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Oh god.
Is this a safe place to talk about Mum Internetting?
My mum seems utterly incapable of searching for things. Her business is internet based, yet whenever I send her details about a local shop online – always linking to the address section of the site – she immediately emails back: ‘looks good where is it’
Mum, you DO KNOW you can just google the address and it’ll show you a map
Or Mom smart phoning? My mom finally got a smart phone (mostly for an easy way to take and share photos of her grandchildren) and asked me to show her how to use it. She scared herself taking her first selfie and then we both collapsed into giggles – I don’t think we’ve laughed that hard together since she tried to teach me how to drive a manual transmission.
My mum has a blackberry and is pretty good with it, but it’s like there’s a block in her brain about downloading apps. She makes my dad do it for her.
Or Mum Skyping?
My Mum manages to mute her microphone almost EVERY time we skype, and still hasn’t figured out how to turn it on herself. If my Dad is there, he fixes it. However, when he’s not there, we skype for 5 minutes while she gets more and more frustrated, and I try and suggest ways to fix it. Inevitably, she switches computers, or we give up.
All of the moms I know have somehow discovered emojis at the exact same time and they are all fucking DELIGHTED.
As a mom with a 21yo and a 16yo, I can attest to this delight. I HAVE EMOJIS I AM UNSTOPPABLE
My favorite ever mom-text was when she sent me various emojii of things she wished for me for my birthday but then accidentally hit some wrong ones and didn’t know how to erase them. So it was just like “cake heart syringe flowers gun puppy sun pill”.
Mine has picked up chatspeak somehow and will periodically drop in “OMG” or “lol” in her text messages. It’s jarring yet hilarious.
my mother signs every text message “love, mom”
Mine never uses facebook, yet was deeply offended when I didn’t want to friend her on it.
mine uses my father’s facebook account
My mom recently sent me an email to comment on a facebook post I had made. It was adorable.
My aunt does all the facebook mom-ing I need. She comments on several of my posts at a time, often ones from weeks or months ago, usually to say how lovely or happy I look in them, or how grown-up I am now.
Ahhh, my mum’s best friend (who is pretty much family) does this. They’re not even my posts; they’re photos I’ve been tagged in. And they’re from about a year prior to her commenting. “lovely pic u look very pretty, say hi to your mum for me xx”
My mom’s got good at Skype, since I live on another continent and my siblings live on the other side of the US, but one day it wasn’t working. I suggested we use FaceTime, since we both have iPhones and my father has an iPad, and she was very skeptical about it working on the iPad. Mom, I am pretty sure that’s what FaceTime was designed for.
🙂 🙂 🙂
Clinique samples were the only* makeup we had growing up, because if it was bonus time, Mom was in there grabbing them. And then passing on things that “didn’t work” for her, as if we don’t have the exact same skin tone and type as her.
*maybe there was more, but I wouldn’t know because it was all buried under yellow moisturizer.
My mom is your mom but with Estee Lauder.
For years my mom didn’t get the big deal about the internet. Then I realized that while I had taught her to type her search into Google, I hadn’t explained what hyperlinks are, so she thought the internet was just a long list of blue sentence fragments.
I still need to explain the difference between email and and an internet browser….
This story is generating a strange combination of gleeful cringing. Gringing perhaps.
“What do mean the internet is just a bunch of words that don’t even make sen–Wait, have you clicked any of the blue text? Yes, clicked. Click the…Mom, click the words that are blue. Yes, any of them. NOW you see George Clooney! YES!”
… I am now wondering if I’ve ever taught Mom the implicit last part of the search process, the past where you click the blue words. That would explain a lot. I mean, if you teach someone to drive by putting them in the driver’s seat and telling them to turn on the gas but never mention the accelerator, they won’t get far.
Exactly. Never occurred to me to follow the explanation to its full end. It’s like the difference between clicking and double-clicking. Absolutely intuitive for those of us who grew up on computers, but I still have to explain that a button only needs to be clicked once to my mom.
My partner, who is 60, double clicks on everything. He also leaves 2 spaces after a period.
#generationgap
My mom once emailed me – on the same day – an article saying that women should never use tampons because they would instantly die of toxic shock syndrome and another article saying that women should never use pads because they all contain asbestos.
This was before menstrual cups became really popular, so I wasn’t sure what exactly she wanted me to do – freebleed all over the place?
regresss to pre-pubescence and remain her precious baby forever?
Just be pregnant all the time until menopause, and thus provide her with a litter of adorable grandchildren
You were not sure what she wanted you to do – so, she failed to send you the links on making your own pads out of fabric scraps and SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT and NEVER DEPEND ON THE FEMININE HYGIENE INDUSTRIES THAT EXPLOIT WOMEN’S NEEDS again. Google it, click once on the blue links, and you can find lots of instructions.
