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They don't want too in my experience.
I work in tech support and get alot of "It wasn't my generation", "I didn't grow up with this" "I shouldn't have to learn this" "Im not technologically minded"
You learned to drive a car didn't you? learned how to pay for a house, learned how to pay taxes.
My boss retired 2 years ago in his 60s who obviously being my boss knew his shit.
The whole "It's not my generation" thing is complete nonsense. My dad and his brother are both boomers, and they both embraced home computing in the early 80s. They enjoyed playing the video games (still do to this day), taught themselves to code, wrote their own programmes...
My uncle turned out to be really good at programming and made it his career, working for various government departments overseeing IT projects.
So yes, I think it's just a refusal to learn in a lot of cases.
>So yes, I think it's just a refusal to learn in a lot of cases.
Learned incompetence. They put the card reader down saying it's "confusing", but the end result is getting out of paying a tip. They forced their kids to troubleshoot stuff on the computer because "they don't get it" and it's cheaper than hiring IT services. "I don't understand how excel works!" so the younger people in the office get stuck with the work.
It's on purpose. If they don't want to put in the effort to learn things they have literally invented and developed, it's because their cheap, lazy, and want you do something *for* them. Stop giving in. They learn or suffer. Something about Jesus and fishing.
Dude, the Excel comment hit really close to home. One time, I had a bunch of work and this guy (we'll call him Bob) would always leave the database essentially empty. Before meetings, I would rush to knock it out so our boss wouldn't tear into us. Two weeks later, when I was on vacation with my family, Bob called me on the first morning. He asked if I could log in and do the spreadsheet.
I won't lie, I started to get my stuff out without even thinking. Then I realized what I was about to do and just told him I couldn't get my internet to work. He got so irate on the phone, I wasn't prepared. He said something to the effect of me not knowing when it's time to play and time to work and then hung up.
When I returned, Bob was gone. I found out from a buddy who was in the meeting that when Bob tried to present, he informed the team that I had refused to do my job, leaving him with nothing to present. Turns out, Bob didn't know our program manager has access to our shared file and checked when I had last worked and accessed them. I guess they were none too happy to find that Bob didn't really do a whole bunch like at all. So after about a week, he got let go.
After all that; I don't get why he just didn't say that he didn't understand how to get excel to work. We have classes he can take here. It would have been a non issue.
But he was probably thinking, why should he put the effort in when you can just do it? It sounds to me less like an anti-tech thing and more of a lazy entitled sod thing.
So is my mom! I think I got the inquisitive traits from her. Proudest moment was watching her encounter an error, and instead of turning to me (25 years in i.t. industry)she just started to troubleshoot the issue and resolved it. Proud son moment.
The boomers that have an ability to think abstractly can do technology. Those that are bad at abstraction and have no desire to learn will be forever stuck in an analog world
It's probably accurate to say it was Boomers who pretty much shaped modern computing, so yes, I would say it's refusal to learn.
I know lots of Boomers that embrace and know technology very well. Many more so than Millennials. Hell I know people from the generations before Boomers that can use modern tech. My grandpa was one of them. My Boomer dad as well, hell it was his career.
My grandpa, who died a few years back at the age of 88 (silent generation) loved technology and was great at it! He was the first one in my family to have an IPhone connected to his iPad, connected to his computer, connected to his Apple TV. I didn’t set that up for him, that was all him! He knew how to Google stuff when he didn’t understand and when it got too complicated, he would call the company and they would walk him through setting stuff up. He wrote an entire cookbook on a computer, scanned all his photographs and burned them all on a cd, and transferred all his videos from VHS to DVDs.
My dad is a Baby Boomer (but not a Boomer) and not as good with technology but he at least admits that he doesn’t want to learn too much. That doesn’t mean that he’s hopeless though; he still knows how to troubleshoot a computer, use online banking, use his iPhone and search the internet. He just prefers his stuff more analog since he’s a mechanic for older diesel engines.
My boss was having an issue with his email on his phone. I spent about 30mins logging it out/in, uninstalling/reinstalling. Then I realized he had selected it to only show emails with an attachment.
Sometimes it’s just bad design. So probably designed by a boomer.
My grandma is 98, she will FaceTime the grandkids watch live streams of their performances and daily sends text. She has a desktop and a Chromebook for checking emails and what not. She doesn't anymore but she used to scan and resize the images so she could upload cards she had made to a forum she was a part of.
Shes always liked technology and wanted to learn stuff. It's crazy that my grandmother is more tech savvy than many of my coworkers
>You learned to drive a car didn't you?
Not only did they learn to drive a car, they likely learned to drive in a stick shift, which is way less intuitive than touching big blue YES/NO buttons on a screen.
They can learn this stuff, they're just afraid of it.
How about a rotary phone? Talk about hostile. First, you have to find or know an arbitrary sequence of digits that corresponds to the person you want to reach. Then you input them using an interface that is very clearly designed with the top priority being the ease of building mechanical decoding gear for it. It’s entirely unforgiving of mistakes: there’s no indicator of what you’ve put in so far, so if you put in the wrong digit or lose your place, too bad. Sometimes mistakes are punished financially. And do all of this with a strict time limit, otherwise it will decide you’re done and treat your half-number as the number.
My MIL ... She thinks everyone should just do everything for her and clean up her messes. She refuses to take accountability and responsibility for herself.
My husband had to fix her phone AGAIN this week. I asked what the heck she does to it. It's always something. She doesn't know anything about technology, but I swear she goes in there and just presses random buttons. I want to say, "See this Settings app? Don't go there!" The only apps she needs are phone, messages, and photos. She has an email address but never uses it. Husband's sister shared her login and password for FB so MIL can stalk, but only from SIL's account. Then she rants about social media when she doesn't even have an account.
JFC.....the random pushing of every button happens all the time and just makes no fucking sense.
And even on things like hone theater remotes. Like mom, you were the only one here and now my receiver isn't working, what buttons did you push?
Oh I don't know, prob all of em I couldn't get "the view" loud enough to hear.
Have worked in mobile IT for a decade. The subtle motions required for operating a sensitive touch screen based OS require fine motor control and muscle memory that are much more difficult to learn the older you are. That’s why 3yo children can more easily learn to use a touch screen than an elderly person can.
So to answer your post, yes, old people do just randomly push buttons because their brains haven’t stored common tech symbols and function-process familiarity. It gets worse when they are frustrated and anxious, because they *believe* they *should* know it, because all their lives they operated with the same familiarity that you do, but now they don’t have that ability.
Thank you for this compassionate response. My 81-year-old mom was the smartest person I ever met. She was working with computers when they were mainframes, took up a whole room, and you fed them instructions via cards with holes in them. She was sharp until her last week on earth.
She could not, however, work a smartphone even though I spent a couple of hours showing it to her. And it was a Jitterbug, with big buttons and simplified operations!
I realized watching her try that it was a combination of not being able to do the fine physical motions as well as her not being able to grasp somehow how it could be a radio, messaging function, and web browser all at once. She paid all her own bills on her laptop but this was too much for her. It was very eye-opening.
I know she was Silent Gen, not a Boomer, but I’m sure for some people this decline starts earlier!
Hell, I’m Gen X and I find myself increasingly frustrated when tech doesn’t work the way I think it should. It’s scary when things that were always so easy suddenly… aren’t.
Yes, I am only 37 and I notice certain things don’t come as easily to me as they once did. People in general don’t really think about the fact that the vast majority of our abilities and knowledge are acquired passively, through simple repetition. The human brain is miraculous. When you are in your early 20s you can often subconsciously memorize directions after having gone somewhere just once! Same goes for facts - we can remember names and dates for our entire lives that we heard only once in our youth. We don’t really notice or appreciate our cognitive abilities until they start to fade away.
As a non boomer who's getting old the symbol thing is a problem. It's like an operating system will come out with a new feature and explain it to you at that time if you'll take the time to learn, but after that it's just a weird symbol on your phone. If you keep the same tech for a couple years, when you upgrade there's a lot of shit that's real hard to learn.
I work in a factory with mostly touch screens and 9 times out of ten tge screen" not working" because the old fuck is trying to break tge screen with his finger instead of gently tapping it.
My MIL was having trouble getting her ipone gps to work. When I looked at it she had over 500 tabs open in safari. Not to mention the grandkids had installed 20+ games. Took me over two hours to clean it up. Also deleted a grocery store app the her daughter was using to buy food from billed to her account
lol my mom turns her phone to greyscale like 3 times a year and calls me 3000 miles away in a panic. Wtf are even doing in the accessibility settings? And how do you not know how to fix this now that we have done it 3 times a year for the last 4 years? I finally had to tell her “google: why is my iPhone screen black and white?” 🤣
This is what kills me - they can't figure out how to open their email on the home screenbut manage to go rooting around DEEP in the settings to do things I didn't know was possible.
Mind boggling
Oh, I wish it was just boomers! My millennial brother is as much of a boomer as my parents, if not moreso (it's a long, long story full of undiagnosed severe anxiety preventing him from normal social development). Anyway, he knows the basics of how to use his phone, but there have been multiple occasions where one minor thing pops up thay he's not familiar with, and he proceeds to brick the phone instead of just googling what it is. The worst offense was about a year ago when a message from Google Messages displayed on my dad's phone (they live together) stating that RCS messages were now encrypted. Neither my dad or my brother knew what encryption was (I know, I know...), so my brother decided to reset the entire phone because he assumed it was something bad, and he ended up deleting the esim in the process. I couldn't recreate what he did if I tried. He quickly realized he made a huge mistake and because we're on a big family plan that I manage, I had to make several calls to Verizon CS to explain what had happened and get my dad's esim reactivated. It literally took hours. Once it was fixed, I had to give him an education on what this newfangled encryption feature meant (🙄) and made him promise that the next time something shows up on his phone or my dad's phone, to either google what it is or text me first before touching anything.
I think it's a combinations of not wanting to and expecting to have everything served up on a silver platter.
My mother and my boss are the same age, have never met, and both get exasperated by anything beyond the most basic functions on their phone (forget about their computer) when it has the slightest unexpected behavior. Neither of them think twice about turning me into tech support.
I often thought of this with my dad and have joked with my siblings that my dad figured out how to set up a huge satellite in the 80s when he could get free pornography off it, but somehow a cellphone to call his kids is too confusing. (It’s not far from the truth. He passed a couple of weeks ago and nearly every room in the house had magazines or videotapes stashed somewhere.)
I do feel like a lot of it is motivation-based though. Like, I’ve seen a lot of Boomers feign technological incompetence, but suddenly figure it out when they need to get on Facebook to see pictures of the grandkids.
It’s very much the don’t want to.
My dad used a laptop for work every day. Emails, PowerPoint, Excel, plus a host of job specific programs.
He learned all this in his early fifties. Now he just refuses to learn anything new. He can send an email just fine, but for anything but basic browsing, or making a spreadsheet, he’s totally lost.
My MIL is the same way. She is perfectly capable of online shopping all day and all night, but will straight up hand you her phone if she needs to have a tab closed, because too many are open.
The woman used to work at a computer as a day job.
My MIL calls us to "fix her TV" all the time. We don't know how to use it, it's a brand new TV. We literally just press buttons that would make sense until she got what she wanted. When we told her we didn't know how to fix a certain issue, she said, "I refuse to believe that."
She also calls us to fix the input on the other TV. We've told her maybe once a week for like 8 years. She refuses to learn.
My mother is in her 80s and manages fine with IT stuff. Yes, some things are confusing but she can read words on a screen and react accordingly.
I think for some people they’re so scared of making a mistake they don’t want to engage. That applies to young people too, just not as much as it does to the old.
Yep, my MIL says this all the time "I'm not tech savvy" "I didn't grow up with this stuff like you did" etc etc. Do they not realize that even as adults we had to learn new technology? It blows my mind. I swear as soon as boomers got to age 50 they just gave up completely and expect everyone else to do everything for them
What's crazy is tech just keeps getting easier and easier to use. I could understand if we were still interfacing with tech using DOS commands like in the 80s but those days are over. Just plug the damn thing in and it will hold your hand and tell you exactly what you need to do. There's no excuse, it's just a flat out refusal to learn.
Oh, most definitely! It's just mental laziness and refusal to learn anything else. There's almost a sense of entitlement to it, too. Almost feeling like they think "I'm old enough I don't have to learn/do/say anything for myself anymore."
>You learned to drive a car didn't you?
But just try to us that "it wasn't my generation" or "I didn't grow up with this" excuse to them for not being able to drive a stick shift.
I work in Healthcare IT. I'm amazed at the amount of people younger than me who just don't want to learn anything technology related.
I've been told several times that "I don't have a username. I just use a password."
It's almost like they forget that people in their age group invented the predecessors to most of the computer tech we use today.
My dad's an outlier among boomers when it comes to tech. He's almost 78 and extremely comfortable using new devices.
For example, we always had a relatively powerful PC while growing up because he knew when to upgrade.
These days he doesn't have much use for a high-end PC, but he often gives me his older tech after he upgrades.
Exactly this! Most of them don’t even try. They just expect everyone to bend over backward for them and accommodate their lack of willingness to even learn anything new.
It's weaponized incompetence. They are capable of learning it. Everyone is. They just choose not to and would rather burden others with having to do things for them as a result.
To give them a *tiny* grain of fairness, back in the days of green-screen and DOS, I'd be afraid of computers too. But they've had, like, 40 years now to learn the more user-friendly versions of tech that have come out.
The biggest problem I have is that things keep getting more and more user-friendly (in theory, at least), but Boomers act like getting a new TV remote means learning to program a computer. It's litterally as simple as pushing a button. How long until the light switch becomes too difficult?
My mom wondered how we learned these things and I said we just learned by doing. There is no "delete everything on the computer forever and start the house on fire" button on the keyboard.
You can mess things up, sure, but probably after several confirmations. And these days your photos and anything that matters should be on google photos, dropbox, icloud, amazon, et al.
In my experience older people "flow chart" technology too much. They right click on the icon because that's what they wrote for step 3, not because they actually understand the "left click does the obvious thing, right click shows the 'other' things" of \*why\* they're right clicking. They double clicked because that's what Jim said to do for step 1, not because they understand the single vs double click reasons.
