[269/365]

[cosmolinguist]

I spent a good chunk of this morning trying to untangle smart TV problems from satellite TV problems -- squinting at PDFs on my phone that I had to download from mobile-unfriendly websites because my dad confidently frisbee-tossed the "unboxing and instalation instructions" aside when he unboxed his new TV, scoffing at them. He carefully kept the rest of the packaging but digging through both it and the recycling bin this morning didn't get us the instructions. (I did find some more stuff in the recycling bin that didn't belong there, though, so I was able to use this as a teachable moment, I guess.

Finally after trying to work live chat on Samsung's (still mobile-unfriendly) website, I got far enough to determine who I need to murder. It's the CenturyLink guy who told my dad that my parents could use DirecTV before CenturyLink can be bothered to come around and get them some internet, and then sent him hardware that only works over wi-fi.

After this frustrating but definitive result, it was time to go to the farm and do the heavy lifting. It was particularly dirty gross work today, and also full of nystagmus triggers so I had such a headache by the time we finally got to quit due to rain because it made everything we needed to work on even more dirty and gross.

My big win for the day was defeating my mom's horrifying "plan" for hazardous waste disposal. I can't remember if I said but since they can't put stuff like paint in the dumpster, her plan was to dig a hole in the yard, pour the paint in, bury it, and then put the paint cans in the dumpster! I couldn't believe my ears and it was hard not to freak out at this. Why not skip the middleman and get this shit directly in the groundwater, eh?! So today I looked up hazardous waste disposal for the county -- which handily will include all the nearly-empty barrels of tractor transmission fluid, old motor oil (also for tractors), old gasoline, and all the other horrifying fluids a farm collects in more than half a century -- and told Dad about it. He seemed relieved and really happy with the idea of just driving all this stuff to a town where they regularly go anyway -- he can drop it off any Wednesday between 9am and 3pm! -- and that was also a huge relief for me.

I said I'd send him the link I'd found but he said "no, write it down" so I carefully wrote half this webpage down in his little yellow legal pad where he keeps all his Important Things.

These people just do not Google things and they are not comfortable with webpages even if I Google them. "We don't have the phone number" is something I've heard millions of times from both parents in the last few days. Dad went to the post office and the newspaper in their small town to change their address, things I'd have looked up a phone number or email address for. And at one point this morning when I was still messing around with the TV, Dad announced that he was setting up a Gmail account because "he needed to" in order to change his address for the Minneapolis paper. I actually rushed across the room to try to stop him (like I do when I see Mom carrying things that are too heavy for her!) but he brushed me aside, already setting up his new password (last night, setting up his DirecTV account, he said " 'Choose a password'...I'll use the same one I use for the bank, everybody likes this password.") I assume one of the options on the webpage was "sign in with Google" and he saw that as a demand rather than an option?

I kept thinking of my work all summer on trying to save train ticket offices. My parents aren't "digitally excluded" because they have iPhones and use their iPad to read the news and Skype with me. But they are completely out of their depth with any other task. They don't think of the internet as a way to solve problems; it is a problem for them in itself. When my dad tried to look up the number of the auto salvage place, he didn't search for it, he searched for "white pages" because that's what he really wanted: a book with phone numbers in it. Of course that led him to some paid-for service -- whether real or a scam I don't know, but luckily he refused to do it. A lot of old people would just pay, because they think "the white pages" is the only way to get the phone number of a business they need. Even having seen me Google the auto salvage phone number, he doesn't feel any more confident in finding the plumber's phone number, so I'm going to have to do that tomorrow. These are the kind of people the UK government and train companies insist can buy tickets online or with an app.

They of course don't get trains but they had something remarkably similar happen a month or two ago when they went to meet family at a state park. You have to pay for parking there, and apparently most people were happy to do this online. I guess my parents did look into this, because when they told me about it they said "We weren't comfortable with that. You have to set up an account..." So they waited twenty minutes for "the gal to come back" (from what, I don't know, but I bet she's "multiskilled" in the way the train operators claim they're going to "multiskill" their staff, i.e. give one person multiple different people's jobs) so they could deal with a person.