Go sit on your bucket, Fennel!
LESSER TAUPE
My mom just plain forgets that the internet exists most of the time. She and my dad are forever having conversations where they’re like “it’d be cool to find out about x” and “I wonder if x” or “where could I buy x” and never, ever think to just look it up.
An older lady I volunteer with was trying to remember the name of a British TV show she loved in the 80s. I managed to find it with what details she remembered and told her the title. She was very excited, and lamented not having seen it in years. So I found it on Amazon and told her she could order complete seasons on DVD for not a whole lot of money. And she rolled her eyes and said “That’s the problem with you kids today. You can find anything whenever you want it.” Er…yes? That is the….problem? With us?
You terrible kids and your finding stuff instead of just being wistful about it!
In preparation for oral surgery a few years ago, I was lamenting to my mother that I wished we had cable because I imagined all I’d want to do was plunk down in front of the TV and watch Columbo without commandeering our household’s then-only laptop.
My mother, who is not comfortable with the internet, surprised me with a Best of Columbo DVD she tracked down online. It’s one of the sweetest things she’s ever done. I recently mentioned it when she was saying “Oh, I never order things off the internet!” I pointed out the Columbo DVD; she said “Noooo, I found that on Google and I called the phone number! I would never order it from an online!”
… same people, Mom. Same people.
I love this story so much.
That is so sweet!!
Also, very reminiscent of my mom, who will not place an order online (“because that’s how the steal your credit card information!”) but will happily call a number and give them all the same information.
Riiiiiight? And at the same time, she’s not operating irrationally: if you don’t feel competent to judge the marketplace and discern which places are scammy or insecure, it makes a certain amount of sense to avoid that marketplace entirely and rely upon a more familiar one. The logical breakdown is in not recognizing that this is obviously the same place.
Right, the credit card information gets run through the same system whether you’re the one typing in the numbers or the person on the other end of the line is.
I’m 31 and I can totally relate to this. We’ve lost the joy of the hunt! When I was 15 I spent months looking for the out-of-print Newsies soundtrack (shut up). When I finally found it I was elated. Kids today can just order that shit off Amazon in 2 minutes, and thus lack the character built by such a journey.
I dunno, I spent months tracking down an old game board and its pieces for my husband’s Christmas present one year and I definitely experienced the thrill of the hunt: even on eBay, it took a lot of searching and examining and piecing things together from different sellers before I collected all the necessary pieces.
Similarly, there’s a very specific skirt I own that I now wish — five years later — I had also bought in black. Someday, I’m going to find it, probably thanks to a combination of Google alerts and eBay searches. Ten or twenty years ago, I would never have found it, but given the abilities of the current day, I probably will. And I’m going to be delighted!
What constitutes “the hunt” has changed, but it isn’t gone.
It’s so aggravating to listen to moms and dads having a “I wonder if x” conversation while their smartphones lie listlessly on the table next to them. What do they think they’re for?
I am the mom, but The Dad of the House does this, so it is my job to look things up.
My parents once called me long distance (from a landline, so “long distance” meant something) from their vacation to my aunt’s home to ask me what gremolata is. I was a little puzzled, since even if Mom didn’t remember, it’s easier to Google it than to remember my number.
Only their triumphant (and tipsy) laughter when I answered revealed the truth: this was some sort of bet not about what gremolata contains but about my ability to answer the question instantly. They were using me as their Google and wagering on the outcome.
My mom instructs me and/or my sister to look stuff up on our phones for her, even though she also has an iPhone.
My boyfriend does this to me as well, but I get a very strange sense of satisfaction from being the One To Find The Thing Online so I suspect he’s doing it more for that than laziness. (Laziness too.)
My dad does this and calls me his “daughter app.” Like, to my mom, “Let’s just ask the daughter app, it’s the fastest way to find out.” Makes me giggle.
I for one love that yellow Clinique moisturizer.
Seconded. I’m just about to bust it out for the season, since we’ve finally entered actual cold weather and my skin is going into histrionics over how dry it is.
You’re half a mom already!
I wanted to love it, but it doesn’t work for me 🙁 It sinks into my skin really fast and then it’s like I never moisturized in the first place – back to tight, dry skin right away.
I’ve literally been using it every day for the past 15 years. Works darn well for me.
…And I picked up the habit from my mom…
OH GOD IT’S HAPPENING
Lost it at two separate continents.
My mom sends my emails signed “Love, Mom and Henry” now
Henry is the dog
Amazing. I think my mom is probably about 2-3 months away from doing that. Her dog has been getting steadily more spoiled over the past 5-8 years.