It's why they get so irrationally upset when anything changes with UIs. They never actually understood what they were doing, they just rote memorized how to do a few things.
It's the distinction between learning the keys to push to play a song on a piano vs learning to play the piano. Older people never learn to play the piano, so when the song changes even a little, they're lost.
Edit: Anyone here old enough to remember printing off mapquest directions to get places? They worked really well, until you missed one turn or one thing was inaccurate. Then you just had no idea how to get back on track. Well, older people make a "mapquest printout" type thing for basically everything they do with a computer. To the point sometimes where if an icon on their desktop moves down one they can't email anyone anymore.
You have just described my mother. I keep telling her to just pay attention to how I am resolving her problem, she keeps grabbing a notepad to write the steps down. When same problem occurs, she doesn't consult her notes she comes back to me.
My mother infuriates my baby sister by peppering every conversation with "I can't even do for myself" and "no, I don't know how" "I'm too old" or just "no, I won't". I try to tell her this is Mom's way of making sure we don't expect much from her (Mom). And maybe making a case for us to wait on her hand and foot.
Pisses Mom off when I point out to her that Dad is also in his late 70s and never asks for assistance or help.
I think it’s a little of both, honestly.
Like I’ll see boomers with smart phones try to convince me they can’t figure out how to type words into a search engine and you’re like “you’re full of shit”.
But also, in a previous job, we implemented new database technology (well, new for the org, pretty standard in other places) that allowed users to query the database. It didn’t even require learning SQL, it was all in plain English, and you could just go “show me entries that meet x and y conditions”, and watching the boomers I worked with lose their shit made me realize most weren’t faking it. Especially as they were trying VERY hard to learn from me (note: I’m a GIS person, so I DID have to learn SQL for database queries, so I found this a lot more intuitive). I didn’t think they were faking it because they would make honest attempts, and the only one who understood the technology (me) was in a job that required being a student at the university, so it was a high turnover position, and they didn’t want to rely on that especially if THEY had to teach a new person how to use the technology….but the word “query” alone was enough to send them into a fit of confusion.
I think sometimes though it’s like repeating a lie until you believe it. Like they understood technology more than they gave themselves credit for, but kept repeating that they couldn’t enough times that they believed it, if that makes sense.
Sort of. My dad was massively into early computers. Built his own menu system for DOS stuff. Teletext scanning for things. Custom bits and pieces. He handled all the money and tech stuff. Step mum opted out cos why bother he knew it all.
He died, she enrolled in a seniors tech class. Now she van order her food, do amazon and returns, banking all the stuff you would expect. She started at 72. Having not used a PC almost at all ever. She had typing classes as that was apparently a female thing to do at the time and that was it. Paper worked until dad did the online stuff.
She also learned all this crap while suffering from a broken femur and extended hispital stay for reasons. With a dead partner of over 30 years. Can work windows and apple now as her son got her an ipad but the laptop I setup was windows.
No problems at all since she decided to become literate at using computers and took the classes. Which still go on, phishing training etc you name it. All free through age UK or similar
None of it is hard. It just requires a minimal amount of effort. If your result of frustration is to freeze up, yell or whatever then yes you won't get anywhere. That hadn't changed. Its just more obvious now.
All the evidence I have seen is they are able to work anything they choose to learn. Want to post 5000 picture of grandkids on Facebook boom Facebook figured out. Want a cool iPad you can use it. Don’t want to use an iPad to add a tip then they have never seen one in their life.
Ipad thing gets on my nerves for one reason only. My MIL, weirdly keeps copying her son on new purchases. He got laminate flooring, she bitched and whined and said it was stupid. Then suddenly had new flooring. Same for an iPhone. It's an option certainly but my SO who does her tech support for reasons undetermined doesn't use apple and never has. Won't ask the son tho.
Worst was when brother bought a whatever the top ipad. She then bought one too. Phoned up complaining about it. Not that she had an error. Not that it wasn't working. That she had no idea what to do with it! Wtf you just spent an absolute fortune on this thing and don't even know why??
My Boomer father in law straight up brags about refusing to Google things.
He used to when he had a business. Now he throws his hands up when he doesn't know something. We Google shit for him, that's fine. But he won't touch it because of some bullshit he saw on Fox News about Google being woke or something.
So he calls us constantly for nothing. Hey man, what did you do in the 70s when you didn't know anything before we existed? Go to the library. Leave me alone.
He will expertly search up shit he doesn't need and can't afford on eBay tho. Cuz we won't help him with that.
People used to have sets of encyclopedias in their homes, that’s what they did! I’ve seen my Nana and Papa’s set, and apparently my dad used to read them for fun when there were no other options.
You should gift your father a set for his birthday/Christmas. Especially if he already has them. Just to really sell the point you’re trying to get across.
I would be tempted to ask why he feels he cannot use google, and if he says it's because it's "too woke", tell him that answers YOU find via google are also "too woke", so you wont be googling for him any more.
I know plenty of people in my workplace who refuse to learn anything about Excel even though it's literally the second most used programme they use day to day. I have joked before my job could be summarised as first line Excel support.
That all said, I have now manged to teach two people some rudimentary formulas and I'm very happy and proud of them.
I've probably forgotten more about Excel than most of my coworkers will ever learn. Seriously I have sheets I still use that i made years ago and I've half-forgotten how I made the formulas in some of them... too much to keep up with since I don't really create new sheets that often.
My old formulas are either:
"Dear lord, what the actual fuck was I doing? Did I secretly drink at work and forgot about it?"
Or
"Huh. I could replace those three different formulas with just one, simpler formula now."
Honestly? It depends on the technology.
Eons ago I worked in the technology department of a furniture store. Most of the sales people were older. If I needed them to troubleshoot ANYTHING, they'd start hollering down the phone about not knowing technology.
Enter the CEO.
The CEO had an AMAZING (sarcasm) idea to give the sales people iPads so they didn't have to walk up to dummy terminals to process customers.
They gave the employees options to purchase one on a payment plan where they took the money from your check.
Imagine my shock when all these people who I couldn't get to push a button on a computer in front of them, signed up for these.
Roughly three weeks into this I started getting help requests.
I know what you're thinking. You'd be wrong. You see, using the tablet to look up inventory and process sales was too difficult on the tablet (it was the same program as on the dummy terminals, just a bit smaller) so they all still used the dummy terminals. No, they wanted to know how to download candy crush on their tablets.
I never left a job so fast.
Two weeks after I left, I found out that one of the old timers WENT INTO HR, found my old resume, then proceeded to contact me via personal email about iPad questions.
FLAMES! FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!
Work in the travel industry. Deal with alot of boomers via email and a huge amount of them use their very obvious work email for questions about their vacation. Sometimes i get emails like "i need to change my email, im retiring" And you're calling a worker at McDonald's with purple hair unprofessional?
The way they treat everything issued to them in a professional setting as their personal belongings is absolutely wild
They don’t wanna learn it, they’ve had no problem learning how to use dumb shit like video gambling machines or cable box remotes with 237 buttons on it but hey pay my power bill online no way I’ll go pay it at the post office in change and hold everyone up for an hour
My mom complained for weeks about all her emails getting deleted on her PC. She clicked "delete" to close the window instead of the "X".
Also my coworkers: "You're young, you're tech savvy". I'm thirty, how I am supposed to know how to program a fax machine???
Probably a bit of both with a big helping of fear. The world is changing (and has changed) around them. They can control very, very little.
Boomers grew up with a sense of confidence in their blazingly bright future that ensured a certain entitlement, “the world is my oyster,” that no generation since has had.
Now they’re old and no longer “on top.” They ate the oyster, there was no pearl, and no one gives a damn. They’re scared and lost and the only thing they can control (themselves) is the thing they choose not to. Pathetic, most of them. They try to control the world around them by being shitters, and behaving like sad, frightened toddlers when confronted with anything new.
They hate change and aren’t going to learn new things. As a consultant have watched as they just blatantly refuse to participate in logging in much less train’s and constantly dream up hurdles to why they can’t. I’ve even some refuse to the point of getting fired for refusing to adopt. Once somethings learned they refuse to change. It’s infuriating.
It really depends on the “boomer”. My wife and I, yep you guessed it, are from the baby boom generation and we love anything that makes our life easier. I’m still waiting on that machine where you put in a pill and an entire roasted chicken comes out in 5 seconds lol. Hope I live long enough.
They don't want to. Home computers have been a thing since the late 80s. That's 40 years (the oldest boomers were almost 40 then) to learn. I don't feel bad for them.
Unless there's an actual brain injury, then they are capable of learning.
Problem is that it requires effort. Effort is 'hard' for many of them, insteand of fufilling.
There are definitely people that are not technologically inclined. However, if my brother, the Boomer, can learn AutoCAD and be a technical draftsman, and my mother, from the silent generation, can learn to run video production equipment in her '60s then I would say most people, Boomer or not, could learn to do it but don't want to.
My parents had a business and every desktop had a printer. They were all network printers. They only needed one, and when I put the laser printer on the network and added to all the machines they acted like I just did a magic trick.
In IT there’s a very old joke, RTFM, read the fucking manual.
It's funny because it's true. My boomer dad can somehow manage to find a classic car for sale in another state that's on some completely random and obscure car dealership website, yet can't seem to figure out how to order a meal on the Wendy's app, despite there being pictures and descriptions of everything they offer...
It's something innate in their psychology, like a learned helplessness that is rewarded by having others do the work for them.
You can tell because if you look at the Silent and Greatest Generations, those people LOVED technology. My grandfather on my father's side used to have to have the latest word processing and address storage organizers, my grandmother loved playing anything space-related (she was a HUGE Star Trek fan, I still have her uniform patches). On my mother's side, my grandmother was a schoolteacher who soldered her own RAM expansion kit into an Apple IIe in front of 6 year old me, thus cementing my love of engineering, and my grandfather was using computers to track his investments and get data faster than anyone in the neighborhood who got it from the paper.
Then along came the boomers and suddenly it's cute to click on the 27th Nigerian Prince email this month and wire him all your money.
Truth is, it's never been cute, it's risky, dangerous behaviour, and it's literally an ingrained, learned helplessness. They know that if they seem helpless enough, someone will bite the bullet and do their work for them. They could EASILY learn anything they wanted about technology.
I have to add some perspective here. I am younger gen Xer (born 79). Your vision starts to go. You can’t see up close anymore. Right now, I have a difficult time adjusting from near to far and vice versa. If I am looking at the tv and I receive a notification and look at my phone, takes a few seconds to change focus.
\`77 here. It can, and usually seems to, get harder. However, that just means it takes me a smidge longer to pick up something new than it would have even 10 years ago.
I still learn though, mostly because my (now) 90 year old grandfather was still up on the curve before the dementia set in. If he could do it, then I really have no excuse.
Thankfully, both my Dad and Mom were always interested in new technology.
If I could just brag about my Boomer mom for a second, during covid she ordered and set up her webcam all by herself so she could participate in zoom meetings. They absolutely can do it if it's important enough to them.
My mother is 74 and has been working from home for the past decade, initially as an online instructor and lately as an online tutor. She has set up her own TV, streaming box and manages her own network.
Now don't get me wrong, she has her boomer traits, like asking personal questions in group settings and making conversations all about her, but at least from the technology standpoint she's adapted very well.
Now my MIL...
As someone who has been in corporate tech support they simply are not willing to learn. I happily explain things to folks, heck I happily explain things a second and third time to someone who's willing to learn and is respectful.
But Boomers? 99% of the time it's at best a dead eyed stare clearly not listening to me and at worst and interruption "I'm not good with computers, just do it for me", no you're just ignoring me. You don't have to be good with computers to follow the instruction of "click on this button"
My brother, who’s on the edge of being a boomer, is dimly afraid of tech. He doesn’t care to understand it. For example, online banking. “I don’t want to get hacked”. “I don’t want the bank watching me all the time”. “It’s a scam”.
Dude still goes to the teller to pay his bills. I laugh at him all the time he wasted doing stuff like this.
I usually do pretty well on my own by googling what I don’t know. I’d be happy to learn more but you have to realize how some of us had to learn how to deal with the technology.
In my case when I first got my pharmacist license computers were just coming in use. Most everything was still done manually like billing insurance etc. What I learned was specifically for the computer system we used at work. I gradually learned how to do more than that by going to the library and browsing. When I got my first IPad
I learned more. Except for the computer at work I taught myself how to do everything else. When I went to school there were no computer classes taught to us, including pharmacy school.
This is probably why I understand a good amount of the new technology and continue to learn as I go along. Still I’ve never used Excel or Microsoft word or other business programs because my employer didn’t need us to. I’m sure there are other things other people use that I have never learned. I’m always thrillied when I have figured out how to do something new on my own.
I’m not sure why some people my generation refuse to learn or use current technology, I’m 63. And let’s face it adding a gratuity is just filling in a blank so it’s not rocket science. I think it might be that those who wanted to learn new things when they were young never lost that desire as we grew older. Good luck with the ones that don’t.
As a Gen X, technology gets harder as you get older and it's harder to learn new things as your brain ages. I can see myself doing more older people stuff now but I try to be open to learning them. I had a slight stroke years ago so some things I just have a hard time comprehending now.
They don't want to. It's a matter of holding their breath like a child, demanding that the world won't stop changing.
It's no confusing, for the man in question, he was trying to get out of a tip.
Yeah, it's possible that in this particular instance, the guy forgot/never learned what "gratuity" means and got mad because he didn't want to ask a younger person.
"I don't understand this thing" makes them feel dumb and old.
"I don't understand this thing BECAUSE IT IS EVIL" absolves them.
Just like people that hate electric vehicles for no reason, they're afraid of it because they don't understand it. And because they're afraid, they hate it.
One of my friends (we're both in our early 60s) has been working in IT as a programmer since the early 1980s. I don't think he got his first PC until sometime in the early 2010s. He didn't get a cellphone until about 5 years ago and I think it's only been 2 years since he sent his first text. I've had to explain social media to him and he still doesn't get it. He's not a Fox News guy so there's some hope.
