[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKXW1zAdmrs&hl=en&fs=1]
If you’ve ever tried to give over-the-phone tech support to a parent, you’ll appreciate this. My version of this video would involve my dad calling up to tell me his POS Windows machine “can’t open that photo you sent me,” and me begging my dad, over and over and over again, to just please go out and buy a goddamn Mac already. Aaaaaargh!
I’ve been trying to get my father-in-law to get a Mac, for years! He’s finally starting to shop for a new computer. Let me tell you, after all this time I’ve caved. I’m actively helping him shop for a new PC.
That way, I won’t have to deal with “How does this work?” every 5 minutes. There’s just only so much one man can take!
I worked tech support at two Mac software publishers, this was 18 years ago when you could still call and get help. Anyway, I can testify that the tech support horror stories are true, it is a quick burn out job. These days I only help out the immediate family and a few very close friends, including one who was a customer way back when. Anyone else can call Geek Squad. Well do help on some of the blogs, including Apple Discussions, but that is voluntary.
Jesus.
“Cmd+Spacebar…Type E-N-T-O-U..”
PROBLEM SOLVED.
ahahaha that is hilarious. I love John Mayer even more now. “Namaste, Microsoft: iHonor the place where your ridicutard progs bring families closer together.” Say hi to your dad for me, John.
Oh my god. I wept. I thrashed around on the floor and screamed. That’s ME, talking to my father. My mother (who has now passed on) got it all pretty quickly, but my Dad can only now, after years of patient explanation, do a few things like find web pages and get his email. He’s happy. BOY, am I happy. For years, his progress on the computer was impeded by a complete unwillingness to accept that computers have their own vocabulary. Window? Scroll bar? Mouse? Cursor? Every fucking time, I had to explain the terminology again and again. And he’d interrupt me to ask questions like, “but I still don’t get it. What IS a file? What IS a program?”
My Dad’s a smart guy, and has all his marbles. But he’s in his 80′s and he’s just not inclined to learn anything new. He wants a computer to be like a telephone – a dial telephone. Or a TV – a 12-channel VHF TV. And y’know what? He’s justified. But it drives me NUTS to do tech support on the phone. Poor John Mayer – I know EXACTLY what he’s going through. Hell, he’s using my script!
And my folks have had nothing but Macs!
Better buy your Dad a Mac instead of telling him to buy himself one. If anything is keeping him away, it’s probably sticker shock. (Or maybe that he already learned Windows and doesn’t want to re-learn.)
Also, I kinda prefer Penny Arcade’s take on this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/
do you have any idea how satisfying it is to tell your dad to “read the fucking manual” and then hang up. go ahead, you know you want to do it…
jesus, the old man can’t even play solitaire without help anymore. pathetic.
Of course the “red dot, yellow dot, green dot” thing shows you that Apple doesn’t follow its own damn user interface guidelines. Color shouldn’t be the only cue in a UI.
1.)They’re all boxes and bricks. Some are nicer and shinier than others. Sometimes it’s the guts that goes wrong. 99.99999% of the friggin’ time it’s the friggin’ software! It’s a nightmare no matter what you’re running.
2.)Civilians born before 1940 or haven’t used anything more complicated to operate than a butter churn, a self-winding analog watch or a vehicle with automatic transmission are going to be in trouble when presented with computer, even a kludge that is supposedly as user friendly or as intuitive as a Mac with OS X or an Everex with gOS. Buy them whatever phone support is out there for their systems. Let the phone techs handle your parents or other relatives. It’s bad enough when your own system goes down and you try to repair the damage. It’s infinitely worse when dealing with a relative who forgets to plug in a cord or know where the send button is on the screen.
3.)H-P printers. When they’re great, they’re great, but when they fail – I start looking for an extension cord and a bathtub full of water – to throw an H-P engineer who wrote the driver, thus created bug that caused my printer to fail.
This is funny, but tiring. If you want to teach your parent(s) to use email, give them gmail.
I prefer gmail too, is simple and easy to use…teach them!!
May I ask who John Mayer is? He appears to be a musician from what Google is telling me but I doubt that somehow…
Hilarious, especially considering I just saw a recent picture of him online in which he is sporting a total buzz cut.
My parents are still debating as to whether or not they should get cable.
He’s not very nice. It’s his frickin’ father.
Did his dad get that frustrated when John peed his bed?
