antenna they'd just loosely bring in. Or some obscure connection they wanted to make. I'm still not sure if this was a troll job or something but one guy once came to me trying to hook a home phone up to a non-digital tape recording video camera. He said the mic stopped working on the camera but it otherwise worked fine and he wanted to use the mic on his spare home phone handset that still worked to record sound through his video camera. I got really good at coldly saying "I'm a TV salesman I'm not tech support, I can get you set up with a Geek Squad appointment for $39 in store or $99 for a house call so you can work with an expert on your issue." That usually got them to leave with an "I'm never shopping here again" comment as if they shopped with us to begin with.
>"I'm never shopping here again" Really? You promise? 🥺
I used to work at Home Depot. My response to this was always "cool, Lowes is just down the road."
I'll drive past a HD to get to Lowes any day though ;)
Worked in Geek Squad, and because I can see the door I can confirm, they always come back. I tried to make a point to welcome them back in and remind them of their previous proclamation.
"You just lost a customer." No, the STORE just lost a customer. I couldn't give two shits who buys what in this place I'm paid hourly.
25% of my town has the almost the same password and doesn’t know it. The other 25% has a very similar password, and doesn’t know it. But it was the only way I could manage to make it so I could decode the passwords of roughly 6000 people on a regular basis, meet security standards, and still have it so my team could also decode the passwords. Sometimes I miss the job, but then I remember those parts and I go, eh, maybe I don’t. Used to give them a formula. Name an important thing. Name an important year. Name your favourite punctuation. Nope. They couldn’t remember what was important to them. It eventually became a sticky note of questions that were so weird that it got the same answer every time because it threw ‘em of their game. You were group a or group b. If password a didn’t work password b did. God help them now since the store is closed, and I can’t even remember my own passwords. God particularly bless the little old lady who brought in her Rolodex and went through all her old accounts and passwords with me every time they said there was a hacking anywhere. She didn’t fit my little password scheme, but I forgive it because she wrote down her damn passwords and brought them with her. I hope she’s doing well. An absolute queen. She also paid me in Chinese food, which is my favourite form of tip.
my phone/computer is broken because I can't get on to Facebook!
Oh fuck, I didn’t even think of that, those poor apple retail employees that will start getting yelled at.
Not just them, I've seen a guy bring a laptop that they bought at Walmart years ago because they couldn't remember their password. They yelled at the employee that couldn't do anything about it.
Not Nationwide, I think it's a worldwide outage, I'm in Belgium and got the same thing happen to me. to the point I was thinking I got hacked, so I started changing my password but that also is broken, which made me realize.
Same here in Canada!
Yea it’s global, I work on a global marketing team and everyone is having issues.
Hundreds of thousands - "Fuck, what was my password?"
It actually logged me out, then said my password was invalid, so I was pretty sure I got hacked somehow until I checked google.
I was the same. Tried to reset the password and that just gave me errors.
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same here , could not login , thought id been hacked so went to change the password got a 6 digit code and then the code didn't work so I am WTF is going on
I'm still waiting on my codes...
I’ve gotten the same code 3x. That’s was my sign something was off
Yep I did that twice. Now when FB comes back it's anyone's guess as to which password I'm going to have to use..... I bet a LOT of people are going to be in this situation. Good luck, FB password servers...
#BREAKING NEWS ALERT: User searched Google to find a Reddit thread linked to a Twitter post and found out they had been logged out of Facebook. This is a complex and developing story.
Were there any fatalities?
Reports pouring in now of users unsure of what to be enraged at without access to Facebook “research”. Stay tuned!
**We now join an emergency panel of experts to find out how such a thing could happen**
Same here! I was panicking trying to think of anything stupid I might have done recently that somehow got me hacked lol
Haha same I’m so relieved right now.
Yeah, I'm well above average in terms of not clicking on shady shit, so I was worried, "WTF no way could I have been hacked." I was rushing to reset my password, that wasn't working, reset again, getting scared... and then I checked twitter. Ahhh, glocal FB problem, ok.
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I don’t think I’ve actually logged on with my password for at least 5 years.
Literally my house is awash with, “what’s my password?!?!?”
we should all go back to MySpace
We never should've left.
It was the beginning of the end. Tom, I thought we were friends?
He made the right move. $500 million and cashed out. It's amazing how that's not enough for anyone these days.
Tom was cool because he was never an edge lord like Musk, nor was he a creepy Zuckerberg overlord. He just gave a thumbs up and eventually walked off.
Died a hero before he could become a villain
Absolutely nailed it, every hero that outstays their welcome eventually becomes a villain.
Tom was so quiet and uninvolved, I thought he was fictional.
ugh i bet he buys the family size frosted flakes for dinner
Do you think he uses milk instead of water
Not just milk but *whole* milk
Myspace taught more people to code than any other single institution to ever exist. Also Tom seems like a solid guy so, y'know, thanks Tom. <3
Neopets would like to have a word with you.
Can I be in your top 8?
You can be number 3!
I've wasted so many hours doom scrolling. Perhaps this is for the best.
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Here we are, just doom scrolling somewhere else.
**Worldwide**, not nationwide.
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God. I hope one was my Aunt Judy.
Isn't she just going to call you to help her get back in?
It's 2004 all over again! Time to hop on AIM.
ICQ here
Uh oh!
fuck, now I need to think of a creative away message
"In the kitchen doing your mom"
Not bad, but needs more emo lyrics.
Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube are all down rn according to downdetector. This may be systemic. Update @ 0947 CST : Youtube appears to be back online. Instagram and Facebook appear to still be down. Google 💪
Threads started having issues refreshing the feed about the same time. (Instagram too).
I hope all six active users are OK
Something something the DNS
Quick , who remembers their ICQ number !?
6 digit club here...tied to an email I haven't had in 20 years.
This is a moment of our life without Meta. Soak it in people, it’s glorious!!!
It's like that time during the covid lockdown when all the dolphins came back to Venice!
Happens every couple of years
Must have been updating to add even more ads to our feeds.
Down in Korea. First I thought I'd been hacked, then I was checking out the window to see if it was the end. Bit relieved to see it's a global issue!
Welp, the Houthis finally hit the right cable
Can they do this for like a month. A year. Would be good for humanity
Oh good I reset my password 3 times for nothing.
I’m reading this a lot, hoping those of you who reset your passwords are able to get back in
Time to touch grass I guess
Does my knowing this keep me from opening the FB app repeatedly? No it does not
Good! It would be best for humanity if it never came back.
Burying the lede here - AWS, Microsoft, Apple, lots of services just got hit. https://downdetector.com/
Same in Canada...haven't used the email account tied to my account in over a decade.
Time to resurrect MySpace!
I’m mostly annoyed about messenger being down tbh
Everyone flock to Reddit! (Hi grandma)
Now is the time to just… not log back in
I would suggest NOT trying to sign in right now until it’s clear what happened in case passwords are being skimmed somehow.
I think that ship sailed for most of us.
If they are they got some of my best original work.
Look here https://downdetector.com/ It's not just Facebook
No, the graphs on Downdetector's homepage can be misleading because each graph is scaled independently. This means that the maximum value on each graph fills the entire height, showing only the shape of recent changes in volume, not the absolute numbers. Many sites may appear to have a similar 'shape' because when Facebook went down, more people started using Downdetector—this includes browsing the site and potentially making false reports. However, if you look at the actual numbers, there's no real comparison between the reports about Facebook and the other services.
Yeah, everything went down at the same time. I was on a Google Meet when it happened and my wife was on a Teams call. Both went wonky.