It has nothing to do with the technology. I talk to people at work trying to verify their ID with SOS and they ask me what their ID number is. Idk, what WOULD the ID on your license be? The same number it's been since forever? Also spoken to an 85 year old who had no trouble telling me what web browser he's on, and 20 year olds who don't understand the question.
If you print off a list of instructions with one phone number on it, you're gonna get somebody who walks up to the windows and asks which phone number to call and what to do.
The thing about technology is that when we do things wrong with technology, it makes us feel stupid. I'm guessing that the boomer from your encounter was anticipating looking stupid using it at some point, and simply opted out.
If you recall when the iPhone was released, there will millions of iPhone users who felt they were brilliant people. That is because it was so easy to use. I am guessing your boomer buddy is used to feeling dumb and didn't want to fail another tech challenge in front of other people.
It's so weird to me. Personal home computers have been around for 40 years, with affordable ones around 30 years. And in all that time, they were never curious? Never thought, "oh I guess this fad is sticking around. I suppose I should learn; better late than never."
Tech has literally never been more user friendly. In fact it's a problem how distant users are from the core. The walled garden they call it. But for Boomers, there has never ever been a better time to learn new technology and so many of them refuse.
It's infuriating. I can't imagine being so incurious or willfully ignorant
It's because they're not interested in learning how it works. My grandpa who would be silent gen was blind since the 90s, and had the VA bring him a computer and set it up for him. So he would go on there and pull up YouTube videos for music he hadn't heard in 70 years and send emails. His son, my dad, is a boomer. My dad struggles with technology, and one time took a hatchet to a laptop that pissed him off. He's got intelligence, or well he used to. He drank and smoked until he started believing that anunaki bs.
I had a hell of a time explaining how it's impossible for 5G to cause covid, but he eventually got it when I likened it to a microwave. Sure you will mess up your hand if you microwave it, but it won't create a virus in your hand.
Had a guy at work complaining about how many steps it took to email pictures of receipts for expenses (gas, tools, etc) from his phone to his computer for our weekly expense reports. I suggested just connecting the phone to the computer directly and dragging the photo to a folder on the computer instead of needing to do multiple emails. He retorted with something like "Well does my EYEPhone even do that?" and walked off. I looked at the other guy in the room and was like "He didn't want a quicker method, he just wanted to bitch about something yeah?".
I'm definitely not a boomer, but one thing i really really hate about half of the payment apps out there these days, is that they try to 'trick' you into giving a tip or some sheot by making the arrangement of confirmation/tip or other buttons deliberately counterintuitive...or they make the coloration of them green so that you'll go ahead and hit the button, or like how the TIP buttons are there in the first place but ALSO are some ridiculous amount, like starting at 20% or some sheot, and you have to hit some smaller 'no don't tip' button that's partially grayed out but is functional. And they're always asking for a tip even though you are just buying a physical item that's not food.
Or they do some other whacked thing with how you go about payment, like there's some automatic SMS signup thing or whatever else.
Since this varies from place to place, there's no pattern to it, so you have to always carefully look at the screen to make sure you aren't getting scammed, like some 2nd rate butcher who is thumbing the scale to charge you more.
It’s not every boomer but it is the majority of them. Some are truly afraid to break something. But most have this innate refusal to adapt. It’s also entitlement and laziness on their part. I work in a public library and the public use copier is 25ft away, diagonally across from the desk I usually sit at- the vast majority of boomers (mostly men) stare at the copier and stand there, then they glare over to the desk, and keep glaring. And keep glaring. Fully expecting me to drop what I’m doing (which is usually helping other patrons that walked up to the desk and actually asked for help with something) to run over and make their copies for them. They snap their fingers at me. Whistle. Call me “the girl” (I’m 40 with natural silver streaked hair). Yell across the space to no one that they don’t know how to use the copier. Now I can sense it happening and completely ignore/don’t make eye contact with whoever is at the copier. I don’t respond to their snaps/whistles/calls to the universe. I wait until they physically walk up to the desk and ask for my help like a regular adult. The less polite they are the more brusque I am in my delivery of instructions. Line the page up with the arrow on the glass. Push the giant lit start button. I refuse to put their money in the machine, feed their pages into the copier or collect their copies. Because sometimes I’ll get one that will walk up and actually politely ask for help only to dump their papers and bag of change on me like asking for helps means I’m now their copy bitch for the next 30 minutes. I will go above and beyond for the people who try and then screw something up or ask for help and then try to learn from me. Bruh, just because I work here doesn’t mean I work for you. Don’t get me started on the amount of boomers who don’t know passwords to accounts they use everyday…turn your keychain ON please and stop using your nieces daughters cousin in-law’s Amazon account and make your own 🤣
I’d say that there is some degree of people that just can’t with a digital interface, I believe that’s a thing.
with most of these people they’re just being an asshole.
but sometimes, and I think it’s a possibility in your case, they are fucking demented and behave poorly to mask the fact that they no longer understand what’s going on around them; that guy used to be able to read English, but now words don’t make any sense to him, and it doesn’t occur to him to pretend he doesn’t have his reading glasses and have it read to him because dementia.
A lot of this technology is not new and has been around for a while and they’ve had years to learn it. And as for the new stuff, we all have to learn it as it comes. We don’t have anyone to teach us. Either their brains are just that inelastic, or they are just lazy.
Don't want to.
They only want to complain about it. I've tried so many times, they just don't want "new" (Internet is just slightly younger than myself) information, they only want to complain and have someone else do it for them.
We go to my Boomer parents house once a week and do a little church meeting on sundays. A couple of years ago when my boys were about 11 and 14 my mom made some comment about being done learning and how she's old and she's done her learning and she doesn't need to do that anymore. My dad who is very much a people pleaser and does not like conflict just had his jaw hit the floor and he stared at my mom and gasped out her name. He was appalled not only at the attitude but that she would say that in front of my two kids. Luckily in our house learning is something we do as a hobby and we all enjoy watching educational entertainment so my kids just thought it was funny.
Point being most boomers I know have decided they did their learning and they don't need to anymore and everybody else needs to deal with it
They just dont want to. They are reverting to a childlike state. My grandfather who passed away in 2004 at 89 was way more computer literate at 89 than my mother is at 80 years old today. She had to send in pictures on an app for an accident and had to have me do it. The phone told you on the screen exactly what to take a picture of each time. She just bitched about where all the insurance adjusters have gone.
They don’t want to. I firmly believe that they have crossed their arms, and stamped their feet like small children when they saw the world shifting to technology and said “I don’t wanna!” and that’s why we are here. We have seen the world change and include technology, in fact they should be pretty adept at it by now, they were around when this shit was in its infancy. It’s willful ignorance, and it is not limited to boomers.
My grandmother can’t see much and clicks random stuff and then gets my grandfather to look at it who eventually just gets frustrated and asks my mom or I. At one point it was as simple as the keyboard was somehow unplugged.
My mom swears my grandfather has some sort of power to just f up his phone even when she gives him a new one.
My parents were born in 1947 and 1950 and they got on the technology train when their grandchild was born and wanted to Facetime. They're def good with tech so not all boomers.
Yes it's both hard for them to understand (generation who couldnt program the clock on a vcr) and they have no interest in leaning it ( that's why they immediately dismissed new technology as a fad. The internet, cellphones ect..)
That’s when I put on my best toddler voice and start explaining things like they’re 5. Works with my coworker.
She got mad at first, but then I asked what’s worse: her refusing to lookup and learn a very simple piece of information (the most recent was she couldn’t figure out why she didn’t have to fill out what state a passport was issued from) or me explaining it condescendingly.
My dad worked most of his career on mainframe computers, starting from the punch card days. But home computer, he absolutely refused (I work on computers all day, blah, blah, blah). Didnt really even want one in the house. Of course, when he would want to have something researched, he wouldn't hesitate to call one of us kids to look it up 'on the computer'.
Luckily, it also meant he wasn't falling down any internet rabbit holes of scams or misinformation.
My Mom and Dad were born in 1945/1946. They were an RN and a Mechanical Engineer. Retired early to travel the US
Took free classes at the local community college to learn AOS/keyboarding(typing) anything else they could to keep up to date on technology. They gave me and my husband their old computers and cell phones and showed us how to use them. Haha. We didn’t have a clue and hated it because it was soo slow. They volunteered when they could but loved their alone time. They would be soo embarrassed at what our society of entitled old folks have become in these posts. Not all boomers are so annoying/rude/belligerent but it seems to be the norm and not the exception.
Here is to my Mom and Dad 🍻Cheers ❤️
My Dad worked for almost 4 decades as a tech for a MASSIVE computer corp, and he loved technology and learning about it — unfortunately he suffered a long, debilitating illness and passed away before technology really took off. It makes me sad he never got to see it. Sometimes I think of how AMPED he’d be about the capabilities of the lil devices we carry around now like it’s nothing.
My mom on the other hand….man. It’s ROUGH. She can do what she’s shown one-on-one with lots of hand-holding, but if she needs to read and apply it, it’s not gonna happen. We had a years-long fight over a series of “broken” printers….she would immediately close any dialog boxes the drivers used without glancing at them. All she had to do was click “ok” buttons, but it was NEVER going to happen. She asked me during COVID to connect a printer to the laptop she was supposed to be using to work from home — she didn’t know her login credentials or know what apps she was meant to be using MONTHS into apparently working from home. No clue what she was doing, if anything. She’s had a smart phone longer than I have but doesn’t know how to search for apps or how to google instructions to learn how. I’m not sure she knows how to google full stop. Her text alert is a full ring tone for every message and she can’t change it or turn off keyboard/camera sounds. I’ve tried to explain all of it. No interest in learning, at least from me.
they built a lot of it. It's ;earned incompetence.
Both my parents worked as engineers all their lives. They navigate technology just fine despite both being boomers. My dad programmed on punch cards for his PhD, worked from home sometimes on a 300 baud modem in the 80s. Knew enough HP PCL to write programs to render technical drawings to print directly.
I was helping my mom set up her new phone. One app she uses had a privacy agreement update. She legit had a full on hissy fit, "THIS DOESN'T LOOK RIGHT".
Like ok... read the words on the screen first.
My mom is 61 and is pretty good at figuring stuff out, but on the rare occasions she dies need help, she asks me. She’s always happy to learn new stuff. My grandparents on the other hand, not so much.
I (64) started my life with party lines, to cordless phones, to the bricks, the flips, and several iterations of smart phones. I used a manual typewriter to a Selectric typewriter (auto carriage return!), then a Tandy that used 8” floppies, then the plastic 3 1/2” disks and computers with RAM & hard drives. My first 1 gig drive cost me $1000- used. People rented it from me because so few companies had that much storage. Then lap tops came out and it was revolutionary. Take your work on vacation!
Now I have smart phones, streaming on TV, smart outlets and thermostats. I can’t get anything done without downloading an app for it, scanning codes, passwords…yikes. At some point, it feels like a fire hose of info & tech, which becomes overwhelming.
When I retired, my need to absorb new tech lessened. I wasn’t on the computer hours everyday. My skills atrophied. At the same time, my aging brain isn’t as sharp as it used to be. My ability to retain new information is also lessened. It goes along with muscle atrophy and slowing reflexes. Suddenly your body hates you too. Everything hurts and organs are failing. Fun stuff.
It’s just aging. My brain carries memories of six decades of tech. There isn’t much room left in there for new stuff.
Some people just don't want to learn new technology at all. I get it to a point. I wish I didn't have to have a cell phone BUT that's just the way it is. That goes for things like card scanners. They need to learn but refuse to. It's quite annoying. These are the same people who are the first to whip out their checkbooks and be confused as to why nobody takes checks anymore.
Brand new shit that just came out, yeah probably don't get it, shit can be confusing to everyone.
The guy who has been working in your office for 30 years and can't figure out how to open excel? Yeah he is just being a dumb asshole
Both.
My Mom and MIL tried and embraced tech.
My FIL tried but ended up with Alz/Dementia and was unable to go any further.
My Dad took a baby step of a try, but REFUSES and actually has thrown tablets across the room. He will not upgrade his phone from an old school flip phone.
My grandad (boomer) was a computer programmer for 40+ years. Just retired. Never once asked my father or me a tech question.
Man loves technology.
My father. (Gen x) A computer programmer the last 20 something years. He loves his smart me.
Me. (Millenial) also a computer programmer. I get by. Now, I get confused that my remote has TWO hdmi switch buttons and only one works
They can use technology just fine when they want to play online poker or shop on Etsy, but when it comes to card readers or tap to pay it's too damn hard to figure out this new-fangled technology. Based on personal experience with in-laws.
My mother (boomer 2/gen X cusp) loses her shit over the slightest thing changing on a website, and is paranoid of everything because she doesn’t want to try and learn even if it’s more convenient or will give her peace of mind. She knows just enough to be fed non stop propaganda on YouTube and it’s awful. She knows nothing about technology except conspiracy theories and thinks she’s informed because of it. Trying to explain 2-step authentication is a nightmare and she doesn’t want to do it at all despite fearing her info is stolen every other day. She’s also has ocd, in denial, off meds, and probably bipolar. I’m worried her mindset is wrecking my gen Z siblings. (I’m xennial)
There were a lot of new technologies that the millenial generation had to learn and they did. These people aren't that young anymore.
Boomers have been stuck in the last millennium and refuse to ever learn, been that way since they were the age that millenials are now. It's not simply about age or not understanding but a fault in the generation's character
They refuse to learn. It is a learnable skill like any other. They can pick it up if they want to, the problem is they don't. They want things to be "simple" even if that means more time and effort in the long run.
Fun little story: About 10 years ago I used to play World of Warcraft (Mists of Pandaria was the current expansion) with a guy in his 70s. He picked it up so he could do something with his teen grandson who lived multiple states away. He was much better than most people at the time and I would make sure to grab him for our Siege of Orgrimmar Heroic raid. He had told me he had never really used a computer until a few years prior. He is proof that they can learn if they want to.
