Ask HN: What did you tell your parents?

[hawkharris]

Many of us have parents who aren't as tech savvy as ourselves. While visiting your folks for the holidays, did you find yourself explaining any technology-related concepts or gadgets?

If so, I'd be interested to hear if anyone found creative ways of explaining the concepts / technology. For example, I drew an illustration to teach my mom about how her iPhone interacted with cell towers and a home Wi-Fi network.

[danso]

This was before Christmas and sometime in the fall...but I had to explain to my mom (who is actually a programmer, but in the COBOL days) how to start an Apple account.

As you well know, an AppleID consists of your email. But I spent more than 10 minutes explaining to her how her Apple password was NOT her Hotmail password, as she was using her hotmail ID for her AppleID.

Funny enough, a few weeks later, I was teaching a web course and showing students how to start a site from scratch off of Amazon S3. One of the students didn't have an Amazon account and had the exact same problem: trying to use her email account password to log back into Amazon

[jeffmould → danso]

Glad I am not the only one who has this problem. I have to explain this to my dad about once a week. He tries to use his work email/password for everything and can't understand why it doesn't work. He seems to think that you can just log in to anything with that combination regardless of whether you signed up for the service or not. Guess it falls to the old saying of you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

[merrua → jeffmould]

I suppose that sort of thinking is helped with "sign in with google" and "sign in with facebook".

[RougeFemme]

I confess. . .I'm one of those parents - almost. No, I'm not nearly as old as your parents and my kids are much younger than you all, but. . .my kids don't understand how I could have worked - literally - as a rocket scientist (well, engineer). . .but still struggle sometimes with consumer devices. I have no problem with web apps. . .coding and testing. . .but consumer devices are not my forte.

The user interfaces and interfaces between the devices do not seem at all intuitive to me. And learning those particular tech intricacies does not pique my curiosity; I just want to use the tools. So I just hand the devices off to my young kids, nieces and nephews and say "show me how to do blah-blah".

[ScottWhigham]

I had to explain why AT&T was slow due to DNS issues. I didn't make this up but read it somewhere (maybe here) - DNS is the equivalent of your telephone address book on your phone. When you "dial your mom", you just type her name and click the phone icon. Behind the scenes, you trust that your phone translates that into the correct phone number because, long ago, you told it what mom's phone number was. DNS is the same - intel.com translates to a specific IP address and, when AT&T is having DNS issues, it's akin to your phone being either (a) unable to find the phone number for "mom", or (b) the phone line at mom's is not responding properly.

[bobfirestone]

I had to fix my Dad's iPhone. His email stopped working and he could't download apps.

His email was broken because he changed his email password and instead of changing the password stored on his phone setup a second account to the same email box. Yeah that was a fun one to try and figure out.

[gesman]

Did your mom actually inquire to explain the last little details of cell towers topology and design architecture

....

...or you just had no one to talk to at the moment? :)