I may have told you this story before, but it may make you feel better, @Thenomain.
Once upon a very long time ago, I got a 'halp!' call from my father for tech support, shortly after they got a new computer.
There are two important facts to know here:
-
I am a lifelong mac user. My mother worked for the school district back when mac was the school computer in the 80s, so it's what we had in the house for the two of us to use.
-
My father has been using computers far longer than that. He was a journalist for years, and had a travel word processor from hell and later a 'laptop' that took up a whole hard-sided briefcase (and had its own handle), that used the kind of modem that looks like two giant suction cups that you'd screw onto a phone. As in, I remember when we had to upgrade one of the phones in the house to push-button from rotary, and this was a big stinkin' deal, because the equipment he was using required the kind of phone that could translate the tones.
That he was calling me for tech support was worrying, as a result. Mom had been using PCs a while since the schools had since switched over, which was why they did, too, and this was somehow different from the (by now relatively normal by mid-90s standards) laptop he'd been issued at work.
He explains that he can't ask my mother, because he has a question about-
-- wait for it --
-porn on the internet.
About which apparently I knew everything? I am, to this day, amused and completely fucking baffled by this; the only thing that became clear was why he couldn't ask my mother•.
But he sounded so legitimately distressed that, gods help me, I asked him what his boggle was. (This is where I pause to take a really deep breath because just remembering this, and how painfully earnest and upset he was, is making me tear up with laughter.)
Dad: "They're trying to scam me out of money, I can tell!"
Me: "Well, a lot of sites do that, yeah."
Dad: "They said it was all free, though! And one of these, I gave in and entered my credit card info, and it still did the same thing! They're trying to scam me!"
Me: <now legitimately confused> "What's it doing?"
Dad: "The pictures cut off halfway down the page, no matter what page I click on."
Me: "Huh. And it won't scroll down?"
Dad: "...scroll down?"
Yes, the man who had used scrollbars in every other piece of software he had ever used in his life to scroll up, down, left, right, and every-which-way he needed... did not think to try to scroll down.
For days.
Days over which he spent money and tragically futile rage in, apparently, abundance.
Me: "Yeah. Just like the stuff you used for work, or all those articles you read in the web browser, or emails... "
Dad: <sounding happy as a schoolboy> "You're a genius! You fixed it!"
Me: "Glad it's working now, Dad. Enjoy."
And that's how I became <cough> the guru of internet porn, apparently.
It took the better part of a decade to disabuse him of the notion that I could perform any and all required magic on his computer after that. At one point, he called to ask what he needed to type to upgrade his RAM. One frantic 3AM call•• involved something barely coherent about software to magically translate foreign films without dub tracks or subtitles into English because this was something that should and therefore must exist.
I swear, it happens to all of us.
• (And she wouldn't have told him, she would have made some shit up on the fly about a saint trying to save him from hellfire and 'breaking' the computer to save him from himself and while that shit normally drives me screaming up the wall, in this case, I would have laughed my fucking ass off.)
•• (I forgive him this one. I once called him frantically at 3AM to come over from next door to kill a really, really enormous spider before the days of the spider-smashing heavy-duty swiffer with Mjolnir scrawled down its side.)
![😕](http://musoapbox.net/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=4vfms5ns7sl ":\")
I think something got into this one and under the slip of ribbon with the contacts and fucked up something good. Because while cleaning one day (in the hopes I'd clear out whatever it was), I had about 30 seconds where it worked!!! and then it stopped again.