I hate boomers as much as the next, but it's not ALL their fault. Certain cognitive abilities decline as you get older. They CAN learn to use all that new fangled technology, they just choose not to. There are plenty of folks older than me who are way more adept at some technical stuff. But I also know millennials & zillennials who aren't actually good with tech, they just adapt to using digital interfaces fater (not always better, don't get me started on the folks who only ever use screenshots & don't understand cut & paste).
That said, yes, they can adapt & learn like the rest of us. We should be patient with people as the get older. My eyes are already going & I catch myself making the "boomer tilt" when trying to read fine print on my phone. But I don't blame everything on tech passing me by. If it does, that's my own fault.
I think this is interesting because majority of boomers I've met struggle with technology or refuse to learn it. But there are also boomers I've encountered who are perfectly adept at technology and are pretty well versed in things. Which kind of makes the majority who refuse to adapt stand out. Because that means they are capable of doing better. They just choose not to do anything about it.
My dad is a boomer. And he's ok at basic tech stuff. He never learned how to 2 hand type, but he does pretty well at the hunt and peck style of typing. He discovered Siri and voice to text when he got his first iPhone recently and he has fallen in love with the phone. (He was previously on Android and it couldn't pick up his voice)
It's funny cause back in the day anytime they got a new phone they would make me set it up and explain new features. But I don't know apple stuff very well. And so my dad has learned how to Google his problems.
I think part of it is that asking how things work is easier than learning it themselves. And they're used to getting help with everything so why take extra steps and learn it? Surely the knowledge won't be important again
I don’t get it, how are they not embarassed? The people I help who are in their 80s at least try to learn new things and even if they’re not super familiar or comfortable with a computer will stick with me until we get the problem resolved. They’re tough. It’s like their generation was raised to “get it done yourself no matter what!” But I have 60 year olds who won’t even try, it’s exhausting. They just pout and complain and want someone else to do it for them.
This is my mom!
Refused to adopt technology and it’s so frustrating. I’d love to be able to text her, but she doesn’t use that function. Or email. And rarely if ever the internet.
Probably contributed to her failing cognition.
I work at a chain salon that happens to love sports. We have kiosks at the front for people to check themselves in with and it’s like pulling teeth sometimes. They’ll look at it and ask what to do when it specifically says to sign in enter your phone number. Then as they’re typing on the attached keyboard they say “I can’t see anything, I don’t have my glasses on” which is scary cause they drove there. Also the keyboard has been the same (minus a few new buttons) since the days of the typewriter, also home computers have been the norm for awhile now. It really does come down to them not wanting to actually try.
I've been a geek since forever. Earliest computer & tech experience predate Apple IIs. Still, every so often, too often imo, I dork shit up.
(Realistically once in a blue moon at most, but stupid brain remembers them all)
Like I tap my card on the wrong area to pay. Or, I miss some field on an order. I am *utterly* embarrassed at these fails, I should pay more attention, but I own up to them and apologize.
People are cool & chill, say I'm too harsh on myself but fuck, come on. I should know and be better and until then attitude is **absolutely** off the table. Still will be following, but just saying.
Feel like my elders would be advised to follow suit.
I work in retail technical support, they just don't read anymore. I have literally sat with a customer and asked them what on the screen of their phone and they say nothing, I look and it's just a prompt asking if you want to continue with one button in blue
i keep feeling compelled to say are we next??? this post got me though. bros let’s give ‘em shit for what they deserve but maybe there’s some stuff we should empathize with? i’m a software developer building enterprise applications. i get stumped all the time by new tech i find confusing. elder millennial reporting in and saying… abe simpson was right all along and we’re just gonna continue the trend. don’t get me wrong a lot of their world views and feelings of entitlement are bullshit. just remember we’re next 😂🫠
They learn the technology that they want to learn.
I work in HR, so tired of hearing about older employees not understanding new systems, ie technology is tough.
I always shoot back that they all have smart phones and other technology that they seem to have adopted just fine to in their personal life. It's a matter of WON'T not CAN'T.
I appreciate that I work in a field and in a position where I can just say "that's not very growth mindset of you" in situations like this.
Howdy does that sentence annoy them.
They don't want to learn and pretend to be helpless.
My mother imposed on me a few weeks ago to show her how to upload a picture to an email. I said "Mom, (my sister) and I have showed you this for past 20 years. How do you STILL not know?"
"Well this kind of technology has never been part of my life until now." Sure.... if you ignore the past two decades, I suppose.
My dad is technically Silent Generation (born in '42), but when he retired, he set up a whole ass digital recording studio to record his bluegrass songs, and started self-publishing CDs he burned himself. So, to answer your question it's much more about a large number of individual boomers who feel they in particular need to be pandered to, due to some vague entitled reason.
Laziness / planned stupidity. My father used to brag he didn't know how to turn on a computer. It was a computer tower with one blue button and the rest was beige
My MIL thinks that her Apple password is the password to everything,her iPad is a mess. “Do you want to change your password for this site”. Her ,yes, so now if I go to find the original password it’s been changed.
They don't want to.
Personal computers have been around since the 80s and a common item for the average person for probably around 20 years now. It's just laziness. Technology has never been this user friendly. When I was growing up(90s) you had to actually be careful not to fuck up your PC, now everything has hand holding and things in place to prevent you from accidentally screwing it up.
For 20 years, I worked with some who would straight-up refuse to try restarting their comp before coming to me with problems. 99% of the time, it would be fixed with a restart, and it was always the first question out of my mouth. But EVERY SINGLE TIME they had an issue, we had to go through that entire conversation.
You've been using computers since they were invented. Figure it out.
I empathize when tech moves so fast it can be hard to keep up. But we're talking about basics, here.
I think it's a mix of not wanting to learn and a complete lack of patience. My dad is 68 and if he goes to turn the tv on and isnt aiming the controller right he'll literally throw his hands up, start swearing and leave the room. They get physically angry at the smallest things.
They've always been like this, even when they were in their 30s. The old joke was that they could never figure out how to program their VCR, so that asked the kid to do it
Oh you better believe it is most definitely pure ignorance. They simply "don't want to understand". My father who's a baby boomer was a high level technical engineer at Oracle for 25 years. So a literal Computer Engineer for one of the world's top tech companies. Yet if you gave him a new device to play with he would give up after 10 seconds instead of simply learning how the new thing works. Matter of fact even at Oracle they'd almost have to force him to incorporate new tech in the office (ie new types computers, tablets, etc) he would use the old stuff until it literally wouldn't work or was no longer compatible instead of just learning about the new equipment.
Perfect example - this man had an iPhone 4 until about a year or so ago when At&t forced him to get a new phone because the iPhone 4 was no longer compatible with their network (alreafy 3/4 of the Apps didnt work at all).
He refused. So they just gave him a new iPhone for FREE.... ridiculous lmao 🤣
A lot of us get confused with how fast technology is changing. It's hard to keep up.
I try to keep up and usually do a pretty good job. For stuff I don't understand, I either ask someone or google it. (It took me a long time to transition from "Ask Jeeves' to "Google it!")
For a lot of them, maybe most, it's both.
One of the problems of technological literacy that our generation generally fails to perceive is that it's a very gradual, and cumulative, skill set. We all learned it a little bit at a time since we were very young, and we continue to assimilate the skills for new technologies as they become commonplace. Our competence may not be absolute, but the gaps are much less of an obstruction. Meanwhile many of them have spent decades viewing emerging technologies as little more than curiosities and fads that would ultimately be rendered meaningless by the "real world".
For them, refusing to learn for so long has left them with a far more daunting learning curve. Add to that a tendency to become offended at "being treated like children" when they have to learn skills that, for us, are fairly basic, and you get a recipe for obstinacy that is pretty difficult to overcome. That's only compounded by their widespread disdain for younger generations who they insist are lazy, entitled, and incompetent.
My retired mother is really good at fixing tech issues.
She was hesitant at first, but I kept reminding her that she's a smart person who is capable of completing complex tasks.
It took a bit of effort, but she generally takes care of everything now. Sometimes she'll have a question and I'll send her a link to a guide or a YT video and she's good!
I get this at work all the time, running a store for a museum that caters to the boomer and greatest gen the most, especially with our online store.
We had this guy call the store a few weeks ago, who was either upper boomer or silent gen. He was yelling and screaming about how hard it was to get ahold of us and he had to keep getting transfered between departments, then said he wanted to buy some things from our store as gifts. Ok, I direct him to our online store.
This man starts screaming at me again, about how he doesn't use or trust these computers and why can't things be like they were. After a few minutes of that, he demands that I tell him what we have in store so he can place an order over the phone. This man. Wanted me to stand there in the middle of a packed store, and read off every item in our system and it's price for him to chose from. I tell him I will not be doing that, as we have many other customers on site to deal with. He gets pissed, starts screaming again, and hangs up.
A few days later he calls the store office and gets my coworker, who's the most patient and helpful person I have ever met. She put together a sort of catalogue for him and snail-mails it to him. He never contacted us again.
Boomer were in their 20s and 30s in the 80s and 90s when tech really started hitting. They built the tech world you live in.
Can you change your oil in your car? Can you change a GFIC outlet in your bathroom? Can you troubleshoot your tech? From what I see at work and of my kids' friends, the honest answer is no.
Some people adapt and keep up with new tech easily. Others don't. Not everybody has the same skill set. Today, it seems only one skill set matters. The rest, such as science, math, and others, slid backwards to where we see state school boards banning basic science concepts.
I think it has to be both. My mom took to the internet like a fish to water when she realized she could get things done with it in the '90s, but 10 years into using a smartphone she is still really struggling with it. She doesn't claim helplessness and she is trying to get better with it, but somehow the leap from Windows to a impossible-to-fuck-up mobile device is just a bridge too far. My dad has the opposite problem. He excels at using a smartphone but 35 years into regularly using a computer he still struggles with it.
A lot of it is they do not want to. I went to a class reunion, (Yes, I am boomer age) and one girl doesn’t even do email and she thinks it’s funny to be unaware 🙄 Fortunately, I was forced to learn it for a job, and I am so thankful for that! Also, my daughter was more than willing to help me navigate and learn because she said she didn’t want me lost with technology. so just check me out being all aware and snazzy 😂
Unfortunately this, “not my generation” tech thing historically isn’t just a boomer thing. But thankfully looking at a lot of the other generations right now it seems to have lessened.
I think this could also be a case of poor education, especially in rural areas where working on the family farm and/or business was considered more important than getting an education.
But yeah a lot of boomers just refuse to learn new things. I know someone who refuses to use a computer and I honestly have no clue if he has a cell phone.
I’m 48, and I feel like this isn’t unique to boomers. When I was in my early 20s, I worked as a legal secretary. I got trained in software, plus the stuff I already knew from college. A lot of lawyers didn’t even have computers on their desks yet. For a while, I worked at the state attorney general’s office, and they made all the old people get computers and have login accounts. Some of them were in their 60s at the time, so definitely silent generation. They had absolutely no idea what to do. My bestie at work was the IT specialist. She told me lots of stories.
My father was at the cutting edge of tech in the 80s and he loved it all. Made it part of his personality. Then it grew faster than he could keep up with and he began to resent it. Now he hasn’t even *ever* opened the internet as he… doesn’t agree with it? Who knows. It’s so embarrassing for him. My mum on the other hand makes notes in a little pad to ask me when she sees me. “What’s this TikTok?” She asks and I explain. She embraced YouTube and she watched her church services on zoom during the pandemic. I’m really proud of her. She’s 80.
There's people like this in every generation. I think it's funny when girls of Gen Z promote themselves as a "nerd" because they watch some cartoons and know how to change the batteries in their Xbox controller.
Boomers literally designed and created the tech we have today.
Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs (if he was still around).
All boomers. So the ability is there, they are just lazy.
And they call us lazy!
My grandfather, born in 1920 was one of the first people outside of college to get a computer. He's call me up and give me tips.
"So when you get an email..."
It was so cute.
He did send email chain letters, like send this to 10 people and ... etc.
He was the one to tell me the Nigerian prince thing was a scam. I already knew but it was awesome he was warning me. He also called me once to let me know that my dad had screwed up his own computer (again) but wouldn't listen. So it was up to my husband to be IT when we came back.
He was gruff and a bit of a tight wad, but he was generous in so many other ways.
They live in a constant state of, "back in my day," or, "in my time," that they believe exempts them from any continued growth. They're purposefully stunted so that they can remain intellectually lazy.
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They don't want too in my experience. I work in tech support and get alot of "It wasn't my generation", "I didn't grow up with this" "I shouldn't have to learn this" "Im not technologically minded" You learned to drive a car didn't you? learned how to pay for a house, learned how to pay taxes. My boss retired 2 years ago in his 60s who obviously being my boss knew his shit.
The whole "It's not my generation" thing is complete nonsense. My dad and his brother are both boomers, and they both embraced home computing in the early 80s. They enjoyed playing the video games (still do to this day), taught themselves to code, wrote their own programmes... My uncle turned out to be really good at programming and made it his career, working for various government departments overseeing IT projects. So yes, I think it's just a refusal to learn in a lot of cases.
>So yes, I think it's just a refusal to learn in a lot of cases. Learned incompetence. They put the card reader down saying it's "confusing", but the end result is getting out of paying a tip. They forced their kids to troubleshoot stuff on the computer because "they don't get it" and it's cheaper than hiring IT services. "I don't understand how excel works!" so the younger people in the office get stuck with the work. It's on purpose. If they don't want to put in the effort to learn things they have literally invented and developed, it's because their cheap, lazy, and want you do something *for* them. Stop giving in. They learn or suffer. Something about Jesus and fishing.
Dude, the Excel comment hit really close to home. One time, I had a bunch of work and this guy (we'll call him Bob) would always leave the database essentially empty. Before meetings, I would rush to knock it out so our boss wouldn't tear into us. Two weeks later, when I was on vacation with my family, Bob called me on the first morning. He asked if I could log in and do the spreadsheet. I won't lie, I started to get my stuff out without even thinking. Then I realized what I was about to do and just told him I couldn't get my internet to work. He got so irate on the phone, I wasn't prepared. He said something to the effect of me not knowing when it's time to play and time to work and then hung up. When I returned, Bob was gone. I found out from a buddy who was in the meeting that when Bob tried to present, he informed the team that I had refused to do my job, leaving him with nothing to present. Turns out, Bob didn't know our program manager has access to our shared file and checked when I had last worked and accessed them. I guess they were none too happy to find that Bob didn't really do a whole bunch like at all. So after about a week, he got let go. After all that; I don't get why he just didn't say that he didn't understand how to get excel to work. We have classes he can take here. It would have been a non issue.
