Tech Tuesdays: Unintentional Bad Tech Support

This time I’m not talking about dealing with the automated chatbots when you try to contact a tech vendor. I’m talking about when you try to help a friend with a tech issue and given your years of experience, you should be able to help them, no problem. But we’re not talking about the usual, “why won’t this work when I do that?” kind of problem. We’re not even talking about those time I’ve done major Windows or Mac OS updates that went on for hours (or overnight!). I think my first case of “unintended bad tech support” was something many techies do, when I did a technology-hand-me-down and gave my “old” Windows system (that I’d upgraded from) to my mom as her first computer. Oops.

This isn’t a slam against Windows (that’s later…), but the usual mistake geeks make when handing down technology is thinking that your old system should do just fine because the person getting the system isn’t going to need anything “high end.” It’s logical. They aren’t going to be doing any video or photo editing or gaming, the old tech should be just fine. But that’s a mistake.

The real question the geek should be asking as they hand down their old computer is how reliable and stable was that system? Did it have any quirks? Does it start up fine every time? Does it require a software/system maintenance download every time you turn it on? You see, any problem, any glitch, no matter how minor it might seem to us, is going to be just another that mom (in my case) is just going to stop using the computer. I mean, we’re so used to working around any quirk that might come up, we don’t even think about it when handing it down to the less tech-savvy. So, don’t hand down anything that isn’t rock solid 100% dependable every time. In this case, it ain’t about the power or speed or newness, but the reliability. So giving my mom my old stuck-together PC was a mistake.

The next major error is making big changes that the intended user didn’t ask for (and I’ve done this one more than once… ack!). After the debacle giving my old PC to my technophobe/newbie mom, I decided to give her some thing much more reliable and easy to use. I gave her a Mac mini. It was much more reliable and the user-interface was so much easier than the old PC. Of course, the problem then became that she was used to the old PC and the UI was just different enough to keep her permanently confused. It didn’t help that I then moved across the country and couldn’t offer any hands on help when she needed it. Add to that, one of my older sisters, a PC user, would come over and offer her support and only confuse her all the more. As much as I loved my Macs and found them very simple to use, I should have just gotten mom a more reliable PC. Doh!

2005-12-24 Xmas at the Quinbys - Mom opens her Mac Mini — **2005-12-24 Xmas at the Quinbys – Mom opens her Mac Mini**

I then followed up that miscalculation with the brilliant idea that what mom really needed was an iPad. I had bought one for myself when they first came out and saw how convenient it was to have something that I could use from the kitchen table or the couch or anywhere in the house when I wanted to check my email or browse the web or listen to music. And the user interface was even easier than using a mouse and keyboard on a computer. Well, that’s what I thought. But then I’d already been using an iPhone for three or four years so using an iPad was no huge adjustment for me. All I saw was its usefulness and ease of use and that I didn’t have to sit at a computer desk to do my tech stuff. But I wasn’t entirely clueless when it came to whether my mom could make the jump to this new technology,. I made a series of videos for her on how to use the iPad. I don’t remember how I shared the videos with her, probably made a YouTube playlist for her to click (I’ll post the videos below…). I have no idea how much or how often she used the iPad or whether she ever consulted the videos I’d made. But, this turned into another case of me giving her technology that she really didn’t ask for and I wasn’t available enough to get her into any habit of using it. Ugh. You would think that I would have learned from these “errors,” but wait, there’s more!

Yeah. Then there was that time that I bought mom an Amazon Echo Show so that we could do video calls. We were a little more successful with that effort than the PC/Mac/iPad experiments. But it still was a case where it was still just difficult enough when she tried to initiate a video call or even a voice call that we probably didn’t use the device more than a dozen times over several years. It’s a dangerous thing when nerds think something is useful and attempts to share the discovery with those less-nerd-inclined. And I can’t blame the generational differences for the lack of adoption. I unintentionally did the exact PC-to-Mac/iPad/Amazon Echo miscalculation with a recent significant other. Thinking about it now, she seems to really enjoy her iPad, but the conversion from her PC-to-Mac probably wasn’t necessary and lord know what happened to her Echo Show. Mine has just become an expensive smart clock. Ugh.