My mom has been known to refer to the dog as “your youngest sister.”
haha my mom calls the dog my “sister” too. I have an epic email from her about how my “sister” wouldn’t leave the dog park, and how she obviously took after me because i like to stay out too late also.
My mom sometimes accidentally says the dog’s name when she means my sister’s name and vice-versa. (they’re both four-letter two-syllable names ending with an ‘a’), and for some reason it seriously pisses my sister off.
My mother used to alternate between calling my brother by the dog’s name and calling the dog by my brother’s name. They both start with M and, more importantly, both of them often did things at the time that necessitated her yelling at/for them. Though the dog has since died, my brother is not gonna let her forget it any time soon.
My mom used to send me cards from her and the dog, where his signature was a little doodle of a paw print.
Yes, I got those too! I loved them…
I do the paw print signature on the birthday card of every family member! The big cat gets a big paw print and the little cat gets a little paw print. I’m an honorary mom!
My mom refers to our two cats are “my grandkittens” and gives them Christmas presents. She inquires “How are my girls?” more often than she inquires about the status of me, her actual daughter, and my husband.
YUP! When I had a dog and my parents came to visit, it was always “OH LOOK IT’S BAXTER!!!!!!! oh hi Jenny.” Seriously though I thought it was great.
My now-fiance’s mother (who is really not an animal person) is so enamored of my cat that she *printed out a photo of him to show all her friends* at a party she had the last time we came to visit. I mean, he is a very attractive cat.
(The last time we saw her, though, was for a family wedding, and her oldest niece brought both of her babies, and my mother-in-law-to-be kept picking up the 1-month-old and cooing and then LOOKING AT US POINTEDLY. We weren’t even engaged at that point!)
My sister once signed an email from herself, her husband, and the tiny baby still inside her. It was in the days before smartphones and Bluetooth, and I just wanted to know how she got the keyboard up there.
My mom sent me mothers day cards from my dog. It was adorable.
My friend’s mom realized how much I like one of her cats, so now I get pictures of the cat followed (less than ten minutes later) by texts asking if I got the pictures. If I don’t respond soon enough, I get a text from my friend saying her mother wants to know if I got the picture of the cat.
This entire thread makes me feel greatly reassured about my own family. Maybe they are still a bit odd, objectively speaking, but at least now I know I’m not alone.
*Another person who has received a Mothers’ Day card from the cat, courtesy of mum*
The skydiving search made me laugh. My mom is very big into health and safety – she would approve of those links.
I’m glad my mom doesn’t control my search engine. Any search about cat videos or random pop culture questions done during work hours would bring up results about good time management, overcoming procrastination and tips for highly efficient people.
You searched for “unflattering beyonce pictures”. Did you mean “getting back to work”?
“color that would look good in the hallway, I’m thinking sort of an olive green but more like [gestures vaguely], and with warm undertones”
*our color-matching app is the perfect choice to be the one app on your phone. Pull it out every time you go to Target from now on!*
“video where a porcupine eats a pumpkin”
*here’s a different video, you should send both of them to your daughter*
60% of my phone calls with my mom are about what color she should paint some room in her house.
I have had this conversation so many times that I actually know what my mom means when she says she’s looking for a color that’s more [vague gesture].
I have so many conversations with coworkers that ask “Can you do the…” “is that a do we could you I don’t?” Now I just wait for the second draft, or gather fragments until I can send off for a whole sentence.
Me: That video sounds cute, send the link to me?
Mom: I saw it on Facebook, I can’t send you Facebook.
The skydiving ones are my favorite. I want there to be a Journal of Extremely Dangerous Things.
I’ve seen one! It’s published by, like, the National Park Service or something, and it’s an annual describing all the accidents and “incidents” that happened in the parks that year, with causes, outcomes, and recommendations. I wish I could remember the name of it– it was right around the corner in the library from the sports&games books I was using at the time…
Or you could always go with _Injury Facts_: “Since the early 1920s, the National Safety Council has published an annual statistical compendium on unintentional injuries and deaths and comprehensive illness data —first as Accident Facts® and now Injury Facts®.”
My world is a better place for knowing these exist, but now I must make sure my mother NEVER finds out about them.
See also: Motorcycle riding
I MISS MY SPINAL CORD
We bought my mom a laptop for Christmas last year and helped her set it up. She was having trouble getting to her email, though. I found this phrase typed into the google search bar : “MY EMAIL”
Pretty much all of my lipstick is something my mom bought and decided against. I never wear lipstick, so it’s just an elaborate ruse where I hold it in a drawer for 2+ years and then throw it away, but she never has to feel wasteful. It’s the least I can do.
Maybe we’re ready for Dad magazine’s companion, Mom’s blog (which is the opposite of a mommy blog).