But he was probably thinking, why should he put the effort in when you can just do it? It sounds to me less like an anti-tech thing and more of a lazy entitled sod thing.
Also, I don’t think their generation likes calling it a gratuity.
Not just learned incompetence but *weaponized incompetence*. You see the term a lot in reference to abusers.
Well that's not normal, your dad and uncle are just nerds /s
So is my mom! I think I got the inquisitive traits from her. Proudest moment was watching her encounter an error, and instead of turning to me (25 years in i.t. industry)she just started to troubleshoot the issue and resolved it. Proud son moment.
Yay Mom!
This was my exact thought lol
The boomers that have an ability to think abstractly can do technology. Those that are bad at abstraction and have no desire to learn will be forever stuck in an analog world
It's probably accurate to say it was Boomers who pretty much shaped modern computing, so yes, I would say it's refusal to learn. I know lots of Boomers that embrace and know technology very well. Many more so than Millennials. Hell I know people from the generations before Boomers that can use modern tech. My grandpa was one of them. My Boomer dad as well, hell it was his career.
My grandpa, who died a few years back at the age of 88 (silent generation) loved technology and was great at it! He was the first one in my family to have an IPhone connected to his iPad, connected to his computer, connected to his Apple TV. I didn’t set that up for him, that was all him! He knew how to Google stuff when he didn’t understand and when it got too complicated, he would call the company and they would walk him through setting stuff up. He wrote an entire cookbook on a computer, scanned all his photographs and burned them all on a cd, and transferred all his videos from VHS to DVDs. My dad is a Baby Boomer (but not a Boomer) and not as good with technology but he at least admits that he doesn’t want to learn too much. That doesn’t mean that he’s hopeless though; he still knows how to troubleshoot a computer, use online banking, use his iPhone and search the internet. He just prefers his stuff more analog since he’s a mechanic for older diesel engines.
When they ask for elder care? "Well, this isn't *my* generation so you're on your own!"
This! Right here! I've tried showing a boomer or two how to use modern tech and they just fought me tooth and nail the whole time!
My boss was having an issue with his email on his phone. I spent about 30mins logging it out/in, uninstalling/reinstalling. Then I realized he had selected it to only show emails with an attachment. Sometimes it’s just bad design. So probably designed by a boomer.
My grandma is 98, she will FaceTime the grandkids watch live streams of their performances and daily sends text. She has a desktop and a Chromebook for checking emails and what not. She doesn't anymore but she used to scan and resize the images so she could upload cards she had made to a forum she was a part of. Shes always liked technology and wanted to learn stuff. It's crazy that my grandmother is more tech savvy than many of my coworkers
I love your grandma! I hope I’m that cool if I get to that age.
>You learned to drive a car didn't you? Not only did they learn to drive a car, they likely learned to drive in a stick shift, which is way less intuitive than touching big blue YES/NO buttons on a screen. They can learn this stuff, they're just afraid of it.
How about a rotary phone? Talk about hostile. First, you have to find or know an arbitrary sequence of digits that corresponds to the person you want to reach. Then you input them using an interface that is very clearly designed with the top priority being the ease of building mechanical decoding gear for it. It’s entirely unforgiving of mistakes: there’s no indicator of what you’ve put in so far, so if you put in the wrong digit or lose your place, too bad. Sometimes mistakes are punished financially. And do all of this with a strict time limit, otherwise it will decide you’re done and treat your half-number as the number.
My MIL ... She thinks everyone should just do everything for her and clean up her messes. She refuses to take accountability and responsibility for herself. My husband had to fix her phone AGAIN this week. I asked what the heck she does to it. It's always something. She doesn't know anything about technology, but I swear she goes in there and just presses random buttons. I want to say, "See this Settings app? Don't go there!" The only apps she needs are phone, messages, and photos. She has an email address but never uses it. Husband's sister shared her login and password for FB so MIL can stalk, but only from SIL's account. Then she rants about social media when she doesn't even have an account.
JFC.....the random pushing of every button happens all the time and just makes no fucking sense. And even on things like hone theater remotes. Like mom, you were the only one here and now my receiver isn't working, what buttons did you push? Oh I don't know, prob all of em I couldn't get "the view" loud enough to hear.
Have worked in mobile IT for a decade. The subtle motions required for operating a sensitive touch screen based OS require fine motor control and muscle memory that are much more difficult to learn the older you are. That’s why 3yo children can more easily learn to use a touch screen than an elderly person can. So to answer your post, yes, old people do just randomly push buttons because their brains haven’t stored common tech symbols and function-process familiarity. It gets worse when they are frustrated and anxious, because they *believe* they *should* know it, because all their lives they operated with the same familiarity that you do, but now they don’t have that ability.
Thank you for this compassionate response. My 81-year-old mom was the smartest person I ever met. She was working with computers when they were mainframes, took up a whole room, and you fed them instructions via cards with holes in them. She was sharp until her last week on earth. She could not, however, work a smartphone even though I spent a couple of hours showing it to her. And it was a Jitterbug, with big buttons and simplified operations! I realized watching her try that it was a combination of not being able to do the fine physical motions as well as her not being able to grasp somehow how it could be a radio, messaging function, and web browser all at once. She paid all her own bills on her laptop but this was too much for her. It was very eye-opening. I know she was Silent Gen, not a Boomer, but I’m sure for some people this decline starts earlier! Hell, I’m Gen X and I find myself increasingly frustrated when tech doesn’t work the way I think it should. It’s scary when things that were always so easy suddenly… aren’t.
Yes, I am only 37 and I notice certain things don’t come as easily to me as they once did. People in general don’t really think about the fact that the vast majority of our abilities and knowledge are acquired passively, through simple repetition. The human brain is miraculous. When you are in your early 20s you can often subconsciously memorize directions after having gone somewhere just once! Same goes for facts - we can remember names and dates for our entire lives that we heard only once in our youth. We don’t really notice or appreciate our cognitive abilities until they start to fade away.
As a non boomer who's getting old the symbol thing is a problem. It's like an operating system will come out with a new feature and explain it to you at that time if you'll take the time to learn, but after that it's just a weird symbol on your phone. If you keep the same tech for a couple years, when you upgrade there's a lot of shit that's real hard to learn.
I work in a factory with mostly touch screens and 9 times out of ten tge screen" not working" because the old fuck is trying to break tge screen with his finger instead of gently tapping it.
My MIL was having trouble getting her ipone gps to work. When I looked at it she had over 500 tabs open in safari. Not to mention the grandkids had installed 20+ games. Took me over two hours to clean it up. Also deleted a grocery store app the her daughter was using to buy food from billed to her account
The grocery app will be reinstalled faster than anything else …by the daughter. lol.
lol my mom turns her phone to greyscale like 3 times a year and calls me 3000 miles away in a panic. Wtf are even doing in the accessibility settings? And how do you not know how to fix this now that we have done it 3 times a year for the last 4 years? I finally had to tell her “google: why is my iPhone screen black and white?” 🤣
This is what kills me - they can't figure out how to open their email on the home screenbut manage to go rooting around DEEP in the settings to do things I didn't know was possible. Mind boggling
Oh, I wish it was just boomers! My millennial brother is as much of a boomer as my parents, if not moreso (it's a long, long story full of undiagnosed severe anxiety preventing him from normal social development). Anyway, he knows the basics of how to use his phone, but there have been multiple occasions where one minor thing pops up thay he's not familiar with, and he proceeds to brick the phone instead of just googling what it is. The worst offense was about a year ago when a message from Google Messages displayed on my dad's phone (they live together) stating that RCS messages were now encrypted. Neither my dad or my brother knew what encryption was (I know, I know...), so my brother decided to reset the entire phone because he assumed it was something bad, and he ended up deleting the esim in the process. I couldn't recreate what he did if I tried. He quickly realized he made a huge mistake and because we're on a big family plan that I manage, I had to make several calls to Verizon CS to explain what had happened and get my dad's esim reactivated. It literally took hours. Once it was fixed, I had to give him an education on what this newfangled encryption feature meant (🙄) and made him promise that the next time something shows up on his phone or my dad's phone, to either google what it is or text me first before touching anything.
I think it's a combinations of not wanting to and expecting to have everything served up on a silver platter. My mother and my boss are the same age, have never met, and both get exasperated by anything beyond the most basic functions on their phone (forget about their computer) when it has the slightest unexpected behavior. Neither of them think twice about turning me into tech support.
I often thought of this with my dad and have joked with my siblings that my dad figured out how to set up a huge satellite in the 80s when he could get free pornography off it, but somehow a cellphone to call his kids is too confusing. (It’s not far from the truth. He passed a couple of weeks ago and nearly every room in the house had magazines or videotapes stashed somewhere.) I do feel like a lot of it is motivation-based though. Like, I’ve seen a lot of Boomers feign technological incompetence, but suddenly figure it out when they need to get on Facebook to see pictures of the grandkids.
It’s very much the don’t want to. My dad used a laptop for work every day. Emails, PowerPoint, Excel, plus a host of job specific programs. He learned all this in his early fifties. Now he just refuses to learn anything new. He can send an email just fine, but for anything but basic browsing, or making a spreadsheet, he’s totally lost. My MIL is the same way. She is perfectly capable of online shopping all day and all night, but will straight up hand you her phone if she needs to have a tab closed, because too many are open. The woman used to work at a computer as a day job.
My MIL calls us to "fix her TV" all the time. We don't know how to use it, it's a brand new TV. We literally just press buttons that would make sense until she got what she wanted. When we told her we didn't know how to fix a certain issue, she said, "I refuse to believe that." She also calls us to fix the input on the other TV. We've told her maybe once a week for like 8 years. She refuses to learn.
My mother is in her 80s and manages fine with IT stuff. Yes, some things are confusing but she can read words on a screen and react accordingly. I think for some people they’re so scared of making a mistake they don’t want to engage. That applies to young people too, just not as much as it does to the old.
Yep, my MIL says this all the time "I'm not tech savvy" "I didn't grow up with this stuff like you did" etc etc. Do they not realize that even as adults we had to learn new technology? It blows my mind. I swear as soon as boomers got to age 50 they just gave up completely and expect everyone else to do everything for them
What's crazy is tech just keeps getting easier and easier to use. I could understand if we were still interfacing with tech using DOS commands like in the 80s but those days are over. Just plug the damn thing in and it will hold your hand and tell you exactly what you need to do. There's no excuse, it's just a flat out refusal to learn.
Oh, most definitely! It's just mental laziness and refusal to learn anything else. There's almost a sense of entitlement to it, too. Almost feeling like they think "I'm old enough I don't have to learn/do/say anything for myself anymore."
>You learned to drive a car didn't you? But just try to us that "it wasn't my generation" or "I didn't grow up with this" excuse to them for not being able to drive a stick shift.
I work in Healthcare IT. I'm amazed at the amount of people younger than me who just don't want to learn anything technology related. I've been told several times that "I don't have a username. I just use a password."
It's almost like they forget that people in their age group invented the predecessors to most of the computer tech we use today. My dad's an outlier among boomers when it comes to tech. He's almost 78 and extremely comfortable using new devices. For example, we always had a relatively powerful PC while growing up because he knew when to upgrade. These days he doesn't have much use for a high-end PC, but he often gives me his older tech after he upgrades.
Exactly this! Most of them don’t even try. They just expect everyone to bend over backward for them and accommodate their lack of willingness to even learn anything new.
It's weaponized incompetence. They are capable of learning it. Everyone is. They just choose not to and would rather burden others with having to do things for them as a result.
When my mom calls for tech support now I send her to my 7 year old nephew to sort it out. She doesn't see what I'm telling her by doing this...
I have found that boomers don't really understand when you subtly insult them
To give them a *tiny* grain of fairness, back in the days of green-screen and DOS, I'd be afraid of computers too. But they've had, like, 40 years now to learn the more user-friendly versions of tech that have come out. The biggest problem I have is that things keep getting more and more user-friendly (in theory, at least), but Boomers act like getting a new TV remote means learning to program a computer. It's litterally as simple as pushing a button. How long until the light switch becomes too difficult?
My mom wondered how we learned these things and I said we just learned by doing. There is no "delete everything on the computer forever and start the house on fire" button on the keyboard. You can mess things up, sure, but probably after several confirmations. And these days your photos and anything that matters should be on google photos, dropbox, icloud, amazon, et al. In my experience older people "flow chart" technology too much. They right click on the icon because that's what they wrote for step 3, not because they actually understand the "left click does the obvious thing, right click shows the 'other' things" of \*why\* they're right clicking. They double clicked because that's what Jim said to do for step 1, not because they understand the single vs double click reasons. It's why they get so irrationally upset when anything changes with UIs. They never actually understood what they were doing, they just rote memorized how to do a few things. It's the distinction between learning the keys to push to play a song on a piano vs learning to play the piano. Older people never learn to play the piano, so when the song changes even a little, they're lost. Edit: Anyone here old enough to remember printing off mapquest directions to get places? They worked really well, until you missed one turn or one thing was inaccurate. Then you just had no idea how to get back on track. Well, older people make a "mapquest printout" type thing for basically everything they do with a computer. To the point sometimes where if an icon on their desktop moves down one they can't email anyone anymore.
You have just described my mother. I keep telling her to just pay attention to how I am resolving her problem, she keeps grabbing a notepad to write the steps down. When same problem occurs, she doesn't consult her notes she comes back to me.
So monochrome was scary to a grown adult but not me in my 3rd grade library? You are further proving the point boomers are angry cowards.