Anyway! This evening, since there was still no TV, my mom suggested listening to one of their radio stories. They're big fans of the "radio classics" channel or whatever it's called on the Sirius radio they have in their car, and Mom had explained to me the other day when I was in the car with her and one she liked was playing that they've bought the CDs of their favorite stories and, when they make the longish drive to visit family near Milwaukee, my parents listen to them on a battery-powered CD player that my mom puts by her feet.

I find this image unbearably charming.

So we listened to Whistler and Johnny Dollar. It was a lovely way to spend an evening! Me and mothe_bones listen to podcasts a lot at home and often will have one on in preference to the TV. They calm Gary down, he knows they mean quiet time for humans so he might as well go to sleep.

Tonight my dad was snoring in his recliner so much he couldn't follow the stories, and I went to bed just after 8pm, having tried valiantly to stay awake long enough to hear the conclusion of the story but utterly losing that battle. It was a busy day for both my body and my brain and they were Done.

Comments

[otter]

At what point is what your parents doing considered weaponized incompetence? I mean, it mostly hurts themselves in a way, but that hazardous waste "plan" hurts ALL of us. Thank you for helping your dad find a safer way to dispose of all that stuff.

[sfred]

Oof.
<3


(My dad does keep a list of stuff he wants to look up on the internet next time he switches the computer on, but he refuses to have a smartphone and he is very frustrated at the level of life-stuff you have to do online. I think if he didn't have to file his taxes online, and do his banking online, he would ditch the computer and then be pleased that people would have to text or write a letter, rather than emailing.)

[cosmolinguist]

My parents are fine with some online things -- they e-mail, they Skype me, they read the news on their iPad in the morning (especially an issue in their old place where the mail wasn't delivered with the actual newspaper until the afternoon -- but they have apparently fossilized into just this. My mom used to work at a school and at least knew how to google things then, but I guess it's been long enough, and they mostly manage with their offline, paper-based, asking their friends/peers if they don't know something kind of life that they don't consider it relevant.

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you for saving the local groundwater from poisoning. Thank you for taking such good care of your parents.

Soon soon soon home and family and dog.

[cosmolinguist]

Home now! I miss them and I'm sad for all the work I've left them to do (especially because their internet hasn't been connected yet) but I'm glad to be back.

[silveradept]

Your parents sound like so many of the people I get in my library and who call my library. They don't want to do anything online of they don't have to, they're convinced that computers are going to either explode or steal all their personal information if they do the tiniest thing wrong, and they want phone numbers and addresses for businesses that don't have either of them and don't advertise them, either. It's often forty minutes of coaxing then into doing the thing that takes two minutes because they will spend forty minutes telling you about how much they hate having to do this task.

What I really want for them is a class they can take from someone they'll trust and believe who will walk them through doing tasks and who will listen and gently refute all of the wild nonsense they believe. I am not that person, I'm too young.

Good for you on getting the hazardous waste to go to the place it should go to.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I thnk this is why their kids (or similar) end up doing it; it isn't just the relative youth, it's that the old people trust them. I think sometimes they listen too, but my parents never do: they don't really want to learn this stuff, they want it to go away.

[silveradept]

That last statement is the kernel of truth at the heart of it: they don't want to have to learn how to do the thing, they want it to go away and not have to acknowledge that the old ways are no longer viable. (Or, at the least, they want the new way to intrude as little as possible and for a very limited amount of time.)

[gender_euphoric]

Oh my gosh, your mom wanted to set up a future superfund site!! Yikes.

[cosmolinguist]

With no malice in her heart at all! It was so weird.

[forests_of_fire]

My big win for the day was defeating my mom's horrifying "plan" for hazardous waste disposal. I can't remember if I said but since they can't put stuff like paint in the dumpster, her plan was to dig a hole in the yard, pour the paint in, bury it, and then put the paint cans in the dumpster! I couldn't believe my ears and it was hard not to freak out at this.

I fucking screamed WTF?? -headdesks-

I almost wonder if their resistance to learning how to do shit online was because they resent the fact that kids are supposed to be there to do it for them, just like kids are supposed to take care of them in any other way.