I feel like on Moogle, no matter what hairstyle you search, text or image, the only result that comes up is an article entitled “You Look So Pretty With That Hair Off Your Face.” Maybe one entitled “Well, It’s Certainly … Different.”
Or alternatively
Go For It, Try These Crazy Hairstyles! (Much better than doing anything permanent)
Much better than doing anything permanent! My mom’s core philosophy when I was a teen.
“Please Don’t Cut It”
“Please, please don’t cut it” and the sequel, “Why don’t you cut it? It looked so nice when it was short, but now it doesn’t have a ~style~”
Or the two-parter: “Have you considered going blond again, like when you were a kid?” followed by “Blond is a terrible color on you now, why on earth did you go lighter?”
“But you have the nicest hair of any of the kids, why do you have to cut it all off?” I was over thirty when this was pronounced by the mother.
“I Wish You Would Grow Your Hair Out” and “Please Don’t Dye It Again”
“But you always looked so adorable with bangs”
Are you ME?!?!
Did your mom send you pictures of cute celebrities with bangs and “:-(” for the six months it took you to finally grow them out?
Hahaha! Didn’t occur to her. But when she sees some bangsed person on TV and I’m around, she often makes a comment about how much she likes bangs and how nice and YOUNGER-looking they make people look.
(I *love* white tulips btw :))
Oh gosh the TV watching! “Doesn’t she look so sweet and pretty and young with bangs?” Do we have the same mom? LOL.
I have curly hair so bangs are literally the worst possible thing I can do to my hair. lol.
( white tulips! <3)
My sister is the lucky, curly-haired one and I’m the one who had bangs way longer than I’m willing to admit. 😉 In all fairness, they did look nice, I just got bored.
Moms <3
Variation: “Your Face Looks Better Without Glasses”
Haha, yes. When I was a kid it was all “Where are your glasses!? Did you break them again!?”
Now it’s, “Why don’t you try contacts again? You look so much better without glasses!” Contacts make my eyes itch, and they don’t correct my vision as well, and after having glasses for 25 years I feel like random shit is going to fly into my unprotected eyes whenever I take them off.
My mother constantly sends me videos from MSN.com and the screen is either completely blank or the link just goes to the MSN homepage, EVERY TIME. And every time I email her back and say “The video didn’t load,” and every single time she emails me back and goes, “Oh, sorry. Are you cranky? You sound cranky.”
My parents don’t understand the concept of links. They have been known to send me full-sized manila envelopes of printouts from the internet that they think I should read. In the mail.
YES. When I lived near my parents, my dad would regularly print out entire emails (of the “100 most ridiculous things ever said in court!” etc. chain variety) to show me.
Holy crap, between “I miss my spinal cord” and “did you mean: ‘clinique samples'” i’m about to laugh/cry over here.
Since I recently smashed off part of my finger during an accident in a weightroom*, I worry that I’m going to be a permanent Moogle search result for “why women shouldn’t lift heavy things” for my mother and every mother in my extended family with the exception of my sister, who is apparently married to a man who has butchered his fingers extensively over the years.
o_O
*do not let this scare you off of barbells, none of them were involved in this accident.
This was wonderful. It made me laugh loud enough to scare the cats.
I’m fairly sure that my mother’s internet only connects to cruise related websites.
This is why I did not tell my mom I was skydiving until I was safely on the ground. This is how the conversation went:
Me: Guess what I just did!
Mom: I don’t know, what?
Me: I’ll give you a hint: you’re really not going to like it, but I’m fine.
Mom: WHY WOULD YOU JUMP OUT OF A PLANE
Motherly intuition: it’s a real thing.
My mom didn’t speak to me for a week after I told her I went skydiving. But mom, I’m fine! Back on terra firma! I already did it and nothing bad happened!
My mom is terrified of cities, getting lost in cities, and public transportation, so I waited until I was already back home to tell her that on a trip to visit a friend in DC, I…TOOK THE METRO FROM THE AIRPORT BY MYSELF *thunder crashes*
My mom does the same thing! Normally she’s pretty relaxed with her mom-ness but the second any of her darling children leave the immediate vicinity of wherever they happen to be living, it’s RED ALERT with regard to any and all forms of transportation. Driving? BEWARE OF ACCIDENTS. Flying? BEWARE OF PLANE CRASHES. Trains/buses/metros? BEWARE OF I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT, STUFF I GUESS.
I was living in *another country* and she was still going ‘oh, I don’t know about you taking the train to another city by yourself’. Hell, mom, I managed to fly here all by myself in the first place, I think I can manage a day trip alone.
My mom, when I told her to meet me at a dress store in BEVERLY HILLS:
“Oh, I don’t like driving through that neighborhood. It’s not very nice.”