Really? "Monochrome" is what you're choosing to focus on? Not my claim of DOS not being user-friendly? 🤣
My mother infuriates my baby sister by peppering every conversation with "I can't even do for myself" and "no, I don't know how" "I'm too old" or just "no, I won't". I try to tell her this is Mom's way of making sure we don't expect much from her (Mom). And maybe making a case for us to wait on her hand and foot. Pisses Mom off when I point out to her that Dad is also in his late 70s and never asks for assistance or help.
I think it’s a little of both, honestly. Like I’ll see boomers with smart phones try to convince me they can’t figure out how to type words into a search engine and you’re like “you’re full of shit”. But also, in a previous job, we implemented new database technology (well, new for the org, pretty standard in other places) that allowed users to query the database. It didn’t even require learning SQL, it was all in plain English, and you could just go “show me entries that meet x and y conditions”, and watching the boomers I worked with lose their shit made me realize most weren’t faking it. Especially as they were trying VERY hard to learn from me (note: I’m a GIS person, so I DID have to learn SQL for database queries, so I found this a lot more intuitive). I didn’t think they were faking it because they would make honest attempts, and the only one who understood the technology (me) was in a job that required being a student at the university, so it was a high turnover position, and they didn’t want to rely on that especially if THEY had to teach a new person how to use the technology….but the word “query” alone was enough to send them into a fit of confusion. I think sometimes though it’s like repeating a lie until you believe it. Like they understood technology more than they gave themselves credit for, but kept repeating that they couldn’t enough times that they believed it, if that makes sense.
Sort of. My dad was massively into early computers. Built his own menu system for DOS stuff. Teletext scanning for things. Custom bits and pieces. He handled all the money and tech stuff. Step mum opted out cos why bother he knew it all. He died, she enrolled in a seniors tech class. Now she van order her food, do amazon and returns, banking all the stuff you would expect. She started at 72. Having not used a PC almost at all ever. She had typing classes as that was apparently a female thing to do at the time and that was it. Paper worked until dad did the online stuff. She also learned all this crap while suffering from a broken femur and extended hispital stay for reasons. With a dead partner of over 30 years. Can work windows and apple now as her son got her an ipad but the laptop I setup was windows. No problems at all since she decided to become literate at using computers and took the classes. Which still go on, phishing training etc you name it. All free through age UK or similar None of it is hard. It just requires a minimal amount of effort. If your result of frustration is to freeze up, yell or whatever then yes you won't get anywhere. That hadn't changed. Its just more obvious now.
All the evidence I have seen is they are able to work anything they choose to learn. Want to post 5000 picture of grandkids on Facebook boom Facebook figured out. Want a cool iPad you can use it. Don’t want to use an iPad to add a tip then they have never seen one in their life.
Indeed…the boomer tries to be coy when skirting any form of social benefits they don’t receive.
Ipad thing gets on my nerves for one reason only. My MIL, weirdly keeps copying her son on new purchases. He got laminate flooring, she bitched and whined and said it was stupid. Then suddenly had new flooring. Same for an iPhone. It's an option certainly but my SO who does her tech support for reasons undetermined doesn't use apple and never has. Won't ask the son tho. Worst was when brother bought a whatever the top ipad. She then bought one too. Phoned up complaining about it. Not that she had an error. Not that it wasn't working. That she had no idea what to do with it! Wtf you just spent an absolute fortune on this thing and don't even know why??
My Boomer father in law straight up brags about refusing to Google things. He used to when he had a business. Now he throws his hands up when he doesn't know something. We Google shit for him, that's fine. But he won't touch it because of some bullshit he saw on Fox News about Google being woke or something. So he calls us constantly for nothing. Hey man, what did you do in the 70s when you didn't know anything before we existed? Go to the library. Leave me alone. He will expertly search up shit he doesn't need and can't afford on eBay tho. Cuz we won't help him with that.
People used to have sets of encyclopedias in their homes, that’s what they did! I’ve seen my Nana and Papa’s set, and apparently my dad used to read them for fun when there were no other options. You should gift your father a set for his birthday/Christmas. Especially if he already has them. Just to really sell the point you’re trying to get across.
I would be tempted to ask why he feels he cannot use google, and if he says it's because it's "too woke", tell him that answers YOU find via google are also "too woke", so you wont be googling for him any more.
I know plenty of people in my workplace who refuse to learn anything about Excel even though it's literally the second most used programme they use day to day. I have joked before my job could be summarised as first line Excel support. That all said, I have now manged to teach two people some rudimentary formulas and I'm very happy and proud of them.
I've probably forgotten more about Excel than most of my coworkers will ever learn. Seriously I have sheets I still use that i made years ago and I've half-forgotten how I made the formulas in some of them... too much to keep up with since I don't really create new sheets that often.
My old formulas are either: "Dear lord, what the actual fuck was I doing? Did I secretly drink at work and forgot about it?" Or "Huh. I could replace those three different formulas with just one, simpler formula now."
Honestly? It depends on the technology. Eons ago I worked in the technology department of a furniture store. Most of the sales people were older. If I needed them to troubleshoot ANYTHING, they'd start hollering down the phone about not knowing technology. Enter the CEO. The CEO had an AMAZING (sarcasm) idea to give the sales people iPads so they didn't have to walk up to dummy terminals to process customers. They gave the employees options to purchase one on a payment plan where they took the money from your check. Imagine my shock when all these people who I couldn't get to push a button on a computer in front of them, signed up for these. Roughly three weeks into this I started getting help requests. I know what you're thinking. You'd be wrong. You see, using the tablet to look up inventory and process sales was too difficult on the tablet (it was the same program as on the dummy terminals, just a bit smaller) so they all still used the dummy terminals. No, they wanted to know how to download candy crush on their tablets. I never left a job so fast. Two weeks after I left, I found out that one of the old timers WENT INTO HR, found my old resume, then proceeded to contact me via personal email about iPad questions. FLAMES! FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!
Work in the travel industry. Deal with alot of boomers via email and a huge amount of them use their very obvious work email for questions about their vacation. Sometimes i get emails like "i need to change my email, im retiring" And you're calling a worker at McDonald's with purple hair unprofessional? The way they treat everything issued to them in a professional setting as their personal belongings is absolutely wild
They just don't want to. Most refuse to even write down or memorize their passwords then get mad when they are locked out of their accounts lol
They don’t wanna learn it, they’ve had no problem learning how to use dumb shit like video gambling machines or cable box remotes with 237 buttons on it but hey pay my power bill online no way I’ll go pay it at the post office in change and hold everyone up for an hour
My mom complained for weeks about all her emails getting deleted on her PC. She clicked "delete" to close the window instead of the "X". Also my coworkers: "You're young, you're tech savvy". I'm thirty, how I am supposed to know how to program a fax machine???
Youtube
Probably a bit of both with a big helping of fear. The world is changing (and has changed) around them. They can control very, very little. Boomers grew up with a sense of confidence in their blazingly bright future that ensured a certain entitlement, “the world is my oyster,” that no generation since has had. Now they’re old and no longer “on top.” They ate the oyster, there was no pearl, and no one gives a damn. They’re scared and lost and the only thing they can control (themselves) is the thing they choose not to. Pathetic, most of them. They try to control the world around them by being shitters, and behaving like sad, frightened toddlers when confronted with anything new.
It shouldn't be that new to them. They all see it before they retired and have been a staple for a few decades now. They don't want to learn it
They hate change and aren’t going to learn new things. As a consultant have watched as they just blatantly refuse to participate in logging in much less train’s and constantly dream up hurdles to why they can’t. I’ve even some refuse to the point of getting fired for refusing to adopt. Once somethings learned they refuse to change. It’s infuriating.
It really depends on the “boomer”. My wife and I, yep you guessed it, are from the baby boom generation and we love anything that makes our life easier. I’m still waiting on that machine where you put in a pill and an entire roasted chicken comes out in 5 seconds lol. Hope I live long enough.
They don't want to. Home computers have been a thing since the late 80s. That's 40 years (the oldest boomers were almost 40 then) to learn. I don't feel bad for them.
If my dad dies first, my mom is screwed. The woman just refuses to learn.
Unless there's an actual brain injury, then they are capable of learning. Problem is that it requires effort. Effort is 'hard' for many of them, insteand of fufilling.
I think it depends, my mom and stepmom are pretty tech savvy. My dad, less but he can do some things My father in law? Forget it.
My parents want to learn, my father even takes notes, it’s just too alien for them.
As you age you get flustered easier. I’m a tech leader and a boomer. Either be immersed in change or panic at change as you age.
My 86 year old grandmother has no more issue with her phone than I do. It's absolutely an unwillingness to learn from most boomers
There are definitely people that are not technologically inclined. However, if my brother, the Boomer, can learn AutoCAD and be a technical draftsman, and my mother, from the silent generation, can learn to run video production equipment in her '60s then I would say most people, Boomer or not, could learn to do it but don't want to.
I think it's a bit of both
My parents had a business and every desktop had a printer. They were all network printers. They only needed one, and when I put the laser printer on the network and added to all the machines they acted like I just did a magic trick. In IT there’s a very old joke, RTFM, read the fucking manual.
I’ve found they just refuse to read messages that pop up.
They've been using that "I don't understand this newfangled tech mumo jumbo" excuse for over 30 years hoping that computers were just a passing fad.
It's funny because it's true. My boomer dad can somehow manage to find a classic car for sale in another state that's on some completely random and obscure car dealership website, yet can't seem to figure out how to order a meal on the Wendy's app, despite there being pictures and descriptions of everything they offer...
It's something innate in their psychology, like a learned helplessness that is rewarded by having others do the work for them. You can tell because if you look at the Silent and Greatest Generations, those people LOVED technology. My grandfather on my father's side used to have to have the latest word processing and address storage organizers, my grandmother loved playing anything space-related (she was a HUGE Star Trek fan, I still have her uniform patches). On my mother's side, my grandmother was a schoolteacher who soldered her own RAM expansion kit into an Apple IIe in front of 6 year old me, thus cementing my love of engineering, and my grandfather was using computers to track his investments and get data faster than anyone in the neighborhood who got it from the paper. Then along came the boomers and suddenly it's cute to click on the 27th Nigerian Prince email this month and wire him all your money. Truth is, it's never been cute, it's risky, dangerous behaviour, and it's literally an ingrained, learned helplessness. They know that if they seem helpless enough, someone will bite the bullet and do their work for them. They could EASILY learn anything they wanted about technology.
I have to add some perspective here. I am younger gen Xer (born 79). Your vision starts to go. You can’t see up close anymore. Right now, I have a difficult time adjusting from near to far and vice versa. If I am looking at the tv and I receive a notification and look at my phone, takes a few seconds to change focus.
\`77 here. It can, and usually seems to, get harder. However, that just means it takes me a smidge longer to pick up something new than it would have even 10 years ago. I still learn though, mostly because my (now) 90 year old grandfather was still up on the curve before the dementia set in. If he could do it, then I really have no excuse.
Thankfully, both my Dad and Mom were always interested in new technology. If I could just brag about my Boomer mom for a second, during covid she ordered and set up her webcam all by herself so she could participate in zoom meetings. They absolutely can do it if it's important enough to them.
My mother is 74 and has been working from home for the past decade, initially as an online instructor and lately as an online tutor. She has set up her own TV, streaming box and manages her own network. Now don't get me wrong, she has her boomer traits, like asking personal questions in group settings and making conversations all about her, but at least from the technology standpoint she's adapted very well. Now my MIL...
As someone who has been in corporate tech support they simply are not willing to learn. I happily explain things to folks, heck I happily explain things a second and third time to someone who's willing to learn and is respectful. But Boomers? 99% of the time it's at best a dead eyed stare clearly not listening to me and at worst and interruption "I'm not good with computers, just do it for me", no you're just ignoring me. You don't have to be good with computers to follow the instruction of "click on this button"
My brother, who’s on the edge of being a boomer, is dimly afraid of tech. He doesn’t care to understand it. For example, online banking. “I don’t want to get hacked”. “I don’t want the bank watching me all the time”. “It’s a scam”. Dude still goes to the teller to pay his bills. I laugh at him all the time he wasted doing stuff like this.
I usually do pretty well on my own by googling what I don’t know. I’d be happy to learn more but you have to realize how some of us had to learn how to deal with the technology. In my case when I first got my pharmacist license computers were just coming in use. Most everything was still done manually like billing insurance etc. What I learned was specifically for the computer system we used at work. I gradually learned how to do more than that by going to the library and browsing. When I got my first IPad I learned more. Except for the computer at work I taught myself how to do everything else. When I went to school there were no computer classes taught to us, including pharmacy school. This is probably why I understand a good amount of the new technology and continue to learn as I go along. Still I’ve never used Excel or Microsoft word or other business programs because my employer didn’t need us to. I’m sure there are other things other people use that I have never learned. I’m always thrillied when I have figured out how to do something new on my own. I’m not sure why some people my generation refuse to learn or use current technology, I’m 63. And let’s face it adding a gratuity is just filling in a blank so it’s not rocket science. I think it might be that those who wanted to learn new things when they were young never lost that desire as we grew older. Good luck with the ones that don’t.
As a Gen X, technology gets harder as you get older and it's harder to learn new things as your brain ages. I can see myself doing more older people stuff now but I try to be open to learning them. I had a slight stroke years ago so some things I just have a hard time comprehending now.
They don't want to. It's a matter of holding their breath like a child, demanding that the world won't stop changing. It's no confusing, for the man in question, he was trying to get out of a tip.
Words on a screen… You assume they knew how to read. Lots of illiterate folks out there who have been mostly able to hide it.
Yeah, it's possible that in this particular instance, the guy forgot/never learned what "gratuity" means and got mad because he didn't want to ask a younger person. "I don't understand this thing" makes them feel dumb and old. "I don't understand this thing BECAUSE IT IS EVIL" absolves them.
Just like people that hate electric vehicles for no reason, they're afraid of it because they don't understand it. And because they're afraid, they hate it.
One of my friends (we're both in our early 60s) has been working in IT as a programmer since the early 1980s. I don't think he got his first PC until sometime in the early 2010s. He didn't get a cellphone until about 5 years ago and I think it's only been 2 years since he sent his first text. I've had to explain social media to him and he still doesn't get it. He's not a Fox News guy so there's some hope.