What a crack up! I run a Help desk for a major corporation, but it’s my Dad who provides phone support in our family. He goes out to little old ladies (and men’s) homes and helps them do things like pull up their e-mail. Thank GOD I don’t do that every day.
My god, it’s every conversation I have had with my mother for the past couple of years. Even worse is when she has questions about her iPod. I did play a good prank on her and told her that before she puts new songs on the iPod, she has to shake it; it compresses the files that are already on the iPod keeping the new songs as contiguous files. “Like an Etch-a-Sketch,” she asked?
I am wondering how much of this might be scripted. Isn’t Mayer known for having fun with the paparazzi and coming up with clever ways to avoid them? It’s pretty convenient that the conversation ends as the van pulls up and he gets into it.
AJ
People have been reaching YouTube in Turkey through proxies. The ones recommended to me were vtunnel.com and ktunnel.com. I’m not in Turkey at the moment and the last time I tried them they weren’t working very well, but I had some success with them before. If you haven’t tried them before, have a go and see what happens. If they don’t work try looking for other suitable proxies. Big shame about these restrictions on free speech, I hope they are loosened soon but I’m not optimistic. Bloody AntiFreeSpeechTards, doing more harm than good to Ataturk’s reputation. It’s all about controlling people anyway.
Jef Raskin
It’s not true that the Mac UI rests on the red, yellow, green distinction. It’s also a left, centre, right distinction, just as traffic lights rest on a top, centre, bottom distinction as well as colours. It’s also possible to turn off the colours and the blue used in the scroll bar and the url window of Safari. I tried this and you get a graphite colour, anyhoo I preferred switching the colours back on. I can’t remember how to do this right now, but poke around in System Preferences (if you are a Mac user and not gasp horror a MicroTard). Pogue explains all in Leopard The Missing Manual, which may be of interest to those who want to use Mac to the full and aren’t just out for a good troll.
Namasté to all Mac users, MicroTards and Trollers alike.
“My parents are still debating as to whether or not they should get cable.”
Better get them a converter box then. When this digital TV only broadcast comes then I suspect a lot of us more tech savvy people are going to be helping folks with TVs and rabbit ear antennas.
Wow, relived so many phone conversations with my mom with this video.
Telling his dad to click on the hard drive icon is pretty confusing. It would have been easier to tell him to click on the blue happy face on the bottom left of the screen, then click “Applications”…
My version of this video would involve my dad calling up to tell me he doesn’t know how to drive his POS Ford, and me begging my dad, over and over and over again, to just please go out and buy a goddamn Mercedes already. Aaaaaargh!
Hahaha…this was hilarious and just made my day. Good to know that some things, like the pain of providing tech support to your parents over the phone, are universal.
@ Istanbul iTard: Why is youtube restricted in Turkey? I read somewhere that Pamuk works now at Columbia Uni (which is right smack in the middle of Harlem in NYC) and feels “safer” than he ever did on Bosphorus. Off the record, of course. On the record, he is still walking that Bridge between East and West and clutching the western shore.
All this “theory” about Macs. I have several macs, from ancient ones to new ones and I am glad they run faster today. The Mac SE/30 for example was the most expensive piece of garbage ever released: monochrome, with postage-stamp-sized monitor, SLOW, SLOW. Networking was good. If you had that quirky 68K compatibility layer to run IE. You could not run Netscape because a $5K machine did not come with enough RAM. It was expensive and slow. A winning combination. Imagine supporting that. For money. “We just paid five grand for this ***** of **** and it is so slow”). Back then IBM AT (286/12MHz)was a speed demon.
Even today, Apple believes that RAM is more expensive than gold. Ramtards.
small correction: when I said “I am glad they run faster today” I was referring to Macs being as fast as they should be today, in comparison with other Intel boxes.
@SamG Duo 2
2 part answer, a short answer on Macs, a long one on Turkey
1. Macs
I only know the Intel Macs, I’m going to see a friend in London this week who has an earlier Mac, so I’ll try to check it out. In Istanbul I have a friend who used to be an Apple salesman who has one really early Apple computer, I really must check that out. I can only say my experiece of using intel Macs is very positive, and that I gather the new chips did boost performance for Macs, and their functionality (including running Windows obviously) turning a relative speciality commodity into something with much broader appeal.