BEVERLY. HILLS.
My mother does not have the same intuition. Every time I say “I have good news!” or “I have something to tell you, it’s important, you’d better sit down” it has to be immediately followed with a calming “NO IM NOT PREGNANT.”
I don’t want kids, and luckily she is very supportive of that, but for some reason she keeps thinking I’m going to accidentally get pregnant.
Yup, I went skydiving, it was planned months in advance and didn’t tell mom about it until after. Now, of course I tease her mercilessly with it. “Don’t worry about me mom, I won’t tell you when I’m going bungee jumping til after I do it.” “I went ziplining this weekend, it was fun but it was no skydiving. I should do that again.”
My parents recently went on a vacation to Hawaii. Mom sent me excited texts with pictures from when they went ziplining, snorkeling, uhm… that thing where you hang from a parachute being towed behind a boat? and RAPELLING DOWN A WATERFALL. And when I tell her I’m going climbing at the nice, safe, padded-floored indoor rock gym she’s all, “Be careful! You don’t want to hurt your knee again!”
That is BRILLIANT.
I have lived in cities and away from my parents for SEVEN YEARS and my mum is still freaked about me going home by myself at night. Mum. C’mon. The bus is perfectly safe. So is the train. (Okay shhhh there’s always the possibility of creepers but I don’t tell her that.)
back in college I planned NOT to tell my mother about my skydiviing at all….but was forced to when my car broke down in Ohio (I went to college in PA), I had to call to ask for money, and she asked what was I doing in Ohio? She was FURIOUS–and told me skydiving wasn’t an exercise that would help me lose weight, I should play tennis instead!
I thought I was the only one with the mother who was the compulsive article clipper. She does this even after more than one conversation asking, “So did you want this,” and I say no. And the Clinique stuff. Since I’ve been saying no for the past 30 years, she offers it only occasionally now.
Although this is utterly different from my own Mom-related experience*, it is nonetheless wonderful.
*My Moogle would have a feature that recognizes any song you are currently humming and then starts singing along at full volume. It would also have a feature that automatically refilled my wineglass while Doctor Who is on.
When my mom googles something, she doesn’t put spaces between the words.
Does she know about hashtags?
There must be Moms who are the most competent internetters you know, right? Not mine, but someone’s. I would love to hear stories about your whiz-bang internetting Moms.
My mother is a retired computer programmer who isn’t online at all. It’s not a privacy thing. She just can’t be bothered. Everything that has to be done online goes through (lucky, lucky) me.
My father was a computer programmer and software designer, starting as a teacher back in the ’60s when he was excited that the campus computer was compact enough to move around campus on a cart, and I’m starting to wonder if Mom’s resistance to learning computer literacy is in part because it was Dad’s territory (and probably somewhat tiresome subject of conversation). It’s certainly not that she couldn’t learn this stuff.
My mother is as good at internetting as I am, pretty much, which is to say she’s great at it. She fixed all my grandma’s POP server settings the other day and then set up email forwarding. I was just reading this and feeling alone because my mother is nothing like this – and meanwhile I am totally the one who warns her that things might be dangerous and passes on my disliked lipsticks and free clinique samples, hahaha.
My mom’s not bad. She refuses to learn how to use tabbed browsing, which makes me crazy, and she self-deprecates like mad about her computer skills, but she’s perfectly capable of reading the internet like a normal human being.
Unnecessary toolbars notwithstanding, my mom is pretty great at the internet. She is also incredibly fast at responding to texts with appropriate emoji.
My grandma is actually pretty good at internetting! She got a laptop a few years ago and is generally pretty capable. The last time I saw her she asked me to help her figure out the brightness setting, which actually stumped me. She figured it out on her own later, though.
At a family gathering a few years ago, I promised myself I’d stop poking fun at my mother’s apparent technological shortcomings. At least, not where she can hear me.
She asked if someone could figure out why her (very expensive, very wonderful) printer had suddenly stopped working. All of my assembled siblings started laughing and joking that OF COURSE she couldn’t figure out her printer; I assured her that it was probably a queuing problem and that I could teach her again how to clear that.
But when I went to look, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was wrong. After ~20 minutes of googling and reading the downloaded manual (hers was missing, which is not a surprise), I realized someone had hit the “reverse feed” button, so printed paged were now intended to shoot out the back of the printer… which was almost closed, butted up against the wall. I opened it and out popped all her pages; I showed her what happened and we agreed to reset the feed so it worked the old way.
And I realized that it must be really, really hard to ask for help if the predictable response is people howling with laughter because of course you can’t figure it out ahahahahahaha, and even harder if you can’t count on them to stop laughing long enough to see that the problem is real.