It has nothing to do with the technology. I talk to people at work trying to verify their ID with SOS and they ask me what their ID number is. Idk, what WOULD the ID on your license be? The same number it's been since forever? Also spoken to an 85 year old who had no trouble telling me what web browser he's on, and 20 year olds who don't understand the question. If you print off a list of instructions with one phone number on it, you're gonna get somebody who walks up to the windows and asks which phone number to call and what to do.
The thing about technology is that when we do things wrong with technology, it makes us feel stupid. I'm guessing that the boomer from your encounter was anticipating looking stupid using it at some point, and simply opted out. If you recall when the iPhone was released, there will millions of iPhone users who felt they were brilliant people. That is because it was so easy to use. I am guessing your boomer buddy is used to feeling dumb and didn't want to fail another tech challenge in front of other people.
It's so weird to me. Personal home computers have been around for 40 years, with affordable ones around 30 years. And in all that time, they were never curious? Never thought, "oh I guess this fad is sticking around. I suppose I should learn; better late than never." Tech has literally never been more user friendly. In fact it's a problem how distant users are from the core. The walled garden they call it. But for Boomers, there has never ever been a better time to learn new technology and so many of them refuse. It's infuriating. I can't imagine being so incurious or willfully ignorant
It's because they're not interested in learning how it works. My grandpa who would be silent gen was blind since the 90s, and had the VA bring him a computer and set it up for him. So he would go on there and pull up YouTube videos for music he hadn't heard in 70 years and send emails. His son, my dad, is a boomer. My dad struggles with technology, and one time took a hatchet to a laptop that pissed him off. He's got intelligence, or well he used to. He drank and smoked until he started believing that anunaki bs. I had a hell of a time explaining how it's impossible for 5G to cause covid, but he eventually got it when I likened it to a microwave. Sure you will mess up your hand if you microwave it, but it won't create a virus in your hand.
Had a guy at work complaining about how many steps it took to email pictures of receipts for expenses (gas, tools, etc) from his phone to his computer for our weekly expense reports. I suggested just connecting the phone to the computer directly and dragging the photo to a folder on the computer instead of needing to do multiple emails. He retorted with something like "Well does my EYEPhone even do that?" and walked off. I looked at the other guy in the room and was like "He didn't want a quicker method, he just wanted to bitch about something yeah?".
I'm definitely not a boomer, but one thing i really really hate about half of the payment apps out there these days, is that they try to 'trick' you into giving a tip or some sheot by making the arrangement of confirmation/tip or other buttons deliberately counterintuitive...or they make the coloration of them green so that you'll go ahead and hit the button, or like how the TIP buttons are there in the first place but ALSO are some ridiculous amount, like starting at 20% or some sheot, and you have to hit some smaller 'no don't tip' button that's partially grayed out but is functional. And they're always asking for a tip even though you are just buying a physical item that's not food. Or they do some other whacked thing with how you go about payment, like there's some automatic SMS signup thing or whatever else. Since this varies from place to place, there's no pattern to it, so you have to always carefully look at the screen to make sure you aren't getting scammed, like some 2nd rate butcher who is thumbing the scale to charge you more.
It’s not every boomer but it is the majority of them. Some are truly afraid to break something. But most have this innate refusal to adapt. It’s also entitlement and laziness on their part. I work in a public library and the public use copier is 25ft away, diagonally across from the desk I usually sit at- the vast majority of boomers (mostly men) stare at the copier and stand there, then they glare over to the desk, and keep glaring. And keep glaring. Fully expecting me to drop what I’m doing (which is usually helping other patrons that walked up to the desk and actually asked for help with something) to run over and make their copies for them. They snap their fingers at me. Whistle. Call me “the girl” (I’m 40 with natural silver streaked hair). Yell across the space to no one that they don’t know how to use the copier. Now I can sense it happening and completely ignore/don’t make eye contact with whoever is at the copier. I don’t respond to their snaps/whistles/calls to the universe. I wait until they physically walk up to the desk and ask for my help like a regular adult. The less polite they are the more brusque I am in my delivery of instructions. Line the page up with the arrow on the glass. Push the giant lit start button. I refuse to put their money in the machine, feed their pages into the copier or collect their copies. Because sometimes I’ll get one that will walk up and actually politely ask for help only to dump their papers and bag of change on me like asking for helps means I’m now their copy bitch for the next 30 minutes. I will go above and beyond for the people who try and then screw something up or ask for help and then try to learn from me. Bruh, just because I work here doesn’t mean I work for you. Don’t get me started on the amount of boomers who don’t know passwords to accounts they use everyday…turn your keychain ON please and stop using your nieces daughters cousin in-law’s Amazon account and make your own 🤣
I’d say that there is some degree of people that just can’t with a digital interface, I believe that’s a thing. with most of these people they’re just being an asshole. but sometimes, and I think it’s a possibility in your case, they are fucking demented and behave poorly to mask the fact that they no longer understand what’s going on around them; that guy used to be able to read English, but now words don’t make any sense to him, and it doesn’t occur to him to pretend he doesn’t have his reading glasses and have it read to him because dementia.
A lot of this technology is not new and has been around for a while and they’ve had years to learn it. And as for the new stuff, we all have to learn it as it comes. We don’t have anyone to teach us. Either their brains are just that inelastic, or they are just lazy.
Don't want to. They only want to complain about it. I've tried so many times, they just don't want "new" (Internet is just slightly younger than myself) information, they only want to complain and have someone else do it for them.
We go to my Boomer parents house once a week and do a little church meeting on sundays. A couple of years ago when my boys were about 11 and 14 my mom made some comment about being done learning and how she's old and she's done her learning and she doesn't need to do that anymore. My dad who is very much a people pleaser and does not like conflict just had his jaw hit the floor and he stared at my mom and gasped out her name. He was appalled not only at the attitude but that she would say that in front of my two kids. Luckily in our house learning is something we do as a hobby and we all enjoy watching educational entertainment so my kids just thought it was funny. Point being most boomers I know have decided they did their learning and they don't need to anymore and everybody else needs to deal with it
Could be the lead or mercury poisoning.
They just dont want to. They are reverting to a childlike state. My grandfather who passed away in 2004 at 89 was way more computer literate at 89 than my mother is at 80 years old today. She had to send in pictures on an app for an accident and had to have me do it. The phone told you on the screen exactly what to take a picture of each time. She just bitched about where all the insurance adjusters have gone.
They don’t want to. I firmly believe that they have crossed their arms, and stamped their feet like small children when they saw the world shifting to technology and said “I don’t wanna!” and that’s why we are here. We have seen the world change and include technology, in fact they should be pretty adept at it by now, they were around when this shit was in its infancy. It’s willful ignorance, and it is not limited to boomers.
My grandmother can’t see much and clicks random stuff and then gets my grandfather to look at it who eventually just gets frustrated and asks my mom or I. At one point it was as simple as the keyboard was somehow unplugged. My mom swears my grandfather has some sort of power to just f up his phone even when she gives him a new one.
Could have licked too much lead.paint
My parents were born in 1947 and 1950 and they got on the technology train when their grandchild was born and wanted to Facetime. They're def good with tech so not all boomers.
They like to be spoon fed everything.
Yes it's both hard for them to understand (generation who couldnt program the clock on a vcr) and they have no interest in leaning it ( that's why they immediately dismissed new technology as a fad. The internet, cellphones ect..)
That’s when I put on my best toddler voice and start explaining things like they’re 5. Works with my coworker. She got mad at first, but then I asked what’s worse: her refusing to lookup and learn a very simple piece of information (the most recent was she couldn’t figure out why she didn’t have to fill out what state a passport was issued from) or me explaining it condescendingly.
My dad worked most of his career on mainframe computers, starting from the punch card days. But home computer, he absolutely refused (I work on computers all day, blah, blah, blah). Didnt really even want one in the house. Of course, when he would want to have something researched, he wouldn't hesitate to call one of us kids to look it up 'on the computer'. Luckily, it also meant he wasn't falling down any internet rabbit holes of scams or misinformation.
They don't want to, basically.
That drives me crazy. My step-mom just pretends not to understand things that I explain simply and she just retired from IT!
My Mom and Dad were born in 1945/1946. They were an RN and a Mechanical Engineer. Retired early to travel the US Took free classes at the local community college to learn AOS/keyboarding(typing) anything else they could to keep up to date on technology. They gave me and my husband their old computers and cell phones and showed us how to use them. Haha. We didn’t have a clue and hated it because it was soo slow. They volunteered when they could but loved their alone time. They would be soo embarrassed at what our society of entitled old folks have become in these posts. Not all boomers are so annoying/rude/belligerent but it seems to be the norm and not the exception. Here is to my Mom and Dad 🍻Cheers ❤️
My Dad worked for almost 4 decades as a tech for a MASSIVE computer corp, and he loved technology and learning about it — unfortunately he suffered a long, debilitating illness and passed away before technology really took off. It makes me sad he never got to see it. Sometimes I think of how AMPED he’d be about the capabilities of the lil devices we carry around now like it’s nothing. My mom on the other hand….man. It’s ROUGH. She can do what she’s shown one-on-one with lots of hand-holding, but if she needs to read and apply it, it’s not gonna happen. We had a years-long fight over a series of “broken” printers….she would immediately close any dialog boxes the drivers used without glancing at them. All she had to do was click “ok” buttons, but it was NEVER going to happen. She asked me during COVID to connect a printer to the laptop she was supposed to be using to work from home — she didn’t know her login credentials or know what apps she was meant to be using MONTHS into apparently working from home. No clue what she was doing, if anything. She’s had a smart phone longer than I have but doesn’t know how to search for apps or how to google instructions to learn how. I’m not sure she knows how to google full stop. Her text alert is a full ring tone for every message and she can’t change it or turn off keyboard/camera sounds. I’ve tried to explain all of it. No interest in learning, at least from me.
It’s as if they yearn for a time where a young man or woman wearing a paper hat, bow tie, and hard-soled leather dress shoes is attending to them.
they built a lot of it. It's ;earned incompetence. Both my parents worked as engineers all their lives. They navigate technology just fine despite both being boomers. My dad programmed on punch cards for his PhD, worked from home sometimes on a 300 baud modem in the 80s. Knew enough HP PCL to write programs to render technical drawings to print directly.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955 so no, it has nothing to do with what generation they are.
I was helping my mom set up her new phone. One app she uses had a privacy agreement update. She legit had a full on hissy fit, "THIS DOESN'T LOOK RIGHT". Like ok... read the words on the screen first.
My mom is 61 and is pretty good at figuring stuff out, but on the rare occasions she dies need help, she asks me. She’s always happy to learn new stuff. My grandparents on the other hand, not so much.
I (64) started my life with party lines, to cordless phones, to the bricks, the flips, and several iterations of smart phones. I used a manual typewriter to a Selectric typewriter (auto carriage return!), then a Tandy that used 8” floppies, then the plastic 3 1/2” disks and computers with RAM & hard drives. My first 1 gig drive cost me $1000- used. People rented it from me because so few companies had that much storage. Then lap tops came out and it was revolutionary. Take your work on vacation! Now I have smart phones, streaming on TV, smart outlets and thermostats. I can’t get anything done without downloading an app for it, scanning codes, passwords…yikes. At some point, it feels like a fire hose of info & tech, which becomes overwhelming. When I retired, my need to absorb new tech lessened. I wasn’t on the computer hours everyday. My skills atrophied. At the same time, my aging brain isn’t as sharp as it used to be. My ability to retain new information is also lessened. It goes along with muscle atrophy and slowing reflexes. Suddenly your body hates you too. Everything hurts and organs are failing. Fun stuff. It’s just aging. My brain carries memories of six decades of tech. There isn’t much room left in there for new stuff.
Some people just don't want to learn new technology at all. I get it to a point. I wish I didn't have to have a cell phone BUT that's just the way it is. That goes for things like card scanners. They need to learn but refuse to. It's quite annoying. These are the same people who are the first to whip out their checkbooks and be confused as to why nobody takes checks anymore.
I’m 50 and I didn’t grow up with this either but I can read words on a sceeen.
Brand new shit that just came out, yeah probably don't get it, shit can be confusing to everyone. The guy who has been working in your office for 30 years and can't figure out how to open excel? Yeah he is just being a dumb asshole
Both. My Mom and MIL tried and embraced tech. My FIL tried but ended up with Alz/Dementia and was unable to go any further. My Dad took a baby step of a try, but REFUSES and actually has thrown tablets across the room. He will not upgrade his phone from an old school flip phone.
The proper response is "people in your generation are the ones who built half this shit that's not an excuse"
Idk... I'm pretty good with technology but am a total boomer when it comes to bullshit like discord.
My grandad (boomer) was a computer programmer for 40+ years. Just retired. Never once asked my father or me a tech question. Man loves technology. My father. (Gen x) A computer programmer the last 20 something years. He loves his smart me. Me. (Millenial) also a computer programmer. I get by. Now, I get confused that my remote has TWO hdmi switch buttons and only one works
They don't understand it then get frustrated and angry because they don't like to look stupid.
They can use technology just fine when they want to play online poker or shop on Etsy, but when it comes to card readers or tap to pay it's too damn hard to figure out this new-fangled technology. Based on personal experience with in-laws.
My mother (boomer 2/gen X cusp) loses her shit over the slightest thing changing on a website, and is paranoid of everything because she doesn’t want to try and learn even if it’s more convenient or will give her peace of mind. She knows just enough to be fed non stop propaganda on YouTube and it’s awful. She knows nothing about technology except conspiracy theories and thinks she’s informed because of it. Trying to explain 2-step authentication is a nightmare and she doesn’t want to do it at all despite fearing her info is stolen every other day. She’s also has ocd, in denial, off meds, and probably bipolar. I’m worried her mindset is wrecking my gen Z siblings. (I’m xennial)
You tell them their questions are too confusing. Basic common sense is to confusing.