2 Turkey
I presume you asked a serious question and are not just pulling a Troll tactic. If you asked a serious question, I’ve tried to answer it properly and at length in a very earnest manner. If you’re just trolling, knock yourself out laughing, you’re welcome.
Explaining stuff about Turkey is a bit hazardous, not only because ‘insulting’ the Turkish Nation or Ataturk is a criminal offence in Turkey, but because of the possibility of attracting attention from various groups inside and outside Turkey who feel extreme resentment against the Republic of Turkey and its predecessor, the Ottoman State. I’ll do my best to be non-provocative since even more serious issues than Mac vs PC are at stake (but only just).
YouTube is blocked by the courts in Turkey, though many continue to access it through proxies) because Greek ultra-nationalists posted videos claiming that Atarurk was a homosexual, presumably expressing a point of view that is both anti-Ataturk and anti-gay. Homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, but it is a socially conservative country where many people would find it an extreme insult to be described as homosexual.
Why is that such a big deal? After WW1, what is now Turkey was partly occupied by foreign troops, and the plan was to take large parts of what is now Turkey and give it to neighbouring states or the colonial powers of the time. Greek troops landed in Izmir to enforce Greek claims to a large part of western Turkey. Ataturk, a WWI Ottoman general with secular and republican ideas, lead an army outside the control of the Sultan and became the Speaker of a new National Assembly. At that time there were no family names for Ottoman Muslims and Ataturk was known by his two first names, Mustafa Kemal. He was given the name Ataturk as part of the law which established family names for Muslims. After his victory over partitionist forces, he established a Republic of Turkey and became the first President. He established a secular state in which Islam was kept out of politics and the legal code. Laws were based on west European legal codes and many other things were done to create a new nation state under a modernist ideology. Ataturk is so tied up with the idea of an independent Turkish nation and the idea of a secular republic that insulting Ataturk can seem to many like insulting all Turks and the whole Turkish nation. Though Turkey progressed through a period of one party rule to multi-party democracy, the politics and laws have remained very nationalistic and devoted to the primacy of state authority.
That’s the historical background. Pamuk was prosecuted and given a suspended sentence for referring to large scale death of Armenian civilians in WWI (some Ottoman Turks and other Muslim civilians were killed by Armenian gangs at that time, who started the process and what numbers died on either side and with how much the killing was planned is a big debate), and of a much smaller number Kurds in 1938 during a guerilla religious-ethnic uprising against the secular nation state. Pamuk left the country because his life was threatened by an ultra-nationalist linked with the murder of a Turkish-Armenian journalist, who managed to shout threatening remarks at a TV camera after being arrested. I doubt he would be killed if he went back to Istanbul, as after the death of that journalist the government desperately does not want a repetition and he would be offered very high level security like others in a comparable position. Nevertheless it would be very disruptive to his life and obviously it would be a very disturbing situation.
Columbia is not in Harlem, anymore than Obama is Malcolm X. That remark makes me suspect you are trolling. I know some Columbia grads try to get some macho cred out of claiming they were studying in Harlem, but as you New Worlders say BS. It’s in a very pleasant safe prosperous area adjoining Harlem, as I’ve been informed and as I’ve seen for myself.
Maybe Pamuk will come back when there are less ultra-nationalist nutters in Turkey. As political polarisation and terrorism are contuing phenomena, sadly I don’t think that will happen to soo.
It’s like my father.
I know a bit about both PCs and Macs, enough to troubleshoot and do things. But I don’t flaunt it around and talk about what I’ve done to my computer to make it run faster, because I don’t do those things. My father only uses the computer to store his pictures, read email, and publish a blog. Nothing too intensive, and it runs fine for him. Myself and my mom have shown him everything he needs to do. In fact, we’ve even walked him through and sat behind him as he’s done things, and made him sit behind us and watch, many many times.
But too many people in my family think they are tech savy with computers. And what further fuels that in the eyes of my father, he’s somewhat anti-Mac, and the other family members consider it a toy. I laugh. He’s actually looked at Macs in Costco once, but I told him not to get one, based solely on me not wanted to show him what to do. Doesn’t matter if it’s easier, it’s just that it would be different that he wouldn’t get it. If you do anything to his computer, he forgets how to upload to the web, or place pictures on his website.