I work in IT support so see lots of computer problems from simple fixes to huge stumpers. I would never laugh at anyone’s lack of knowledge about it though, because yeah this stuff can be really obscure or non-intuitive, especially if you didn’t grow up using the technology (and oftentimes even if you did). And lots of times I have to hunt around for hours for a solution to something that seems simple on the surface.
Yeah, I have made a point of telling her when a problem is hard for me, too, or when I’ve been able to solve her problem swiftly only because I’ve had similar problems myself.
One of the side effects of living with my father, a high-strung software designer and hardware innovator who did much of his work at home, is that she lived through an era when it was really, really easy to do irreparable damage with just a click or two — or at least Dad instilled in us all the idea that it was. So when something goes wrong, she A. thinks it’s probably catastrophic and B. isn’t keen to noodle around and see if she can solve it.
My boss had me print out a little sheet of instructions for the new credit card processing machine after work, since I was the one who’d put him in touch with the payment company and set up the machine. I made a little troubleshooting section so people would stop asking me what was wrong when they needed to hit cancel or something. The first step in this section is “DON’T PANIC. You probably haven’t broken anything.”
My mom is relatively savvy, but she’s much less savvy than the rest of the family so she feels constantly inferior and also has Mac tutoring every week that, as far as I can tell, has about as much effect as my SAT tutoring, which is to say “none whatever, but it made me feel better.”
My mom’s place in the family has always been to show other people how to work their computers, phones, etc. She gradually pushed her parents and siblings into buying only Apple products because she provides better tech support for them, and none of them would ever try to use real tech support.
Now she has a part-time job helping “old ladies” de-clutter their homes and remember how to work their phones.
Frankly, I’m thinking of becoming a mom just so I can BE THAT INTERNET SAVVY MOM.*
*not really why I’d do that.
My mom LOVES the internet (like mother, like daughter). Whenever she has a question she doesn’t know the answer to, she heads to Google after asking my dad if he knows first. She’s found old recipes her mom made when she was a kid that she wanted to make again, this one weird fizzy sour ball candy we used to eat as kids but couldn’t find anywhere anymore, all kinds of stuff. She has been known on at least one occasion to enter a WikiHole. She bird watches pretty regularly, and wanted more info on a cool bird she saw. Next thing I know, she’s sending me texts about did I know that there are societies that are matriarchies and women are the heads of the family and can take more than one husband? She’s a proper misandrist – again, like mother, like daughter.
Ravelry power-user=my mom
My mom TEARS IT UP with technology and has been doing so since the 90s. She does a lot of websites for her professional societies, teaches online, writes a blog, and is the person I went to with technical questions right up until I married an IT guy. She and my grandma are both early adopters of tech. My daughter is 15 months old and called my sister on FaceTime the other day, although it didn’t work out because babies don’t understand about time zones and it was 4:30 a.m. in Berkeley.
Mom did used to turn the wi-fi off at night to protect it from hackers, but in retrospect she may have actually been trying to get me and my sister to go to sleep instead of dicking around on the internet all night.
My mom’s got the Internet skills! She regularly orders stuff and cheerfully browses through the Internet, and will send me good political cartoons and links to interesting articles from the local paper. Most of our communication is actually through Gmail or text, which is nice. She still asks my advice on more complicated computer stuff (why is her laptop so slow, does she need to renew her antivirus or get a new one) but it’s rare and usually pretty complex stuff she needs help with. Evenings at my folks’ place are usually her on her laptop and Dad switching between his iPad and the TV.
my mom has an instagram and sometimes uses those frames that you put multiple photos in from another app. She also uses hashtags sometimes. (and of course her instagram name has ‘momma’ in it ha)
Not internet, but several years ago, my grandmother got a program that lets you design your own greeting cards on the computer. So she custom-makes cards for all her grandkids for every birthday, Christmas, and occasionally some other holidays (and there are 13 of us grandkids now). She writes a little poem for every card. (She’s also perfectly competent at email and looking things up on the internet.)
My mum is an IT professional, so yes, she is a whiz. She trained in libraries in the 1980s, and if you understand search hierarchies, filing systems and cataloging then you understand the internet. Related: Maybe the only person I have ever known to deploy the term “boolean” in casual conversation.
My mom started designing webpages for fun and profit back in the ’90s. She was the one who had to convince me to get Facebook while I was in college, because I thought it sounded stupid and pointless. I remember her explaining what Twitter was to me before it hit it big, too. She was the first one to get a Kindle in the family and champion ebooks. I always feel like I exist in some sort of weird parallel universe when people my age and younger are joking about how tech-useless their parents are.