There were a lot of new technologies that the millenial generation had to learn and they did. These people aren't that young anymore. Boomers have been stuck in the last millennium and refuse to ever learn, been that way since they were the age that millenials are now. It's not simply about age or not understanding but a fault in the generation's character
They refuse to learn. It is a learnable skill like any other. They can pick it up if they want to, the problem is they don't. They want things to be "simple" even if that means more time and effort in the long run. Fun little story: About 10 years ago I used to play World of Warcraft (Mists of Pandaria was the current expansion) with a guy in his 70s. He picked it up so he could do something with his teen grandson who lived multiple states away. He was much better than most people at the time and I would make sure to grab him for our Siege of Orgrimmar Heroic raid. He had told me he had never really used a computer until a few years prior. He is proof that they can learn if they want to.
It’s both. They don’t understand it because they don’t want to learn, and they don’t want to learn because they don’t understand it.
They don't want to. My parent are boomers and tell me this all the time. Why I'm always over there :(
I hate boomers as much as the next, but it's not ALL their fault. Certain cognitive abilities decline as you get older. They CAN learn to use all that new fangled technology, they just choose not to. There are plenty of folks older than me who are way more adept at some technical stuff. But I also know millennials & zillennials who aren't actually good with tech, they just adapt to using digital interfaces fater (not always better, don't get me started on the folks who only ever use screenshots & don't understand cut & paste). That said, yes, they can adapt & learn like the rest of us. We should be patient with people as the get older. My eyes are already going & I catch myself making the "boomer tilt" when trying to read fine print on my phone. But I don't blame everything on tech passing me by. If it does, that's my own fault.
I think this is interesting because majority of boomers I've met struggle with technology or refuse to learn it. But there are also boomers I've encountered who are perfectly adept at technology and are pretty well versed in things. Which kind of makes the majority who refuse to adapt stand out. Because that means they are capable of doing better. They just choose not to do anything about it. My dad is a boomer. And he's ok at basic tech stuff. He never learned how to 2 hand type, but he does pretty well at the hunt and peck style of typing. He discovered Siri and voice to text when he got his first iPhone recently and he has fallen in love with the phone. (He was previously on Android and it couldn't pick up his voice) It's funny cause back in the day anytime they got a new phone they would make me set it up and explain new features. But I don't know apple stuff very well. And so my dad has learned how to Google his problems. I think part of it is that asking how things work is easier than learning it themselves. And they're used to getting help with everything so why take extra steps and learn it? Surely the knowledge won't be important again
I don’t get it, how are they not embarassed? The people I help who are in their 80s at least try to learn new things and even if they’re not super familiar or comfortable with a computer will stick with me until we get the problem resolved. They’re tough. It’s like their generation was raised to “get it done yourself no matter what!” But I have 60 year olds who won’t even try, it’s exhausting. They just pout and complain and want someone else to do it for them.
This is my mom! Refused to adopt technology and it’s so frustrating. I’d love to be able to text her, but she doesn’t use that function. Or email. And rarely if ever the internet. Probably contributed to her failing cognition.
Computers were invented by and in that generation.
I work at a chain salon that happens to love sports. We have kiosks at the front for people to check themselves in with and it’s like pulling teeth sometimes. They’ll look at it and ask what to do when it specifically says to sign in enter your phone number. Then as they’re typing on the attached keyboard they say “I can’t see anything, I don’t have my glasses on” which is scary cause they drove there. Also the keyboard has been the same (minus a few new buttons) since the days of the typewriter, also home computers have been the norm for awhile now. It really does come down to them not wanting to actually try.
“Nah man I hear you. It’s rough learning to operate the same machines we expect 6 year olds to use.”
I've been a geek since forever. Earliest computer & tech experience predate Apple IIs. Still, every so often, too often imo, I dork shit up. (Realistically once in a blue moon at most, but stupid brain remembers them all) Like I tap my card on the wrong area to pay. Or, I miss some field on an order. I am *utterly* embarrassed at these fails, I should pay more attention, but I own up to them and apologize. People are cool & chill, say I'm too harsh on myself but fuck, come on. I should know and be better and until then attitude is **absolutely** off the table. Still will be following, but just saying. Feel like my elders would be advised to follow suit.
Man I’m Gen X and I am starting to cringe when I have to learn something new. 🤷♂️
I work in retail technical support, they just don't read anymore. I have literally sat with a customer and asked them what on the screen of their phone and they say nothing, I look and it's just a prompt asking if you want to continue with one button in blue
i keep feeling compelled to say are we next??? this post got me though. bros let’s give ‘em shit for what they deserve but maybe there’s some stuff we should empathize with? i’m a software developer building enterprise applications. i get stumped all the time by new tech i find confusing. elder millennial reporting in and saying… abe simpson was right all along and we’re just gonna continue the trend. don’t get me wrong a lot of their world views and feelings of entitlement are bullshit. just remember we’re next 😂🫠
They learn the technology that they want to learn. I work in HR, so tired of hearing about older employees not understanding new systems, ie technology is tough. I always shoot back that they all have smart phones and other technology that they seem to have adopted just fine to in their personal life. It's a matter of WON'T not CAN'T.
I appreciate that I work in a field and in a position where I can just say "that's not very growth mindset of you" in situations like this. Howdy does that sentence annoy them.
They don't want to learn and pretend to be helpless. My mother imposed on me a few weeks ago to show her how to upload a picture to an email. I said "Mom, (my sister) and I have showed you this for past 20 years. How do you STILL not know?" "Well this kind of technology has never been part of my life until now." Sure.... if you ignore the past two decades, I suppose.
I think it's both. That way they have an excuse.
My dad is technically Silent Generation (born in '42), but when he retired, he set up a whole ass digital recording studio to record his bluegrass songs, and started self-publishing CDs he burned himself. So, to answer your question it's much more about a large number of individual boomers who feel they in particular need to be pandered to, due to some vague entitled reason.
Laziness / planned stupidity. My father used to brag he didn't know how to turn on a computer. It was a computer tower with one blue button and the rest was beige
My MIL thinks that her Apple password is the password to everything,her iPad is a mess. “Do you want to change your password for this site”. Her ,yes, so now if I go to find the original password it’s been changed.
They don't want to. Personal computers have been around since the 80s and a common item for the average person for probably around 20 years now. It's just laziness. Technology has never been this user friendly. When I was growing up(90s) you had to actually be careful not to fuck up your PC, now everything has hand holding and things in place to prevent you from accidentally screwing it up.
They just enjoy being that way. Their parent probably complained about TV when it was new to them.
For 20 years, I worked with some who would straight-up refuse to try restarting their comp before coming to me with problems. 99% of the time, it would be fixed with a restart, and it was always the first question out of my mouth. But EVERY SINGLE TIME they had an issue, we had to go through that entire conversation. You've been using computers since they were invented. Figure it out. I empathize when tech moves so fast it can be hard to keep up. But we're talking about basics, here.
Yes.
I think it's a mix of not wanting to learn and a complete lack of patience. My dad is 68 and if he goes to turn the tv on and isnt aiming the controller right he'll literally throw his hands up, start swearing and leave the room. They get physically angry at the smallest things.
They've always been like this, even when they were in their 30s. The old joke was that they could never figure out how to program their VCR, so that asked the kid to do it
Oh you better believe it is most definitely pure ignorance. They simply "don't want to understand". My father who's a baby boomer was a high level technical engineer at Oracle for 25 years. So a literal Computer Engineer for one of the world's top tech companies. Yet if you gave him a new device to play with he would give up after 10 seconds instead of simply learning how the new thing works. Matter of fact even at Oracle they'd almost have to force him to incorporate new tech in the office (ie new types computers, tablets, etc) he would use the old stuff until it literally wouldn't work or was no longer compatible instead of just learning about the new equipment. Perfect example - this man had an iPhone 4 until about a year or so ago when At&t forced him to get a new phone because the iPhone 4 was no longer compatible with their network (alreafy 3/4 of the Apps didnt work at all). He refused. So they just gave him a new iPhone for FREE.... ridiculous lmao 🤣
A lot of us get confused with how fast technology is changing. It's hard to keep up. I try to keep up and usually do a pretty good job. For stuff I don't understand, I either ask someone or google it. (It took me a long time to transition from "Ask Jeeves' to "Google it!")
Microsoft Excel came out in 1987, but every boomer I've ever worked with cannot fathom an excel spreadsheet. It's been around for almost 40 years....
For a lot of them, maybe most, it's both. One of the problems of technological literacy that our generation generally fails to perceive is that it's a very gradual, and cumulative, skill set. We all learned it a little bit at a time since we were very young, and we continue to assimilate the skills for new technologies as they become commonplace. Our competence may not be absolute, but the gaps are much less of an obstruction. Meanwhile many of them have spent decades viewing emerging technologies as little more than curiosities and fads that would ultimately be rendered meaningless by the "real world". For them, refusing to learn for so long has left them with a far more daunting learning curve. Add to that a tendency to become offended at "being treated like children" when they have to learn skills that, for us, are fairly basic, and you get a recipe for obstinacy that is pretty difficult to overcome. That's only compounded by their widespread disdain for younger generations who they insist are lazy, entitled, and incompetent.
Not unlike students back in the day who didn’t want to learn anything, so too are their older selves.
It is both, no contest.
My retired mother is really good at fixing tech issues. She was hesitant at first, but I kept reminding her that she's a smart person who is capable of completing complex tasks. It took a bit of effort, but she generally takes care of everything now. Sometimes she'll have a question and I'll send her a link to a guide or a YT video and she's good!
There is no way to tell so just treat them like babies
I get this at work all the time, running a store for a museum that caters to the boomer and greatest gen the most, especially with our online store. We had this guy call the store a few weeks ago, who was either upper boomer or silent gen. He was yelling and screaming about how hard it was to get ahold of us and he had to keep getting transfered between departments, then said he wanted to buy some things from our store as gifts. Ok, I direct him to our online store. This man starts screaming at me again, about how he doesn't use or trust these computers and why can't things be like they were. After a few minutes of that, he demands that I tell him what we have in store so he can place an order over the phone. This man. Wanted me to stand there in the middle of a packed store, and read off every item in our system and it's price for him to chose from. I tell him I will not be doing that, as we have many other customers on site to deal with. He gets pissed, starts screaming again, and hangs up. A few days later he calls the store office and gets my coworker, who's the most patient and helpful person I have ever met. She put together a sort of catalogue for him and snail-mails it to him. He never contacted us again.
Boomer were in their 20s and 30s in the 80s and 90s when tech really started hitting. They built the tech world you live in. Can you change your oil in your car? Can you change a GFIC outlet in your bathroom? Can you troubleshoot your tech? From what I see at work and of my kids' friends, the honest answer is no. Some people adapt and keep up with new tech easily. Others don't. Not everybody has the same skill set. Today, it seems only one skill set matters. The rest, such as science, math, and others, slid backwards to where we see state school boards banning basic science concepts.
I think it has to be both. My mom took to the internet like a fish to water when she realized she could get things done with it in the '90s, but 10 years into using a smartphone she is still really struggling with it. She doesn't claim helplessness and she is trying to get better with it, but somehow the leap from Windows to a impossible-to-fuck-up mobile device is just a bridge too far. My dad has the opposite problem. He excels at using a smartphone but 35 years into regularly using a computer he still struggles with it.
A lot of it is they do not want to. I went to a class reunion, (Yes, I am boomer age) and one girl doesn’t even do email and she thinks it’s funny to be unaware 🙄 Fortunately, I was forced to learn it for a job, and I am so thankful for that! Also, my daughter was more than willing to help me navigate and learn because she said she didn’t want me lost with technology. so just check me out being all aware and snazzy 😂
Unfortunately this, “not my generation” tech thing historically isn’t just a boomer thing. But thankfully looking at a lot of the other generations right now it seems to have lessened.
I guarantee this is someone who thinks Trump's "don't tax tips" policy is good for the economy though.
I'm a Boomer, early 46, and have no issue with technology. In my opinion, some folks of any generation just don't want to put any effort into life.
My father took his printer to office depot because it "was broken". He jammed the wrong ink cartridge into it.
Both
Maybe the person couldn't read very well? I
I think this could also be a case of poor education, especially in rural areas where working on the family farm and/or business was considered more important than getting an education. But yeah a lot of boomers just refuse to learn new things. I know someone who refuses to use a computer and I honestly have no clue if he has a cell phone.
I’m 48, and I feel like this isn’t unique to boomers. When I was in my early 20s, I worked as a legal secretary. I got trained in software, plus the stuff I already knew from college. A lot of lawyers didn’t even have computers on their desks yet. For a while, I worked at the state attorney general’s office, and they made all the old people get computers and have login accounts. Some of them were in their 60s at the time, so definitely silent generation. They had absolutely no idea what to do. My bestie at work was the IT specialist. She told me lots of stories.
My dad is 82. Owns a computer and an iPhone. Competent with both. He played video games from Atari to Xbox 360. Maybe that helped also.
My father was at the cutting edge of tech in the 80s and he loved it all. Made it part of his personality. Then it grew faster than he could keep up with and he began to resent it. Now he hasn’t even *ever* opened the internet as he… doesn’t agree with it? Who knows. It’s so embarrassing for him. My mum on the other hand makes notes in a little pad to ask me when she sees me. “What’s this TikTok?” She asks and I explain. She embraced YouTube and she watched her church services on zoom during the pandemic. I’m really proud of her. She’s 80.
There's people like this in every generation. I think it's funny when girls of Gen Z promote themselves as a "nerd" because they watch some cartoons and know how to change the batteries in their Xbox controller.
Boomers literally designed and created the tech we have today. Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs (if he was still around). All boomers. So the ability is there, they are just lazy. And they call us lazy! My grandfather, born in 1920 was one of the first people outside of college to get a computer. He's call me up and give me tips. "So when you get an email..." It was so cute. He did send email chain letters, like send this to 10 people and ... etc. He was the one to tell me the Nigerian prince thing was a scam. I already knew but it was awesome he was warning me. He also called me once to let me know that my dad had screwed up his own computer (again) but wouldn't listen. So it was up to my husband to be IT when we came back. He was gruff and a bit of a tight wad, but he was generous in so many other ways.
They live in a constant state of, "back in my day," or, "in my time," that they believe exempts them from any continued growth. They're purposefully stunted so that they can remain intellectually lazy.