From geekology, This is an audio recording of somebody's grandma calling tech support asking how to remove the playable Pac-Man demo that Google put on its homepage for a day celebrating the game's 25th anniversary (which you can still play HERE). I love old people, but the call's actually pretty funny. And by funny I mean sad. Really f***ing sad.
Hit it for six minutes of feeling bad for an old lady (plus tech rep).
8 comments:
My new theory is that it's basically cultural: for people of a certain age (especially women) the situations of their lives have allowed certain cerebral functions (rudimentary problem-solving, visual acuity and perception, basic logic, object retention etc.) to completely atrophy. If you were in elementary school before the 1950s, you probably never had those colored wooden rods and other "new math" techniques to teach inductive thinking and logic (to boys and girls). Combine that with a lifetime of sitting around watching television and this is the result: a person who can't close a browser window.
Back in the 1980s we gave my grandmother a dishwasher and for months all she used it for was as a drying rack.
We gave her a microwave at some point and she was all flustered. she acted as if we had given her a computer.
We gave her a cell phone and she always kept it off because she didn't want to waste the battery.
To this day if we call her on a regular phone she tries to get rid of us as quickly as possible because she still seems to be under the impression that long distance costs a million dollars a minute.
Boy, after writing all that I realize that grandma sounds kind of dumb.
Not at all: I emphasize my original point.
I'm endlessly fascinated by this topic precisely because these people aren't dumb. That's what's so weird about it! Their brains fall out when they have to deal with technology of any kind. This recording is a perfect example. She sounds like she's got something on the ball. She just cannot understand the computer: it's speaking a language she doesn't know.
A modern computer screen with a graphical user interface is using visual metaphors to communicate. Windows, scroll bars, menus etc. are like the "grammar" of this language; a system of consistent responses that a child of five picks up instantly but that "Grandma" will literally stare at the screen for ten seconds of silence (listen to the recording) and not see even with somebody pointing them out.
The implications of your comments suggest that some day our grandchildren will give us a teleportation device and we'll wave it away as newfangled technology.
My father continues to be blown away by my iPhone. He grew up with dreams of having a Dick Tracy wristwatch phone and we have far exceeded that.
iPhones are wondrous, but they become conceptually much less so once you take the networks and the internet into account. If you brought an iPhone back twenty years into the past, even if you brought a bag of them and handed them out to your friends, they would do very little beyond "Searching..."
Yeah, but just the interface would be magical. And you could load the lightsaber sound fx app.
It wouldn't be useless; it would be very useful and fun and amazing. But it wouldn't do anything Dick Tracy-like.
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