My mom was a travel agent in the 1980s, when everything was a command line with weird, cryptic and confusing codes that had to be memorized and typed in. Now she’s pretty much in control of her machine. I do have to remind her that the whole point and click interface is more robust than than she thinks, so she can click on stuff and see what happens. This is in direct contrast to my dad who has tried computers basically once every seven years for the past several decades and it just Does Not Take.
3 weeks late, but: My mother has a Masters of Library Information Science, and thus is an absolute wiz with databases and internet searches – all I need to do is mention something in passing and a few days later I get hit with a barrage of emails full of links to really excellent sources. If I gave her my university login she’d probably find even more. She used to go on Yahoo Answers and give people these really excellent, detailed answers with citations (which they all ignored because, Yahoo answers).
On the other hand, the workings of her smartphone and tablet are baffling to her. (But then, I grew up with the internet and yet, cannot comprehend Tumblr.)
I am intrigued by this whole “Jewish correspondent for a Christian humor magazine.” I could do that.
I’d send this to my mom to make her laugh, but I’m afraid she’d be genuinely distraught that Safeari Adventures aren’t a real thing.
You know, I know I don’t rely on memory nearly as much as I used to–why wonder who that actress was in that show when the tiny computer in my pocket will tell me immediately? And there’s definitely a loss of the hunt there. But then I think back to The Phaedrus (yeah, I’m going to bust out Plato) and the fear that the ability to write at all would reduce human memory. So, I guess it’s always somethin’?
To be fair, I suspect that widespread literacy, lack of oral memory, etc, has led to a loss of memory ability for humans. It’s like a muscle, people! We hardly even rote memorize in school anymore, even compared to a hundred years ago! *keeps frothing at the mouth about memory capacity as two competent nurses bundle her away to the funny farm*
I actually just got a Clinique bonus from my mom recently! I get so excited about them. Not sure why after so many years… But they always bring me happiness, maybe because I remember being a little kid and getting all excited about makeup.
…Kupo?
(I’m sorry.)
(I’m not really sorry.)
My main takeaway from this article is that I should suggest my Mom switch to Clinique in hopes of bonus gifts in the future.
My mom recently graduated to Estee Lauder, and now so have I! But only at free sample time, because that is as much makeup as I need.
My mother expects the internet to move at the approximate speed of thought, and will often click on something 125 times while waiting for a page to load.
Several years back, this searing impatience resulted in her purchasing 9 Sephora e-gift cards simultaneously for my sister’s birthday, and then shrieking that the website “KEEPS SENDING ME SPAM!!!!” when she was emailed all of her purchase reciepts. Then, upon checking her bank account, lost her mind over how Sephora stole her identity.
I just. Ma.
My mom doesn’t have the internet. Or a cell phone. They laugh at me for doing things like checking the traffic overlay on google maps before heading out for the long drive home from their place, because why wouldn’t I just listen to the radio and wait for a traffic report like normal people?
Also, I think this writer is amazing both for the story, but also that bio.
My mom has always been fairly internet savvy (save the time she turned off the computer when she got an AOL IM from my sister, worried she had a virus), but my farming uncle’s life could be greatly improved if all search engines were changed to only supply 1) weather forecasts, specifically rain levels and 2) the price of corn. Everything else is just noise.
Thanks, same. This kind of bummed me out because my mom is a total boss who’s had two different highly successful careers (one in information technology no less), and these are exactly the kind of “ha ha dumb old mom” jokes my father nevertheless feels entitled to make constantly. No thanks. My mom is a badass and I want her advice on EVERYTHING.
Oh my mom is a total boss (just not at internetting). And every time my dad makes any crack about her abilities RAGE ENSUES and I have to remind him that I basically owe my career success to her, even though she quit her high-powered job when I was young to take care of me and teach me how to be a captain of industry. (um, this is meant to be a brag about my mom, not about me, I am not really a captain of industry)
All brags about you AND your mom received with relish–I am pretty sure I read that on an Official Toast Stance at some point 🙂
My mom calls me the Pony Express because she doesn’t have internet at her apartment and so relies on me for news of the world when I come over for dinner (usually once a week). My most recent visits have included explanations of #Gamergate and “Too Many Cooks.” I love my mother.
“I know you have to catch your bus in 15 minutes but before you go I need you to order a pair of boots for your brother.”
“Okay, what kind of boots?”
“I don’t know what kind they were, but they were very nice, [neighbour] had some. He said he got them on Amazon.”
“…”
“I think they were brown?”
My MIL told me she’d found a pair of boots she wanted to buy for The Fella and would I look at them to give my opinion? She started reading me the whole long URL over the phone; I said “Just paste it into an email and send it” and talked her through that process.
The next day, I got the email. (Why did it take a day to send when she was sitting at her computer looking at it as we spoke? The world is full of mysteries.)