My brother recently came over and put Spybot on his computer. That’s it. It affects nothing, changes nothing. Uploading remains the same. He forgot how to upload, and said it changed because of this new program. I laugh and let my mom deal with it, I’ve had enough. Oh I yell “Idiot” from the living room and laugh.
My uncle came over once with ram for his computer. He sat there for 5 hours trying to get it to work. He left with the ram he arrived with. I laughed.
My cousin, the one who calls my $2,000 Powerbook a toy, once was on my mom’s computer, don’t know why, and did something to her registry file, to make it faster. Whatever. All we know, it worked fine before that, and afterwards, it was I that was restoring everything on it.
We’re going to the Apple store next week, I’m sure he’ll be trying to play with one of the computers there. And I’ll look for something to get with my $80 gift card.
“2.)Civilians born before 1940 or haven’t used anything more complicated to operate than a butter churn, a self-winding analog watch or a vehicle with automatic transmission are going to be in trouble when presented with computer, even a kludge that is supposedly as user friendly or as intuitive as a Mac with OS X or an Everex with gOS. Buy them whatever phone support is out there for their systems. Let the phone techs handle your parents or other relatives. It’s bad enough when your own system goes down and you try to repair the damage. It’s infinitely worse when dealing with a relative who forgets to plug in a cord or know where the send button is on the screen.
3.)H-P printers. When they’re great, they’re great, but when they fail – I start looking for an extension cord and a bathtub full of water – to throw an H-P engineer who wrote the driver, thus created bug that caused my printer to fail.”
OMG! I can totally agree with both. I just didn’t forsee that my father would be bad.
And my HP printer is great, when it works.
::imagines el Jobso introducting the new iButterChurn::
@Istanbul iTard:
Thank you for such a detailed explanation / reminder of youtube incident related to Ataturk. I remember reading about that awhile ago. I have to wonder don’t people have jobs to go to, lawns to water, broken furniture in the garage to fix rather than (ab)using youtube?
In America, people complain about many things but forget that we still enjoy freedoms (and take them for granted) which are not “readily available” elsewhere. I mean, where else in the world you can poke fun at the ruling elite and build a brand around it? Imagine if Real Dan was sitting at the Istanbul docks and trying to pull a fast one with a blog.
Sorry about the misunderstood Harlem reference. My point was that Pamuk was feeling safer being if not in Harlem then close to Harlem
than in its home town of Istanbul. Which is sort of ridiculous because with a Nobel in his pocket, you’d think that he’d get some respect. Like Jobso when journtards are not after him.
I’d even say that a relative simplicity of life in the USA (relative to countries with excessive historical baggage) makes unrelenting focus on technology (and poking fun at it) and making tech support calls amid horrible construction noise possible. That digital wireless technology is *crisp* even with background noise. I bet John Mayer is with Verizon, not AT&T.
@AJ
@Sam G Duo 2
Glad I could help.
In Turkey we do see Hi-Tech industry rising up and a general tendency towards greater openness in thinking, which tech including the Internet does help. In a sense getting excited about Mac vs PC is part of the evolution away from a society where the struggle for survival and the struggle with the enemy seem very close and pushes people towards the extremes, so in Turkey the Cult of Mac is both an absurdity and a welcome sign of development. An Apple reseller open within walking distance of where I live which is really interesting but Apple stuff in Turkey is twice the US price and one third more than the UK price, so the only Apple product I bought in Istanbul was the adaptor for connecting to a projector.
I had no idea about accessing YouTube in Turkey with iPhone. Are you using a roaming facility on a network which has iPhone officially AJ, or maybe a foreign Sim card on a hacked phone? iPhone is not official in Turkey yet, so you must be either doing that or using a Turkish SIm Card on a hacked phone. I do hope there is some glitch which will allow iPhone users to access YouTube when iPhone becomes official in Turkey in a few months.
I take Ataturk as a very positive figure who showed that colonised and semi-colonised countries could resist external domination, introduced resolute secularism into the Muslim world, and saw the western democracies as examples to follow, even if Turkey in his time was not ready for complete democracy, in his opinion. Despite Turkey’s problems, Ataturk did a lot to establish a nation in the Muslim world where you can drink alcohol, where women don’t have to cover themselves, where the sexes mix freely, where marriage is a civil ceremony, where homosexuality is not persecuted in law, where many political points of view exist, where parties compete for power and governments generally come to power and leave power peacefully through elections. Everything has its negative side and it is a great shame that the Turkish establishment (and to some degree public opinion) has yet to come to terms with the freedom to look very openly at the negative side and for everyone to say what they want about the national hero-founder, however negative. Turkey is edging towards more openness and I believe this is the necessary consequence of Ataturk’s reforms, which had to be initially concerned with turning a population of uneducated religiously conservative peasants into a secular nation oriented to modernity and the example of the most advanced countries. Those with a different point of view should certainly be free to say so, of course.
