Just spent an hour on chat with my 75 year old mother being tech support. Utterly maddening.

One of her issues was with an excel file a friend sent her that was getting cut off when printed. Her friend came over(before my mom called me) to try and help. Now we have two 70+ year olds on the computer. Her friend did all kinds of stuff to my mom’s iMac. I told my mom, no one of your era should ever be your tech support. Keep them off your computer. I got the excel to print and fixed what the woman did.

It gets better.

We are not video chatting, I have control of her screen helping her with name tag labels so I can move her mouse and show her what’s what.

She keeps saying, “I’m showing you on the computer”.
I say, “Showing me what?”.
She says, “The label”.

I am looking at word document of her labels.

I say, “I’m looking at it”.
She says, “Do you see the elephant on the label?”. (my mother is über Republican and was referring to the Republican elephant symbol)

There are no elephants in the file. This goes back and forth for a while.

Her: “The elephant is right here!”
Me: “I’m looking at your screen, there are no elephants”.

Turns out she was “showing me on the computer” by holding a physical name badge sticker up to her computer’s camera.

A camera that we are not using.