How useless are your parents with technology?

[geK0]

My mother has been looking for a job for about a month now, and has adopted E-mail as her primary means of applying; she used to apply via hand-written resumes. She applied easily to 30+ businesses, without so much as a phone call, and she was getting damn frustrated about it.
One day, my mother asked for my assistance in sending an e-mail, it wouldn't allow her to send it because she had her attached file open in another program. I take a look at the screen, and notice the extension to her resume was ".rtf".... I open the file, and realize that she wrote her resume on an 'Open Office' spread sheet! a spread sheet for crying out loud! and in a format which these businesses probably couldn't even open!
I fixed up my mother's resume and told her to re apply to every place she sent that resume to.... hopefully she finds a job.

Does anyone else have similar stories to this? Are your parents as useless as my mother is when it comes to technology?

Edit: Apparently .rtf is a common text format, I didn't know that. Im not sure why it opened as a spreadsheet when I clicked the file though = \

 

[Cakes]

My father's a computer engineer (well, electrical, I don't think the specific field of computer engineering existed when he went to university), so he is significantly more savvy than I.

My mum pretty much needs me to operate her Facebook account though.

 

[ChildofGallifrey]

I open the file, and realize that she wrote her resume on an 'Open Office' spread sheet! a spread sheet for crying out loud! and in a format which these businesses probably couldn't even open!

Actually, IIRC Open Office text documents can be opened with Microsoft Word, so spread sheets could possibly open on Excel?

OT: My parents live in Louisiana. I live in New York. They still call me to ask why the TV stopped working...

 

[Dogstile]

On a scale of "does this blue cable go into the plug socket? Can it use three?" to "Stand back son, i'm just configuring our MAC address and setting up our LAN properly, in an hour all of our routers will be secure" my mother is at the "Dan, can you show me how to connect the xbox controller to the xbox again" stage.

 

[newguy77]

They're okay once the stuff is hooked up, but otherwise they're a bit slow.

 

[viranimus]

A: The economy is shit, so regardless of how shes applied its pretty much par for the course.

B: Open office is a hell of a lot more widespread than people want to give it credit for. Also, .rtf is NOT specifically Open office.. Its Rich text format. Basically a windows precursor to Word, and is HIGHLY accessible to both Windows computers as well as word processors and in web browsers So actually there is no where near as much problem as you might think.

C: On topic/ My mom is pretty bad. She needs help with opening any program other than a web browser, has opened her email all of 3 times now and typically has her computer break down about once a week. However I have been teaching her and shes definitely gotten better. 5 times a week was soo much worse.

 

[embrezar]

My parents upgraded from their VCR player to a DVD player... last year. My mother thought the answering machine they used was digital, even knowing that it had a mini-cassette tape in it. My father finally got a cell phone within the last year, and only because it was my mother's hand-me-down.

 

[OrenjiJusu]

Im proud to say that neither of my parents have ever needed much help in the setting up nor operation of a computer. There have been a few moments where i knew more than them in a few places and had to give advice, but they are happily not often.

 

[geK0]

B: Open office is a hell of a lot more widespread than people want to give it credit for. Also, .rtf is NOT specifically Open office.. Its Rich text format. Basically a windows precursor to Word, and is HIGHLY accessible to both Windows computers as well as word processors and in web browsers So actually there is no where near as much problem as you might think.

Oh really.I guess I've made a bit of a fool of myself then; for some reason it opened as a spread sheet when I clicked the file.

 

[redisforever]

Mom: Completely
Dad: Database admin, knows more than me. And I am my school's tech support, pretty much.

 

[the spud]

My mother is equally tech savy as I, as she needs her computer for work and what-not. My dad knows absolutely nothing about computers though (never lend yours to him; he will get a virus).

 

[Aidinthel]

I'm impressed that my mom can send email. My dad can be a bit awkward with it sometimes but he's generally able to calmly reason his way through things.

 

[viranimus]

B: Open office is a hell of a lot more widespread than people want to give it credit for. Also, .rtf is NOT specifically Open office.. Its Rich text format. Basically a windows precursor to Word, and is HIGHLY accessible to both Windows computers as well as word processors and in web browsers So actually there is no where near as much problem as you might think.

Oh really.I guess I've made a bit of a fool of myself then; for some reason it opened as a spread sheet when I clicked the file.

Likely because open office was the "default" program for that file extension. Granted, I am not saying that your mom didnt write it in a spread sheet, but .rtf is like a hybrid of word and html which you can transpose spreadsheet data into html/word documents as tables.

Other thoughts...I will say, I am old enough to be a parent now. Technically I had kids on a 6 year lease plan, and it used to drive them to distraction that their "parent" knew more about computers than they did, because they saw all their friends who had parents who had no clue what they were doing to/on the computer. So you kind of have to feel sorry for the future generations of kids, because they wont get away with nearly as much as the current generations got away with.

 

[wench]

Yeah, Dad's a Systems Admin and has been for ages now... Mom's pretty functional but will occasionally use workarounds in older tools rather than using newer versions. So, maybe not quite the typical parents. =) I think the only thing I beat his knowledge on is cell phones.

 

[Vicarious Reality]

Well they're constantly loudly asking me why some random shit which i have no perception of whatsoever happens when i walk past them.

 

[Drenaje1]

I like to think that if I let my dad touch anything else besides a web browser this computer would be sucked into another dimension by means of a program accidentally activated by the aforementioned father that nobody knew about.

Basically, my parents can work the internet and a mouse. EVERYTHING ELSE about the computer falls on me, and sometimes I feel impossibly frustrated with them when trying to explain something that's actually maddeningly simple (to me).

 

[hannan4mitch]

Actually, my mom's an IE and my dad's a Navy Intel Officer, so I don't really need to help them with anything.
Now, my sister, she's the one me and my mom have to deal with.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

My dad's a software engineer, so he's really comfortable with computers, and my mom is competent enough. The weird thing is that my Dad, despite having no problem stripping and reassembling a computer, has a hard time figuring out what's going on with the stereo. It's pretty much tab A into slot B, but he's constantly asking me to set something up for him. We've got an older 5.1 receiver and a modern TV, so the hookups are kind of kludgy and fairly complicated, but it's nothing that someone who problem solves for a living shouldn't be prepared for -- especially since his generation is the one that should really grok stereo equipment, not mine.

Overall, though, my parents are pretty good with technology.

 

[Blue2]

Mom: Not much at all (only on it to go on facebook and youtube)
Dad(RIP): Vary, He took a computer and able to put on a wall with parts shown and all. He was a radar teacher for the air force
Step-dad: Most, He worked on in house security cameras during the past before switching to truck driving
Me:Not able to build, program or do stuff like that but able to manage the network more then anyone.

Note: Even though the topic say how useless. I'm going the other way, How Useful (or knowledgeable)

 

[Galaxy Roll]

My mom is pretty average, but my dad was a computer wiz when computers were still green text on a black background, and he's kept (relatively) up.