I knew it. I knew you were a closet Jennifer Aniston fan. How else to explain you posting this on what would have been <a href=”http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2006/celebdatabase/jenniferaniston/jennifer_aniston5_180_240.jpg”Jen and Brad’s 8th Anniversary</a????
Coincidink? Oh I think not, Mr. Lyons.
So now you don’t accept html? Classy.
Okay, I see I forgot to close the link. But Jesus, you don’t allow editing?
bwahaha@topazz. not only did you not close the tag, you gave an image and anchor tag. lol pwnt.
s’watchoo get for trying to dirty up real dan’s blog.
Dear almighty Jef Raskin,
recheck the three buttons of a Mac window: The buttons are distinguished not only by color but are filled with an x, a minus and a plus sign. In fact, in the Platinum theme all button colors are replaced with grey.
Dan, change your friggin photo. It looks Jerry Yang mated with Sam Palmisano. You’re a giant in the blog space, try to look it. People respect a strong image.
YAYYY!!!! I’m not the ONLY person that goes through this hell.
Hilarious…….my solution Logmein.com (remote access–Free)
Istanbul iTard Thank your for the info about the history and politics of modern Turkey, I very much enjoyed reading that post.
For those who asked themselves what Pamuk has to do with Apple, let it be said that Katie and Orhan share the same last name. Cotton. It is a bit Dr. Seussy, I know.
Hey Istanbul iTard. If there is one thing you are not it is a “tard”, you sound like your are pretty smart. I suggest a new handle for you, Istanbul iTurk
Personally, I love when people call me at work and want help with their Mac. It means I can just tell them “Sorry Dude!!! You should have bought a Dell!!”
It’s pretty impressive how many problems Macs have, especially Leoptard. Laughable, even. But hey, at least they have a warm fuzzy feeling, and it makes them smile, and brings a childlike sense of wonder into their lives… to use their new $3000 laptop to prevent their table from wobbling. Oh well.
to SamG Duo2:
Columbia University is not in the middle of Harlem. It’s in a neighborhood called Morningside Heights, which overlooks Harlem in the valleys to the north and east. In any case, many areas of central Harlem are as safe as any other neighborhood in New York City. And New York is much safer than many other large cities. It’s not even in the top 25 of dangerous cities.
I am a 90-year-old, tippy toeing thru the new cyberworld. It is landmined for us. I suggest that you “bright” and impatient young people print out a hard copy of your smart answers published in this blog and bring them out to read when you reach your parents’ ages in the year 2058 or thereabouts. It ain’t easy being old AND unfamiliar with new technology. But we’re TRYING, darn it! Or some of are, anyway.
Leah, you’re awesome. Would you be my grandma?
This was SO funny – thanks.
I only skimmed the posts but has anyone else considered that this entire video was staged on John’s end? John Mayer isn’t the biggest fan of the Paparazzi (sp?) and likes to mess with them on occasion. So, given that the pap’s were just lying in wait outside wherever it was that this took place, my guess is he staged that whole thing. I mean, why else would he walk out in the midst of a seemingly trying helpdesk conversation with is father and then once the conversation is over, jump in a van? Odds are his dad wasn’t even on the other end. Funny video though.
Hi, Deano, allow me,
John Mayer is better known as “The Mayerbag,” and he is an epic douche-scrote of magnifuckulous proportions.
In fact, modern science has not yet invented a means by which to measure the stink generated by this effluvious pile of walking poo.
It also plays the guitar.
It has been spotted in the wild accompanied by the stage 2 bleeth Jennifer Aniston. Her family is working diligently to help her undertake the mental enema she needs to cleanse herself of the Mayerbag.
tnk
thanks sir
great news
Switching my social media reputation service. Other ReputationUP.com users? Morgan Stanley? I know they only cost 49 dollars which is not much, nonetheless ive like to point out other local users of it for my co-workers.