Fortunately my dad is a retired cybersecurity architect so they live as modern-day Luddites.
I wish.
My father currently works in IT and has “smart” everything (except locks, thankfully)
He has multiple Alexa thingies (used to be Google homes), Internet thermostat, smart light switches, smart cameras/doorbells, smart plugs
Idk why he does. The only thing that really provide any value are the light switches and plugs (scheduled lighting) and maybe the doorbell thingies
the fact that my grandmother absolutely, hard ass refuses to do anything that would improve her situation. Just bitches and moans and has great big narcissistic pity parties until someone forces it down her fucking throat.
For example, her vision isnt great, she complaints its hard to use the computer cause she cant see to type (Shes one of those chicken peck typers). I tell her to get a large print keyboard with a backlight, it’d be easier for her to see and use.
She says no, it wont help. nothing will help. boo hoo pity me blah blah bullshit.
Long story short, it goes back and forth for a month, with her refusing the idea, refusing when I directly link her to a keyboard to buy (it was cheap, too), etc etc. Just making a big fucking woe is me pity party out of it.
I finally say fuck it, buy the goddamn keyboard myself, take it over to her house, put it on her computer.
within 5 minutes “Why didnt you tell me about this before? Its amazing! I can see it and use the computer again!”
Shes the reason i’ve been balding for 20 years.
That sounds more borderline than narcissistic.
The difference between borderline and narcissism is fairly small. They are both cluster b because the symptoms overlap. It sounds more like histrionic, another cluster b disorder. The diagnosis itself means very little unless the person is seeking treatment.
Yeah, laypeople using big words from the DSM to try and sound smart is cringe
big words from the DSM
Ah yes, the big word derived from the mythical Narcissus, who we learned about in school… If anything, the issue seems to be the opposite, where the word is too widely known and used without knowing the overlapping medical term.
When I found out that my dad doesn’t know what the backspace key does on the PC keyboard. His whole life he’s only ever used the Del key and always positions the cursor to the left of text he wants to delete. He used to work at IBM for over 30 years and learned to program back in the day when computer code was printed on punch cards. But I’m pretty sure keyboards already had the backspace key back then.
IBM PCs definitely had backspace keys. I believe that IBM is the reason they have backspace keys. They weren’t standard features on a lot of earlier computers. IBM rather unintentionally standardized keyboard layout, because everyone wanted to build clones.
My mother is very smart. She knows her shit, but her shit does not include tech anything, which, unfortunately, makes her obviously afraid of it. She claims otherwise, but it’s true. If anything goes wrong once, it will forever be that way to her. She’s also incredibly stubborn.
To touch on that last point, she went through her advanced schooling in the 60s, at a time when typing was apparently taught at universities. Her professor made one comment about the women in the room going on to be secretaries, which my mom has clinged to, like so many other things, and now spitefully refuses to learn how to type properly.
I’ve shown her every single time I touch her laptop how to scroll through sites using two fingers on the touch pad. Nope, she must very slowly, squinting, find the tiny, hidden scroll bar, and, even more slowly, drag it down.
Her ability to read seems to completely disappear as soon as she turns on her computer or looks at her phone. After over a decade of holding her hand to do super basic things, the answers to which are almost always found by reading and comprehending, I made it a point to not outright tell her what to do if it’s plainly obvious anymore. She still tries to get me to do it for her by staring at the screen for a moment and then looking at me like she’s completely lost, or asking in the most annoyed way possible what to do, when the only options are click OK or… nothing.
“How do I do (x)?” Where (x) is something like opening Firefox from the desktop, going back to her browser-based email from a different tab, etc.
“You know how. You’ve done it several times before.”
“That doesn’t mean I remember how!” While actively doing the thing.
And the gestures - dismissive hand waving at the screen whenever something mildly inconvenient appears, the annoyed sighs, all of it.
I observe the exact same thing in my parents - it’s as if they somehow can’t see some things on the screen, or lose the ability to comprehend written text, when it’s unexpectedly displayed on a screen. They always fixate on some irrelevant UI element, ignoring the one that’s currently important.
Mine used to say “can you make the picture on my screen go away?”. The “picture” was always a pop up with very clearly written instructions or questions like “would you like to save before closing?”.
So they actually, provably, lost the ability to recognize writing.