The link read only “http://llbean.com/”
THANKS, THAT NARROWS IT DOWN.
My mom has come a long way from the days she used to bring me to work with her so I could teach her how to copy files onto a floppy disk. But a few years ago I was trying to talk her into an iPad. “It’ll be perfect for you,” I’d say. “It will have everything you want and be really easy to use!” Everything she wanted, for the record, was email, Facebook, and one or two of those popular tetris-like games. She was really offended with the suggestion, but I got my dad into the idea and he bought her one for Christmas, and of course she loves it in all its Candy-Crush glory.
TL;DR iPads are the perfect thing for Moms Everywhere.
My mom went through a phase (I assume?!?!) when I was in college where she’d mail me articles she’d clipped out of the newspaper about the dangers of breast implants and lasic and various other elective procedures. I had never expressed interest in getting anything done (and I still done, nearly twenty years later) and in college I didn’t even wear glasses. Moms!
I just cry-laughed through this whole thing. Can you please do this every month? PLEASE
My mother is one of the best Internetters and general Web-based IT people I know. I learn tricks from her, and I Grew Up With Computers. She and my step-dad (also works in IT) are the go-to computer people in the family, while I’m third in line because I’m their kid, so obviously I know what I’m talking about.
Mad props to Savvy, Savvy Internet & IT moms.
My mom and my dad are both computer programmers- which is awesome except for the “oh,
i don’t do hardware.” That’s my mom- happy to play with her hadoop cluster at work, no help at picking graphics cards.
Ha! I get “Goblin sends her love.” Goblin is a cat who most definitely does NOT send her love. Maybe some vague disdain if she even remembers me, since I live 3000 miles away and they adopted her after I moved out.
my mom carries pictures of her grandcats. This from a woman who lied and told me she was allergic to cats my entire childhood.
I made the rather dreadful mistake of getting my mom a password manager because her passwords were AWFUL. I set it up for her. Walked her through set up and use three times. Have reminded her how to use it at least three more (twice from memory of the site over my phone). Now she blames me by extension every time something goes wrong with it. Doesn’t matter if it was operator error. Sigh.
Never again. I love my mom, but NEVER AGAIN.
My dad is a sort of a DIY techie early adopter type, and Mum’s a top-notch typist, so computers were always around in my youth. I have a very vivid memory of once visiting my mum in the computer room while she was typing a Very Important Document, and pressing the Big Red Button on the keyboard that we had been EXPLICITLY told at every junction not to touch. Memory doesn’t extend to what happened afterwards…
I’ve often wondered what the Big Red Button was for, and whether my memory of it being on the keyboard is accurate, or if I just pressed the power switch on the computer itself after having it pointed out to me as a Thing Not To Do. Either way, my mum doesn’t get mad very often, but I’m fairly certain that was one of the times.
YES! I call my mum once a week and she is always like “here are some thoughts I had about that article you posted.” I’m like, Mum you can comment on it and she’s like “I can’t be bothered with that.” ???
(omg first comment on The Toast)
My mom is the queen of ridiculous Google searches (also, I can’t get her to stop going to “google.com” to perform a search even though she uses Chrome). Probably my favorite is when she searched “what up with that lizard thing on teen wolf”. I laughed, but she found what she wanted!
My mother is an anomaly, as her recent holidays have involved:
– going to Sri Lanka and staying in places she’d found through Airbnb
– volunteering in an orphanage in Tamil Nadu
– providing healthcare in rural Kenya
She is about to go to Rwanda. She is thrilled at the prospect.
My mother still clicks all the ad links at the top of the yahoo search results first. We just had to wipe one heck of a trojan off her computer. Can you even get to yahoo from browsers that aren’t internet explorer these days? Mahoo: for moms even less tech-savvy than the users of Moogle.
I infinitely prefer double-spaces after periods! It allows the eye to rest, and then move on the next sentence!
YOU KNOW MY PAIN.
My mother's digital camera is surgically attached to her hand, and Lo! Every holiday we must therefore gather to see Mother's New Slide Show, courtesy of iPhoto, with gawdawful Fundamentalist Christian music timed perfectly to every slide change.
If we're lucky, they're less than 30 minutes long.
Two of my lovely Humanities profs are both in their late sixties, early seventies, and watching them try to search for something on the Interwebs during class is paaaaaaainful.
Both type in http://www.google.com every time in address bar, and then type in their search.
It hurts us, Baggins.
Not just comments, HTML and the entire internet in general does this. Actually, nowadays most settings (outside of a word document) edits two spaces down to one. You're conforming even if you don't mean to.
Even Word does it unless you turn auto-formatting off. Modern fonts have the spacing built in.