Tech Support

My Mom calls about every other week with one question or another about her computer, which thankfully is a Mac so most things are super easy to walk her through over the phone. But I am now beginning to realize that I may have been going about things totally wrong.

You see, instead of just answering her questions, I have been explaining things to her, showing her shortcuts, showing her cool things she can do, and putting applications on her computer for her to play with... That was a bad idea! I now have a Mom who knows what she can do with her computer but does not know how to do it.

The most recent scenario was this last week: My Mom decided she wanted to put together a slide show for my Grandma’s 85th birthday.

Tuesday:
First phone call: My Mom calls and tells me the scanner is not working.
(It was working, it just did not “look” like it was because the pictures were not going into iPhoto or her desktop, they were going into her Pictures file.)
Second phone call: The scanner is going too slow, can’t she put a bunch of pictures on at the same time.
(I had to explain that with out actually being there for this one I could not help her, and no, this was not something I could fix by remote access.)

Wednesday:
My Mom calls and tells me that she is having problems getting the pictures to work in iPhoto.
(I ask if she has imported them into iPhoto.)
Yes, she has but when she opens them none of the iPhoto controls are there.
(Hmmm. I ask if she is viewing them in Preview.)
She says no, but when I ask what it says in the top left corner of her screen she yells, "oh no I am only previewing the picture." :-/
(So we run through the process of importing the pictures into iPhoto. Nope, error, it says that the files are already in the Library. Turns out that she had gone into her Pictures folder and dragged the files into her iPhoto library folder, so after going through and deleting those, we then go through the process of importing the pictures again.)

Thursday:
First phone call: My Mom calls; she has forgotten how to create a slide show.
(Won’t bore you with the details, but we went through the process of creating a slide show.)
Second phone call: My Mom calls; does she need to make a play list for the slide show or can she just pick out the songs?
(Make a play list)

Friday:
My Mom calls and tells me that she cannot get pictures that people have e-mailed her into iPhoto.
(The pictures had been e-mailed to her old hotmail account so I just had her forward - no, forward Mom, not reply - forward them to her gmail account. I wish everyone in the family would stop using her hotmail address but they tell me that, “once you put an address in there, you cannot change it.” :-/ It is a lot easier to just have her forward her e-mails to gmail then to try to explain editing contact information to 10 plus family members.)

Saturday:
Unsettling quiet for the day before the 85th birthday party.

In between here was a normal Saturday night out, getting drunk, getting home late, and completely forgetting about daylight savings.

Sunday morning:
A frantic voice mail from my Mom telling me that everything is wrong and that “there is a major crisis over here!”
(Turns out that she only wanted fragments of the songs she had picked and had gone into iTunes and had put in the start and end times but this does not carry over to iPhoto. Figuring that out was the first hour. When my Mom is frantic she starts pressing buttons, not listening to me, and does not describe what she is looking at very well. I think 15 minutes alone was spent on her telling me over and over again that the “music icon was not there, nothing was,” but once I got her to describe what was there she tells me there is a drop down menu with Adjust, Settings and Music listed. :-/ I had her e-mail the songs to me, Derrick then got to work clipping them down to just the portion she wanted, then e-mailed them back to her, walked her through importing them, and putting them in the play list.)
My Mom calls; it is not working. They are still the whole song, and she needs to leave in 15 minutes!
(Turns out they did work, just with the first song she wanted a minute and a half of it and after 30 seconds she stopped the music and called.)
My Mom then sighs in relief, tells me that this has been “fun” and that she will call me when she gets back home to tell me how it goes.
(Did I mention that I am not going to this party? I don’t get to see this creation or eat any of the homemade food. :-/ )


I now realize that it was not a good idea to put iLife on my Mom's computer when she still says FoxFire instead of FireFox and every time she wants to IM me she says she is going to Fire me. Oh man, the instant messaging! Now that was a bad idea also!